I know it’s more than a week ago—old news—that Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn (authors of Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, to be released next week by Knopf) wrote an epic cover story in The New York Times Magazine about women’s rights around the world (or lack thereof). But I’ve been busy preparing for my new job and making tomato sauce and running after a 3-year-old (or, actually, shouting for her as I lie on the couch!). Finally, though, I had a quiet moment to read it.
Unfortunately, most of it I knew already: the parts about how millions and millions of baby girls die around the world simply because parents don’t want them and they have no value; how only 1 percent of the land in the world is owned by women, and that most women, when widowed, are turned out to fend for themselves; about the easily curable (but hardly ever treated), ostracizing, fistula that happens when 12-year-old girls have babies and the birth canal tears; about the millions of little girls sold into sexual slavery; how women are burned to death when they are no longer wanted or desired. Lack of education is a given. And most of it is legal—even condoned.
My daughter Maya and I explored all these issues in our book It’s My Pleasure (Simon & Schuster) many years ago. We turned our horror at the stories we kept hearing into a detective mission to discover why. Why do cultures allow total brutality towards women? Why do women put up with it (and often perpetuate it themselves)? And how do we stop it?
You may laugh when you hear we traced it back to fear of love (policed by patriarchal male domination), which lives on today in the stigma against happily-ever-after romance stories (a stigma, by the way, of which The New York Times is a major perpetuator). But a few years after we published our book, I was honored to hear Ayaan Hirsi Ali, author of Infidel, speak to women executives in America. Here is a Somali woman who lived through unspeakable brutality—beatings, starvation, genital mutilation, forced marriage—to become a member of parliament in the Netherlands…until she denounced Islam then had to go into hiding after a friend of hers was murdered. The murderer left a note for her, stabbed into the victim’s body with a knife.
What gave Ali her courage? What gave her the insight into a life of different possibilities? It was smuggled romance novels by Danielle Steele and others. In those pages, she saw that women in other countries were worthy of love and had the freedom to pursue it…that women deserve love, and the she deserved men who knew how to give her pleasure—even though her genitalia had been destroyed. Those stories gave her the strength and gumption to escape and devote her life to helping other women.
It’s a very simple but radical idea. And while “big men” in the U.S. and Europe rush to “help” Africa and Asia with “better seeds,” chemicals, and aid that is given to men who drink it away and then sell their adolescent daughters into loveless marriages, they are actually perpetuating the male domination that is at the root of the problem.
When Hollywood finally learns how to make good romance movies (not even a category today!) we might just finally free women around the world, and create the kind of world where peace is a possibility. In the meantime, there are cheap paperback romances and micro-loans to women. In the meantime, love your daughters with all your heart and never take our freedom for granted. It was won in a long, hard-fought battle—it was never a given, and still isn’t. And remember, we free women are the minority.
Links?
Romance novels were never my cup of tea, but this gives me a new view of them that I had never considered before.
All too often people “romanticize” life in non-Westernized nations. They play up the music, art, clothing, history, “tribal spirit” or whatever other aspect of the culture they want, and either downplay or completely ignore the brutality such cultures execute against women. It’s considered the height of evil imperialism to suggest that such cultures should embrace any Western ideals. Western society is not perfect, nor does it have all the answers, but it sure is doing a heck of a lot better at taking care of women!
As a woman, I’m incredibly grateful for the freedom that living in the U.S. affords me. As a student of history, I must point out that freedom for women in the U.S. and other Western countries hasn’t been around that long. In the U.S., a law was passed after the Civil War that gave women the right to make decisions about the property they brought to a marriage.
Prior to that, marriage meant that the woman’s possessions were the property of her husband and could be disposed of as he saw fit. I wish I knew the answer for other countries and cultures. I would think that promoting law and justice for all in these countries should be an ideal.
When you think of these freedoms remember NOW, the organization that continues to fight for rights for women. Young women need to get active and continue the battle and not take the rights they have for granted as they could all be swept away with a bad vote in Congress.
Lovely post. I, too, have been long concerned with the plight of women, focusing mostly on our own country, where women are still abused and disempowered daily. I thought the male terror you write about was obvious in the hearings of Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor. I’m fortunate enough to be married to an enlightened man, and know many others, but the ones who seem to need the power are the scared ones. I loved the connection you made between that fear and the rejection of love stories. thank you.
I am proud to be related to both (but descended from neither) Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. They were contemporaries and outspoken allies in the movement supporting women’s rights. When we think of these two remarkable women the issue of women’s right to vote comes to mind, but it was more than that, including women’s right to own property, oversee her own finances, control her reproductive rights, and make a decent wage. Both women would be thrilled with the many progressive steps women have made, but frustrated that women’s earning power in the US still lags and women in some parts of the world have no more rights than did the black slaves of their time. Both women were also friends and contemporaries of the great Frederick Douglass, women’s rights having many themes in common with the issues of slavery.
Infmroation is power and now I’m a !@#$ing dictator.
Will buy from again! Thanks