By Talia Carner
March 8, 2011 marked the 100th year of International Women’s Day celebration. Initiated in 1911 in Copenhagen, it is celebrated every year in scores of countries around the globe, many focusing on a theme that is in particular need of progress.
How much has changed this past century? In 2011, across the globe, women are still far inferior to men in every public sphere—political, religious, legal and economic.
Back in 1993, following the fall of Communism, I was sent twice by the USIA to Russia to teach women business skills. I had previously witnessed the uplifting effect of microlending on African women’s lives when given the chance to borrow as little as $5 from Credit Union program and buy chair-caning tools, seeds, or a used sewing machine. With the newly found self-worth, the status of these female entrepreneurs rose drastically within their families and villages: Their husbands stopped beating them, their enslaving mothers-in-law relaxed, their sons grew to respect women, and their daughters replaced their vision of life of despair with hope.
In Russia, though, with the fall of Communism, women not only lost their legal rights for social services, jobs and housing, but also for the minimum quota of one-third female representation in the Russian parliament. They needed to establish a women’s political party—fast. But who was going to hand them the huge funding to bridge across ten time-zones? Men? The mafia?
With all of the West’s progress, no country is free of “a woman’s problem,” be it full legal rights, maternity care, access to birth control, religious and political leadership, civil liberties, education opportunities, pay equality, or protection from sexual violence.
In South America, where military regimes are unconcerned about women, poverty is feminized with the highest rate of teenage mothers. In some African nations, maternity death reaches 2,000 to 1 maternity death in Europe. In the U.S., mothers are often disenfranchised and discredited in our courts.
But seeking legal justice or pay equality is the luxury of women in developed and even developing countries. What happens in third-world nations stuck in the seventeenth century?
In the film The Stoning of Soraya, a man in contemporary Iran wishes to divorce his wife concocts an allegation of infidelity. Using false witnesses in a trial Soraya is prohibited from attending, she is sentenced to death. An hour later, with half her body buried in the sand, her upper body is stoned to shreds. The viciousness in which her adolescent son is the first to throw a stone reflects the misogyny indoctrinated into boys’ impressionable minds along with the obsession with women’s “purity.”
A child-bride forced into sexual slavery in the Middle East, Asia, or South America may dream to one day flee the marriage into which she was sold. But she relinquishes all hope once she is the mother of several infants and fears the world outside, more cruel toward an illiterate woman than the world in which she is trapped.
Nevertheless, courageous girls who attempt to flee the rice fields of Vietnam or the steppes of Siberia for the promise of jobs abroad, are likely to fall into sex trafficking rings. At any given year, one- to two-million girls and women are ensnared into brothels from Berlin to Calcutta.
Mass rape is a tool of war. From East Timor to Sierra Leone, wars between nations are won by breaking women, shattering nuclear families, tearing apart villages, and wrecking a nation’s spirit. But when wars end and people crawl out of the ashes, mores are shattered. In African nations, men expect sex simply by overpowering a female, making gender violence an inevitable part of school environment.
Then there is the burning of brides in India and the mass gendercide of girls in China. There is the clitoridectomy of two million girls a year in Africa and Muslim nations—Amnesty estimates that 130 million girls and women suffer the brutal, radical excising of most or all of the female genitalia.
What is the answer for this bleak state of global female misery and death?
Education.
When women are educated, they marry later, produce fewer children, educate them, and present to them positive role models. They work for pay or start their own business, and pull out of poverty. They help improve other women’s and children’s lot, become community leaders or run for political office. They use the Internet to develop hopeful visions for their communities outside their narrow universe. They strive to break from religious fundamentalism that traps them and indoctrinates their sons to become terrorists.
Women are not the problem, but rather than solution. Had society heeded women’s 1911 outcry society had doubled its forward move toward development and prosperity.
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Talia Carner’s novels, PUPPET CHILD and CHINA DOLL—and her upcoming JERUSALEM MAIDEN—are inspired by women’s social issues. www.TaliaCarner.com .
