Today is International Women's Day, March 8th! Why is this day important? Surely we've made progress on equal rights, of course we have. But it is still super important.
Here's another weird angle & perspective to add to the discussion and an example of why, something that demonstrates how women's rights reflects my little craft.
So FYI, my craft is patterning new & classic caps and making them to order. Traditionally caps were worn by working men, because they were the main workers at one point and the styles became associated with some of those trades. So a few cap styles have long established cap style names, based on the trades and professions, that were mainly male dominated. For example, you've got newsBOY, bakerBOY, fisherMAN cap, etc. I've also come across manyyyyy more.
It was kinda infuriating when I first sat down and looked at a list of the cap styles I wanted to include in the long run and saw them all written down together and looked at the pattern. One after another. Don't get me wrong, I understand that's just a part of clothes and cap wearing history though and not something I can really change and I understand the why.
I'm not surprised.... just aware, that it is still an issue so to speak. That is a big part of women's rights and human rights, we're aware of things that are right there. Things that are common place and that we gradually have to address and change.
Now I'm not saying it's something I don't know how to approach or handle, there's a reason why I refer to the fisher cap as a fisher and not a fisherman cap. I make that decision very intentionally and will 90% of the time not add man to a product name, but I also won't correct anyone either. If you ask me for a fisherman cap, I know which you mean and I won't be pedantic. I'm not after blood either, just thinking we can slowly change this.
Of course I can create my own names for some cap styles, and I do.. but If I want SEO to work in my favour and well, make a living, I should stick with the already well known product names.. cos that's what people are already familiar with and are searching by, annoyingly. Of course I am guilty of using the terms #fisherman as hashtags for example too, because that is what I am working with. I can't afford to not find customers as a small biz. But I am still fighting a wee small fight to make changes. As I do with slow fashion!
I also can't just rename some of the caps, like news or baker, cos that will prob bring up the news or the local baker. FFS. It's not always as simple as removing the man part of the cap name. Yes I have thought about renaming every cap style with new alt totally unrelated names based on under sung trades. Maybe that's a campaign for another year.
I also want all the caps to be unisex friendly and I think it's really important in some instances to avoid male & female labels for products. I hate dividing caps into ladies caps and men's caps for example. Because I know that I have male, female, non binary and more customers for each of the styles. I want anyone to feel this is a safe space where you can just buy a cap for your head. So I always call them unisex if anyone asks.
So yeah, that's one of my wee perspectives on why we will always talk about women's rights on March the 8th. There's subtle things that have been ingrained into history and become a part of society, going back years, sometimes centuries and they are so common place, it's a little more complicated than at first glance! Not to mention, the capalog is run by a woman and I have manyyyyy workplace and life experiences that make me want to fight for rights too.