As we have already mentioned in our previous blog, to coincide with this year's International Women's Day, Jewelry Wanderlust will be selling a limited edition "Sisterhood Cord Bracelet."
Making suffragette jewelry under my own jewelry brand was a goal of mine even before I started the brand. I think the trigger for this was an experience I had during my graduate school days in the UK.
Eight years ago, I was in the UK attending graduate school, and it was there that I had my first serious experience of confronting the issue of "gender."
I learned about gender, a subject I had never properly studied before, because we had gender studies classes, and on International Women's Day, March 8th, I was surrounded by classmates who gave me a flower and said, "Happy Women's Day!"
Learning about gender was about learning about humans and relationships, beyond femininity and masculinity.
Japan's Gender Gap Index for 2024 is 118th out of 156 countries. This shows that from the past to the present, there is a large gap between men and women in four areas: politics, economy, education, and health.
Recently, a number of cases that violate women's dignity have come to light, and lively discussions about them are taking place. In addition to constructive discussions, we also see a mountain of slander against women who speak out.
Many people on social media have a wrong understanding of feminism, and some may have an allergic reaction to the very phrase "women's rights."
But true feminism advocates something very simple: stop determining what people should do based on their gender.
The suffragettes who won the right to vote for women in the UK were women who were shunned and looked down upon by many people around them until they won the results. However, without these women in history, we would still be living in a world where everything in our lives, including whether or not we had the right to vote, freedom to choose our occupation, marriage, and behavior, is determined by our gender and the family we were born into.
And this is not something from the past at all. Today, we still live in a world where gender makes it difficult and unfair to live. This is not just something that women live in, but also relates to the way men live their lives. When women feel oppressed and have difficulty living because they are "women," men also feel difficulty living under the pressure of being "men." A world where it is easy for women to live in should also be an easy world for men to live in.
It takes courage to speak up alone. But if you can believe that there are others who have the same beliefs as you, and that you are not alone but have friends, your power will be multiplied. When I made suffragette jewelry, I decided to make something that would make people feel the solidarity (sisterhood) of these women.
The reason we created a cord bracelet with a small motif this time is because we thought it would be something that people could buy easily and wear casually.
Most people probably think, "I'm not an activist." I'm one of them. I'm so busy with work and family that I don't have time to think about such big things. But when I feel like something is being forced upon me because I'm a woman or a girl, I feel uncomfortable and think, "That's wrong." I want to speak up if I can. Maybe we're all just "ordinary people." We're not alone.
I hope that this cord bracelet can be a small source of strength to these "ordinary people."