Four hundred years before the birth of Christ, the Greek playwright Aristophanes wrote a comedy called "Lysistrata." It is the story of an ordinary woman's effort to end the Peloponnesian War; the successful effort in fact. How does she do it?  She organizes the women of Greece, women of all the warring sides, and they decide together to deny their mates sexual gratification until the war is brought to an end.  Desperate, the men put down their swords and spears.
Lysistrata is a mischievous tale, to be sure, but it is one that has more than a kernel of truth to it: we men often make a royal mess of the world, with our wars and our parliaments.  Maybe women should have a go?  Can they do much worse?  They may do much better.
Aren't you people tired of reading my columns yet, for instance?  Don't women have something to say that's worth hearing?  Why are public platforms so overrun with men?  Because they don't care?  Because they're not smart enough?  Because they don't take the initiative?
Well, there are women in this world who are not just sitting on the sideline.  They too have power and can shape the affairs of nations.  Sometimes we know them (think Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, Oprah Winfrey), and sometimes, not so much (think Angela Merkel, Dilma Rousseff, Indra Nooyi).  All of these women are amongst the most influential in the world. However, we are most familiar with the North Americans thanks to the media.
Women in power have been typecast as manless, joyless CEOs who are enviable only for their bank account balance, but who bring nothing much to the table besides education and ruthlessness. This year, however, three women have been noted for their extraordinary power and influence in their countries. They have been jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.  These three women from Liberia and Yemen have significantly contributed to ending war, conflict and suffering in their homelands while facing very real threats against their lives and those of their children.  They aren't doing it in the way Aristophanes proposed (he was a satirical writer after all) but they are doing it.
From the Associated Press: "Karman is a 32-year-old mother of three who heads the human rights group Women Journalists Without Chains. She has been a leading figure in organizing protests against President Ali Abdullah Saleh that kicked off in late January as part of a wave of anti-authoritarian revolts that have convulsed the Arab world."  The struggle against Saleh isn't over but the Nobel has been given to her nonetheless.
Also from the AP: "Johnson Sirleaf, 72, is a Harvard-trained economist who became Africa's first democratically elected female president in 2005. Liberia was ravaged by civil wars for years until 2003 and is still struggling to maintain a fragile peace with the help of U.N. peacekeepers. Sirleaf was seen as a reformer and peacemaker in Liberia when she took office."
And this from the UK Guardian:  "Leymah Gbowee's rise in the women's movement began on a dusty football field opposite the fish market in Monrovia. In 2002, this is where she sat every day dressed in white, with thousands of women praying and fasting for peace. Liberia had already endured 14 years of war and the women were tired of fighting and of being raped and watching their men die while their children were stolen to be used as soldiers. Her strength was evident in 2003 when she led hundreds of women to Monrovia's City Hall, demanding an end to the war. "We the women of Liberia will no more allow ourselves to be raped, abused, misused, maimed and killed," she shouted. "Our children and grandchildren will not be used as killing machines and sex slaves!"
The women protested until [Robert] Taylor agreed to a meeting. Under Gbowee's leadership, they gave the three warring factions three days to deliver an unconditional ceasefire, an intervention force and for the government and rebels to sit down and talk. They got what they asked for and soon after, the Accra Peace Accord was signed in Ghana."
In this country we don' have any problems praising our women.  We boast of how they suffer and endure.  We echo choruses about their selflessness as they struggle to run single-parent homes and manage unruly children without fathers.  When Mother's Day circles around the block each year, the florists can't keep up with the demand.  We acknowledge that more of them finish high school than males, and that more of them go on to college than males, and that more of them hold down white collar jobs than males.  Our women, collectively, bring a great deal to the table.  So why don't Bahamian women have more powerful a national voice?  Yes, we have a sprinkling of women who are doing their damndest to be heard.  They are community leaders working on the ground level, and in times past, some were politicians.  We have even had our own women in white on the parks praying and fasting for the nation, however the momentum never built.
November 2012 will mark the 50th year since women gained the right to vote in this country.  As a people, we are guilty of paying lip service to women, making them feel more influential than they are and can be.  We laud them with praise, but then never do much of what they recommend, mostly because we don't really listen to much of what they say.  We are not about the business of real empowerment of women and in some circles, we'd rather it stay that way.  For reasons that are too many and too complicated to summarize, we have in essence marginalized women to very basic predictable roles, most of which are about maintenance.  Men establish, women maintain.  Men create, women maintain. Men make the decisions, women maintain.  We'd never be able to run a single arm of government if not for women maintaining it all, but that's nearly all we'd have them do.
When Lysistrata is asked by the magistrate why she and her sisters rose up and presume that they can better handle the affairs of the state than their husbands, Lysistrata replies:
"All the long years when the hopeless war dragged along we, unassuming, forgotten in quiet, endured without question, endured in our loneliness all your incessant child's antics and riot.  Our lips we kept tied, though aching with silence, though well all the while in our silence we knew how wretchedly everything still was progressing by listening dumbly the day long to you. For always at home you continued discussing the war and its politics loudly, and we sometimes would ask you, our hearts deep with sorrowing though we spoke lightly, though happy to see, "What's to be inscribed on the side of the Treaty-stone? What, dear, was said in the Assembly today?" "Mind your own business," he'd answer me growlingly "hold your tongue, woman, or else go away." And so I would hold it."
And then all the women shouted in one accord:  "I'd not be silent for any man living on earth, no, not I!"
I wonder.  I wonder what would happen if women spoke up in this country?  Really spoke up.  For themselves.  For their children?  Really organized.  And were united around the issues that mattered most to them.  I wonder.

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