The Women’s Crusade

IN THE 19TH CENTURY, the paramount moral challenge was slavery. In the 20th century, it was totalitarianism. In this century, it is the brutality inflicted on so many women and girls around the globe: sex trafficking, acid attacks, bride burnings and mass rape.

Yet if the injustices that women in poor countries suffer are of paramount importance, in an economic and geopolitical sense the opportunity they represent is even greater. “Women hold up half the sky,” in the words of a Chinese saying, yet that’s mostly an aspiration: in a large slice of the world, girls are uneducated and women marginalized, and it’s not an accident that those same countries are disproportionately mired in poverty and riven by fundamentalism and chaos. There’s a growing recognition among everyone from the World Bank to the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff to aid organizations like CARE that focusing on women and girls is the most effective way to fight global poverty and extremism. That’s why foreign aid is increasingly directed to women. The world is awakening to a powerful truth: Women and girls aren’t the problem; they’re the solution.

One place to observe this alchemy of gender is in the muddy back alleys of Pakistan. In a slum outside the grand old city of Lahore, a woman named Saima Muhammad used to dissolve into tears every evening. A round-faced woman with thick black hair tucked into a head scarf, Saima had barely a rupee, and her deadbeat husband was unemployed and not particularly employable. He was frustrated and angry, and he coped by beating Saima each afternoon. Their house was falling apart, and Saima had to send her young daughter to live with an aunt, because there wasn’t enough food to go around.

“My sister-in-law made fun of me, saying, ‘You can’t even feed your children,’ ” recalled Saima when Nick met her two years ago on a trip to Pakistan. “My husband beat me up. My brother-in-law beat me up. I had an awful life.” Saima’s husband accumulated a debt of more than $3,000, and it seemed that these loans would hang over the family for generations. Then when Saima’s second child was born and turned out to be a girl as well, her mother-in-law, a harsh, blunt woman named Sharifa Bibi, raised the stakes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/magazine/23Women-t.html?th&emc=th#

Men thought they could control overpopulation by dictating to these poor, beaten women that they must use birth control. It didn't work because the only worth these women felt they had was in how many male children they produced.

However, throwing a very few dollars their way so they can start a cottage industry or sell a few things in a market stall is often all they need to raise their standard of living, their horizons, and their status in the home and in the village.

Some of the businesses are ingenious, like taking worn out formal wear from wealthy countries and turning it into communion and quincianera dresses in Latin America, or buying a cell phone and becoming the communications center for the whole village in India or Africa.

http://www.kiva.org is one microlender, the one I use. You can lend as little as $25 to get someone out of unimaginable poverty and hopelessness. You can join the DU Group there to increase the numbers. You get to choose the people you lend to, pretty neat.

There are other microlenders that specialize in loans to women, like Grameen, but they rely on straight donation.

Saving the world has to start with its women, mostly with its poorest women. The human race can't hope to progress out of poverty and ignorance if women aren't allowed to be part of it.

It's my sig line in my personal email. Didn't know about the DU group - that's good to know.

groovedaddy wrote:

<< IN THE 19TH CENTURY, the paramount moral challenge was slavery. In the 20th century, it was totalitarianism. In this century, it is the brutality inflicted on so many women and girls around the globe: sex trafficking, acid attacks, bride burnings and mass rape. >>

Careful with your generalizations about history, groovedaddy.

The civil war ended when the 19th century still had 34 more years to go, and Americans immediately had new moral challenges from the phenomenon called "carpetbagger." Another issue was what to do with emancipated slaves who had no job skills and couldn't read or write. How much should agencies in Washington, DC pay to change that using taxpayers' money? That remained an issue for 100 years later when Lyndon Johnson created the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Also, slavery was hardly a moral challenge in 19th century Sweden, Switzerland or some other countries.

You're pretty sloppy, groovedaddy, when you pigeonhole the 20th century as totalitarianism. It was an issue in many previous centuries, such as the one during which Ivan the Terrible lived, and it remains an issue today with Osama Bin Laden. He has introduced the new concept of the dictator not even owning his own land, sleeping in his own palace, or even telling his admirers where they can find him.

Once again, groovedaddy, you carelessly label the current century as belonging to women who suffer. Mass rape is nothing new. What is new is the growing men's prison population. Something that remains true with penology is that many innocent men are wrongfully convicted of crimes. Then they get raped in prison. Many fewer women get incarcerated for stuff they didn't do. There are acid attacks on men, too. Maybe there are no adult men who are forced to become prostitutes, but there are underage boys who are doing it without their consent or the consent of their biological parents.

You can take up your issues with the New York Times.

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