Ascent of Women (2 page)

Women revolutionaries and visionaries in cities and villages the world over are making history. Leading the way are women like Gloria Steinem, Hillary Clinton and Isobel Coleman from the United States; Sima Samar from Afghanistan; Farida Shaheed from Pakistan, Shirin Ebadi from Iran and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf from Liberia. The list of game-changers also includes Luz Méndez from Guatemala and Siphewe Hlope from Swaziland, Mary Eberts, Fiona Sampson and Margot Franssen from Canada, as
well as women from every far-flung corner of the planet who have marched and petitioned and stood in solidarity to eradicate religiously or culturally sanctioned acts of violence against women and children.

Supporters are jumping on this bandwagon like born-again believers in the power of women. The philanthropist Bill Gates says, “The past decade has seen more progress against inequality than any of the previous five.” Doug Saunders, a columnist for
The Globe and Mail
, writes, “The most potent forces in the world right now … are all centred around the mythic figure of the teenage girl,” commenting on a study released by the charity Plan International,
Because I’m a Girl
, which recognizes that the fate of girls and young women is precisely the fate of their countries and communities. Britain’s royal family ended a thousand years of tradition in 2011 by reversing a primogeniture rule that favoured males for succession to the throne; females now have the same rights to the throne as men. The writer Naomi Wolfe says, “Once you educate women, democratic agitation is likely to accompany the cultural shift that follows.” And Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, author of the recently published examination of human violence,
The Better Angels of Our Nature
, states unequivocally that the world would be more peaceful if women were in charge. “Over the long sweep of history women have been and will be a pacifying force. Traditional war is a man’s game: Tribal women never band together to raid neighbouring villages.” For women, security means more than the absence of war. It means that they can get medical attention when they are giving birth; it means that their children can go to school safely. It means that they can farm the land without fear of land mines and find water without fear of being raped and killed on the path from the village to the well.

The United Nations Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1325 on October 31, 2000—the first time the Security Council addressed the disproportionate and unique impact of armed conflict on women; recognized the undervalued and underutilized contributions that women make to conflict prevention, peacekeeping, conflict resolution and peace building and at the same time stressed the importance of women’s equal and full participation as active agents in peace and security. Nice words, but the fact is, more than a decade later, that women still have to fight their way to the negotiating table and are often not included. Says Hillary Clinton, “If we want to make progress toward settling the world’s most intractable conflicts, let’s enlist women.”

The idea isn’t new. A dozen years ago, in 2001, Jane Jacobs explained the far-reaching effects of well-managed economies and the vital role that women play in them in her book
The Nature of Economies
. Using the form of a platonic dialogue—a conversation over coffee among five fictional friends—Jacobs puts these words into the mouth of one of her characters: “This is why societies that are oppressive to women and contemptuous of their work are so backward economically. Half their populations, doing economically important kinds of work, such as cooking and food processing, cleaning and laundering, making garments and concocting home remedies, are excluded from taking initiatives to develop all that work—and nobody else does either. No wonder macho societies typically have pitiful, weak economies.”

Since Jacobs wrote that passage, the concept of improving the economy and reducing poverty and violence by empowering women has taken flight. It’s been a long time coming.

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The journey to get to this place has been a perilous one for women through thousands of years of oppression and trickery. Women were burned alive at the stake for daring to have opinions. They were beheaded for failing to produce a male heir. They suffered foot binding to create dainty, useless feet to please their men (so tiny, deformed and painful that they could barely walk, let alone run away). They continue to be subjected to female genital mutilation and honour killing and forced marriage. They’re still jailed for being raped in places like Afghanistan. Some clerics and religious leaders have described women as whores, harlots and jezebels; as brainless and even soulless. Women’s story of change is one of stunning courage, tenacity and wit.

Women such as Christine de Pizan were proclaiming women’s rights in the 1400s in France. Mary Wollstonecraft was doing the same in England in 1792 when she wrote
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
. Between those historical points, Isabella of Castile, Elizabeth I of England, Christine of Sweden and Catherine the Great of Russia all reigned as monarchs, and each in her position embodied some form of female emancipation. Women led the bread riots in England and France in the 1500s, marched to protest the salt shortages in the colonies of New England in the 1700s and made sorties into the world of equality rights as long as four and five centuries ago. The suffragettes and the Famous Five from Canada agitated for change early in the twentieth century. And the beginning of the second wave of the feminist movement in the sixties made women such as Betty Friedan and Doris Anderson famous. Helen Reddy’s “I am woman, hear me roar” sounded like a call to arms when she first sang it in 1972. But in the past the gains women made were often
modified, and women themselves were cast back into their historical roles as mother, wife, caregiver or temptress.

For the past five decades, the second wave of the women’s movement has struggled to alter the law, change the status quo and improve the lives of women. In a push-me, pull-you process, women have scored significant victories (writing gender equality into constitutions) and suffered serious losses (failing to get enough women elected to alter the culture of politics in Canada, the United States and the countries of the European Union). Even in places like Rwanda and Afghanistan, which have established quotas for women in parliament, there’s been an obdurate resistance to the ideas and goals that women bring to the table. But now the threads required for serious progress on human rights have started to weave themselves together into a tapestry of change. You want a better economy? Put the women to work. Your health system is lagging? Improve maternal and infant health care. War is your problem? Bring women to the negotiating table. Is poverty stubbornly stuck at unacceptable levels? Ask your women to make the budget.

It’s a sweeping generalization, but my experience writing about women in zones of conflict as well as in developing and developed countries tells me that women are more interested in fair policy than in power, in peace rather than a piece of the turf. And women leaders have long asserted that a sense of community is far more valuable than a sense of control. The information age is altering the grip of top-down power, giving rise to the less confrontational leadership style that women prefer. Gloria Steinem, who is perhaps the best-known contemporary feminist in the world, predicted that the switch would take time when she said a decade ago, “One day an army of grey-haired old women may quietly take over the world.”

As a journalist I have been telling women’s stories for twenty-five years. Until recently the oppression and abuse and second-class citizenship that we endured were seen as women’s immutable lot in life, dictated by culture and religion. Now that treatment is seen as symptomatic of a failed economy, the consequences of sidelining half of the world’s population.

Scenes still play like YouTube videos on the back of my eyelids: the woman in Croatia who was gang-raped in 1991 because she lived in a village that the belligerents wanted. The women of Malicounda Bambara in Senegal who banded together in 1997 and swore a public oath, “Never again, not my daughter,” and eradicated female genital cutting there. The girl on the Shomali Plains in Afghanistan who couldn’t read or write and didn’t know how old she was when she became the sole guardian of her six younger brothers and sisters after the Taliban killed her parents and grandmother in 2000, who told me, “I will go to school and learn to read and I’ll take them with me.” The women in Nairobi who held a public meeting in 2010 to announce that they would make marital rape a crime, proclaiming, “We were there in the room the day that signalled the beginning of the end of violence.” The woman in Canada who grew up in a polygamous family and was forced into a polygamous marriage and had three husbands, eight children, seventy-six stepchildren, forty-seven brothers and sisters. When she broke away, she used one of her best assets, her sense of humour, to sum up the absurdity of that polygamous sect: “I’d become my own step-great-grandmother.”

I also still see the thugs in the lives of these women who get away with denying the girls an education, with refusing to let the women go to work; the rapists and war lords who see women and
girls as pawns or worse; the so-called men of God whose misogyny knows no bounds. They’re all on notice now. Diplomats and activists are no longer silenced by men who claim they are acting in the name of God and that no one outside their culture or faith can point out the error of their ways. Claiming violence is “none of your business” has become an oxymoron. Violence is everyone’s business.

The World Bank has issued reports every five years since 1985 to say that if attention is paid to the girl child—educating her, taking care of her health, feeding her—the economy of the village will improve. Why? Because she will marry later, have fewer children and those children will be healthier. But it’s more than that: in many places women’s intelligence is an untapped resource. If you foster it, the benefits spill over from the domestic sphere into public life. Research conducted by Plan International has found that the level of poverty reduction and economic growth in a country is directly correlated to the levels of education attained by the women—more than any other factor. Studies done in 2010 by MIT and Carnegie Mellon University on collective intelligence found that if you add females to a group, its collective intelligence improves.

There was a time when people were not chastised for making gross presumptions about women: that raped women asked for it and women who were beaten by their husbands liked it. No one would dare to talk that way now in countries where women have achieved emancipation. In 1994 an Alberta judge claimed that a young woman “wasn’t exactly dressed in a bonnet and crinolines” when she applied for a job in a trailer at a construction site and was raped. He implied that it was her own fault and said, “A well-chosen expletive, a slap in the face or … a well-directed knee
would have been a better response than charging the offender.” He was removed from the bench.

When the Canadian MP Margaret Mitchell presented the idea of a sweeping reform of the judiciary to the House of Commons in 1982—reform that included criminalizing marital rape and making sexual assault, including wife abuse, child abuse and incest, a crime—her fellow members of parliament laughed! When the new sexual assault bill passed in 1983, nobody was laughing. Now similar changes are being demanded elsewhere in the world. Honour killing, female genital mutilation, forced marriage and a litany of assaults against women and girls are now being named for what they are. They aren’t cultural, they’re criminal. Until recently there has been a taboo against speaking out on issues pertaining to sex and abuse. But if you can’t talk about it, you can’t change it. Now the women are talking and their conversation is life altering.

I remember being in Bangladesh on assignment in 2002 to research abuses against women that were increasing in frequency as well as severity. Women had been beaten by their spouses, had their joints dislocated, had acid tossed in their faces; one had been tied to a railway track and rescued moments before a train roared by. While I was walking to a village with Rita Adikary, who was working for the non-governmental organization World Vision, a young woman who was trying to hide at the side of the road beckoned to me. When I got close enough I saw that she had been badly burned. Blistered skin was hanging from the underside of her breast, from her arms and her face. One of her eyes was bulging out of its socket after an apparent beating. When I asked her what had happened, the men who had gathered on the street to watch us all claimed that she was a stupid woman who had spilled boiling water on herself.

Rita spoke up and said, “Spilled water doesn’t burn the underside of your breast. Thrown water does. Who did it?” She chased down the facts by asking women who were standing nearby what had happened, then she called the police and gave them the details and the name of the man who had assaulted the girl, and finally told the young girl where she could find help and shelter. When I wrote the story for
Homemaker
’s magazine, the publisher was concerned about using the photos I had taken, which explicitly displayed the woman’s injuries. They were too hard to look at, the reality too upsetting. So other photos were used. Whose sensibilities were being protected by shielding the awful truth? Why is it that the shame of assault lies with victims rather than the perpetrators?

In 2011, though, a similar story won an Academy Award for the filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy. In her documentary
Saving Face
, she chronicles the ghastly wounds that Pakistani women suffer when men throw acid in their faces. She has riveted attention on a hideous crime that nobody had wanted to talk about. In just ten years, the screen that filters public awareness has been lifted, and the silence has been broken in Pakistan and elsewhere. Talking is the antidote for oppression and injustice. The first result when women share stories of victimization is realizing that other people don’t live that way. For the women of Afghanistan, that realization began when they understood that their religion had been manipulated by political opportunists: despite what the fundamentalist mullahs said, there was scant evidence in the Quran to support the actions of the extremists. The second result of telling our stories is overcoming the personally perturbing question, who will we be if we change the way we are?