There is a story about two friends camping in the woods. As they set their tent for the night, a large bear emerged from the trees and charged toward them. The friends broke into a run. One of them suddenly stopped and started to put on his sneakers.
“What are you doing?” his friend shouted. “Come on! You must outrun the bear!”
“No,” the friend replied. “I only must outrun you.”
We know who’s been wearing the sneakers and outrunning women for much too long. While there are some wonderful men who support and care about women’s issues, I am referring to the collective social structure across the globe which, with very few exceptions, has positioned women as far inferior to men in every public sphere—political, religious, legal, and economic.
My first rude awakening took place during my two visits to Russia in 1993 following the fall of communism. I had been sent by the USIA to teach Russian women entrepreneurial and business skills. Soon, I learned that equality in access to financial resources such as bank loans and business opportunities were the first freedom women needed.
Prior these 1993 trips I had been exposed through women’s economic programs to the positive affect that microlending had on women’s lives. When given the chance to borrow even $5 from Credit Union program that made loans available to women, women’s lives radically changed—as did the lives of their family members. Not only was the default rate on these micro loans the smallest these lending institutions ever experienced, but an unexpected upside presented itself: With the newly found self-worth, these women’s status within their families and villages changed drastically. Their husbands stopped beating them, their mothers-in-law expected less servitude, their sons grew to respect women in a way they never before witnessed in their narrow world, and their daughters watched new role models and began to look forward to life of hope rather than despair.
In Russia, though, I encountered a farther reaching result of access to economic resources—or the lack of thereof: With the fall of communism—and the entire legal system that had established women’s equality in society—women lost their rights for social services, jobs and housing, decent wages, and, perhaps more important, for the a minimum quota of one-third female representation in the Duma, the Russian parliament. In a country where a one-parent household is common, and where men’s life expectancy is the lowest in the developed world at 58 years of age due to a widespread malaise of alcohol addiction, the loss of the security net of social services meant no more school meals for these women’s children nor basic medical care—or the Russian version of medical care in a country that had never had aspirin or Band-Aids in its stores.
Women needed to establish a women’s political party—fast. But who was going to hand them the necessary funding to reach across a country with ten time zones? Men? The mafia?
With all of the West’s progress, there is no country that is free of having “a woman’s problem,” be it adequate legal rights, maternity care, social services, access to birth control, religious representation, cultural norms, political leadership, civil liberties, education opportunities, pay equality, or the elimination of sexual violence. A 2006 survey of 115 economies by the World Economic Forum revealed that outside the Nordic nations, only about 50% of the gender gap had been closed in economic participation, while as little as 15% of the gap in political empowerment had been closed. But even in Sweden, the most progressive in women’s equality, the political rhetoric had not been fully translated into equal economic participation, and Swedish women are still facing patriarchal power-order both in the public arena and at home.
In South America, where military regimes marginalize women and are least concerned about families, the feminization of poverty is glaring. With the highest rate of teenage mothers, 70% of working women in countries such as Brazil and Colombia are employed in domestic service. In Eastern Europe, poor men’s earnings are often spent on alcohol and prostitution, while women’s earnings go for food for their families. 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, and gender discrimination is evident in all levels of the economic sphere.
But seeking political and legal power or pay equality may be a luxury reserved only for women in developed and even developing countries. What happens in third-world nations that are so backward that they have yet to emerge out of the eighteenth century?
Recently, I watched the film The Stoning of Soraya, which takes place in a village in contemporary Iran. A man wishing to divorce his wife, the mother of his four children, in order to marry a 13-year old concocts an allegation of infidelity, and with the help of false witnesses, in a trial that Soraya is not even permitted to attend, she is condemned to death. In the slow torturous death, Soraya’s lower body is buried in the sand, while her upper body is stoned to shreds. It is hard to describe what is most devastating in this horrific scene when her relatives and neighbors—all men who’ve known Soraya all her life—are her delighted executioners, starting with her own father. I was particularly struck by the viciousness in which her adolescent son is the first to throw a stone that hits her squarely on the forehead. And the way her second son is prodded to follow.
There is a link between misogyny of this magnitude that is indoctrinated into boys’ impressionable minds and global terrorism. The same bloodthirsty societies that focus on the oppression of women and are obsessed with women’s bodies’ “purity” are also the ones that breed terrorists. Male-dominated countries such as Afghanistan, Iran, and Saudi-Arabia, where extreme forms of fundamentalism reins and women are considered property (no different than goats), are also the countries that produced most of the terrorists and terrorist acts of the 20th and 21st centuries. There is no better time to be reminded of it than now, the anniversary of 9/11, when the destruction force of Islamists came charging to our shores.
What happens to a child-bride forced into sexual slavery in the Middle East, Asia, or South America? She may dream that one day—when she grows up—she will flee the marriage into which she was sold. All too often, though, she relinquishes all hope once she is the mother of several infants while not yet out of her teens. The primal instinct of protecting them and the fear of the world awaiting her outside, more cruel and merciless toward an illiterate woman than the world in which she is trapped, is hard for us to fathom.
Nevertheless, there are girls and women who attempt to flee or seek opportunities through the promise of jobs outside their small, unforgiving world. Except that in most cases, these women—whether fleeing the rice fields of Vietnam or the cold steppes of Siberia—fall into a sex trafficking ring. Slavery has not been eradicated from our globe: at any given year, according to U.N. report, one- to two-million girls and women are ensnared into brothels from Berlin to Calcutta.
The atrocities visited upon women are not limited to illegal activities by individuals or crime gangs. In recent decades we’ve seen mass rape as a tool of war to break a nation’s spirit. From East Timor to Darfur, the war between nations is won by breaking women, shattering their nuclear family, tearing apart villages, and ending with a military victory. But when the wars are over, when people crawl out of the ashes to rebuild their lives, in countries such as Liberia, Congo, and Rwanda, wars have shattered norms and trained men to believe that sex is obtained by overpowering a female. According to a Human Rights Watch report, raping of girls is common in African schools both by other students as well as by teachers and administrators, and gender violence is 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 International estimates that 130 million girls and women suffer not what we in the West often dismiss as a cultural “female circumcism,” but rather a brutal, radical excising of most or all of the female genitalia.
When first encountering some of these atrocities while attending the International Women’s Conference in Beijing in 1995, I also wondered about the mothers’ complicity in these acts of violence against their daughters. I soon learned that in the case of clitoridectomy, illiterate mothers who see no future for their daughters but to be married—and therefore be sheltered and fed—view the men’s request for their daughters’ asexuality as the only meal ticket for life.
Even more disturbing is the Chinese mothers’ complicity in infanticide, and more specifically, in gendercide—the killing of baby girls. Infanticide is as old as China. In Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth, published in 1931, she tells of a killing of a female infant in a time of great famine. In my interviews with old Chinese women about birth control in their younger years, many told me, in a flat voice, that when they had a baby, they often smothered it with a pillow or their husband drowned it in the river.
But why, today, when famine in China is a thing of the past, do mothers abandon or kill their daughters? Beyond the long-seated tradition of preference for boys (women are still referred to as “the maggots in the rice,”) many Chinese women’s lives are utterly miserable: Poorly educated and often medically neglected since birth, forever cut off their own birth families since their teenage years when given away in marriage, sexually enslaved to their husbands, often ridiculed, beaten, starved and made to serve their in-laws, Chinese women demonstrate the highest rate of suicide in the world—more than half of the world's female suicides occur in China, or five times higher than other countries according to a study by the World Bank, Harvard University, and the World Health Organization.
No wonder that Chinese women do not want this life for their daughters.
What is the answer for this bleak state of global gender discrimination that results in female misery and death?
Education.
When women are educated, They delay marriage age. They have fewer children. They seek education for their children. They present role models for their daughters. They present their sons with a fresh view of women in society.
When women are educated, Their earning capacity increases. They are more likely to start their own business ventures. They have a better chance to pull out of poverty.
When women are educated, They help better other women’s and children’s lives. They are more likely seek leadership roles or to run for political offices. They are better equipped to fight for their legal rights.
They are less likely to tolerate extreme forms of religious fundamentalism that is the root of terrorism in our world today.
To quote Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times columnist and author of the upcoming book Half The Sky, “women on this globe are not the problem, but rather than solution.” When women, one-half the world’s population are educated, society doubles its forward move toward development and prosperity.
We can help turn the vision into reality. We can outrun the bear. Let’s all put on our sneakers and win the race.
Talia Carner’s novels, Puppet Child,China Doll - and the upcoming Jerusalem Maiden - are inspired by women’s social issues. For more information, please visit www.taliacarner.com.
About the Author
Talia Carner was the publisher of Savvy Woman magazine. A former adjunct professor at Long Island University School of Management and a marketing consultant to Fortune 500 companies, she was also a volunteer counselor and lecturer for the Small Business Administration, a member of United States Information Agency (USIA) missions to Russia, and a participant at the 1995 International Women's Conference in Beijing. There, she sat on economic panels, taught entrepreneurial skills, and helped develop political campaigns for Indian and African women. Ms. Carner's first novel, Puppet Child, was listed in “The Top 10 Favorite First Novels 2002” and launched a nationwide legislation (The Protective Parent Reform Act) that became the platform for two Senatorial candidates. China Doll has made Amazon’s bestsellers list and served as the platform for Ms. Carner's presentation at the U.N. in 2007 about infanticide in China—the first ever in U.N. history....
I am the author of Blackbird, a story of childhood struggle within a middle class American family--where the pie is supposed to be thick and juicy. I have lived, first hand, what this world of women struggles with but my true savior was that I lived in a place where I could get an education, where I could speak out and not get killed for my opinion, I could create art from my suffering and I could contemplate deeply. I now speak out as well but this is one of the best, most concise and important articles I have read and I can be silent and offer a health AMEN to what is written here.
Amazing Talia. Thank you and please, keep speaking!
My main focus in art is color, design and composition. I have a true passion for color as the art subject itself - how colors fit together, how they communicate with each other within the design, how certain colors combined with one another evoke a certain feeling - this is paramount in my work. I am a social worker, artist and poet living in Austin, TX. Read More...
Talia Carner was the publisher of Savvy Woman magazine. A former adjunct professor at Long Island University School of Management and a marketing consultant to Fortune 500 companies, she was also a volunteer counselor and lecturer for the Small Business Administration, a member of United States Information Agency (USIA) missions to Russia, and a participant at the 1995 International Women's Conference in Beijing. There, she sat on economic panels, taught entrepreneurial skills, and helped develop political campaigns for Indian and African women. Ms. Carner's first novel, Puppet Child, was listed in “The Top 10 Favorite First Novels 2002” and launched a nationwide legislation (The Protective Parent Reform Act) that became the platform for two Senatorial candidates. China Doll has made Amazon’s bestsellers list and served as the platform for Ms. Carner's presentation at the U.N. in 2007 about infanticide in China—the first ever in U.N. history....
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