Tomorrow, March 8, is International Women’s Day. It coincides with the anniversary of the birth of the late Lady (Gladys) Bustamante. It will also be the 18th anniversary of the by-election in St Ann North Eastern, when the Jamaica Labour Party’s (JLP) Shahine Robinson won the seat for the Jamaica Labour Party in 2001. That by-election was caused by the resignation of the former Member of Parliament (MP) Danny Melville of the People’s National Party (PNP).

Before the 21st century, service clubs like Lions, Rotary, Kiwanis and local clubs like Kingston Cricket Club were exclusively for men. Some of the men who supported the women in their quest to join these clubs belonged to secret societies exclusively for men.

Why would they do that? Because men, who have a natural need to join with other men in some sort of association, would have their options limited to interest groups controlled by men who look out mainly for themselves. In this way, other men become part of a manipulative ‘old boy’ network.

I strongly suspect that this manipulation to obey, even if reluctantly, happens by way of the conditions of membership of those interest groups that women are not able to join. So who benefits here, men or women? It seems to be men to me, even if a relative few, who seek to control just about everything.

This is why it is important to have associations of men only who have such needs that are independent of manipulation.

There is a resolution in Parliament to legalise abortion piloted by MP Juliet Cuthbert. As a Roman Catholic, I view abortion as murder, but there is another reason for my objection. If the Bill is passed — God forbid — and it becomes legal for women to have an abortion on demand, who will be the ultimate beneficiaries?

Who will sell the equipment that doctors use to perform abortions? Who will establish the abortion clinics on just about every street, lane and corner of Jamaica? I suspect that 99 per cent of them will be men.

So you women who say that it is your body to do as you like are playing into the hands of unscrupulous men who will laugh all the way to the bank after you have exercised your ‘right’ to mutilate your bodies. And when that happens, who have you liberated? Certainly not yourselves!

International Women’s Day passes each year and the plight of domestic helpers, who are mostly women, remains the same. I have written this repeatedly over the last three decades. It is also topical in light of Damion Crawford’s mention of the helpers that are employed to Ann-Marie Vaz while campaigning for the by-election in Portland Eastern.

True, the Jamaica Household Helpers Association exists, but domestic helpers are still treated cruelly by other women, some of whom might even be at the forefront of women’s liberation activities. Many helpers are allegedly forced by needy circumstances to sleep with the ‘tapinaris’ husbands of their upper-class wives. Again, these adulterous men might see themselves as the main beneficiaries here, except when their shenanigans land them with a venereal disease.

So the anniversary of the birth of Lady Bustamante coincides with International Women’s day. Born in 1912, Lady B would be 107 years old tomorrow were she alive. She died in 2009. She was Sir Alexander Bustamante’s loyal secretary who all Labourites had to consult before approaching the ‘Chief’.

It is believed that in the mid-to-late 1930s, at the time of the famous “’Bustamante letters”, it was Lady B who wrote out them all, taking dictation from Bustamante. The ultimate beneficiary here was again at least one man (Bustamante), if not thousands of his men and women followers.

When the JLP’s Shahine Robinson won the St Ann North Eastern by-election she was the beneficiary of a split in the PNP camp between two women who both wanted to be the PNP candidate in the by-election. With the PNP’s campaign effort divided, Shahine Robinson won with less than 50 per cent of the vote, with 700-odd votes going to Barbara Clarke, then of the National Democratic Party (NDM), (who later joined the PNP), and less than 200 votes for Ras Astor Black.

Bruce Golding said that the low poll for the NDM in that by-election result led him to resign from the NDM that he founded to return to the JLP. He ultimately became prime minister between 2007 and 2011, so here again the beneficiary was a man.

More significantly, the by-election result of victory for the JLP’s Shahine Robinson was a wake-up call for the then governing PNP, which heeded that warning and used it to win a fourth-consecutive term of office in October 2002. If the JLP had not contested that by-election — just as they did not in many previous by-elections — it would have kept the PNP unaware of its diminishing strength, and the JLP might have won the general election in 2002.

The circumstances leading to the victory of the PNP in the general election of 2002 had a stark similarity to their victory on July 28, 1959 after a wake-up call in 1958. The West Indies federal election of 1958 were in the JLP’s favour locally, although the combined West Indies Federal Labour Party/PNP coalition won the federal election.

After the wake-up call to the Norman Manley-led PNP in 1958, P J Patterson featured as a political organiser, who engineered, in the words of the Gleaner headline, a “smashing comeback victory” for the PNP in 1959.

Similarly, in the case of Shahine Robinson’s victory, the PNP, led by Patterson, having been awakened by the by-election result, put things in place to win again. In this vein, former Finance Minister Omar Davies made the famous statement that they had to “run wid it’.

But the difference in 2002 is that, while a woman (Shahine Robinson) advanced, the main beneficiaries were men like P J Patterson and Bruce Golding, the party leaders. Women should really evaluate who ultimately benefits from their protests.

Michael Burke is a research consultant, historian and current affairs analyst. Send comments to the Observer or ekrubm765@yahoo.com.