Spanish feminism was one of the first stories I covered for the Monitor as a foreign reporter. I will never forget what one leader told me then, 20 years ago: that while most Western women had been gaining ground in the women’s liberation movement, Spanish women had been living under dictatorship, so they were now in overdrive and, in her view, had “sprinted ahead” of their peers. I returned to that thought when, in my small world, I was seeing my friends from home start to have babies and leave careers, while the Spanish friends I was making (including my future husband) were not dreaming of anything but a two-career household. Were Spanish women more “feminist”?   

As a foreign correspondent, you do tend to notice the differences between your own culture and that of other places first. And the Monitor has reported on the many gains for women globally, from universal preschool in France (when I was a Paris-based correspondent, my husband and I were happy participants) to protections for murdered and missing Indigenous women in Canada, to protests against femicides in Latin America. 

But having had the privilege of interviewing women in over 40 countries throughout my career, I also have started to more profoundly understand how much common ground we share, even as we live under vastly different systems. That was clear covering the fallout from the #MeToo movement around the world in 2017 and 2018. And hard-fought legal achievements can be quickly lost at any point in time for anyone. That was never clearer to me than last year when I was the lead reporter for a piece, based on the U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, on the history of global feminist movements and reproductive rights.   

On this International Women’s Day, the protests taking place in repressive regimes around the globe might seem far away and foreign to most. But women today fighting to defy a dress code, to speak their minds, or to protest a war are essentially fighting for the same things all women want: equality, justice, freedom, and safety in every sense.   

These are the shared values we aim to express in our Monitor coverage.