Ascent of Women (32 page)

It was a self-inflicted body blow to the organization that had been founded and has operated with the best of intentions. Its website tells the story of the woman whose name it bears, Susan Komen, who fought breast cancer with her heart, body and soul.
Throughout her diagnosis, treatments and endless days in the hospital, she spent her time thinking of ways to make life better for other women battling breast cancer instead of worrying about her own situation. That concern for others continued even as she neared the end of her fight. Moved by her compassion for others and committed to making a difference, Nancy Brinker promised Susan, who was her sister, that she would do everything in her power to end breast cancer forever. Reading the story of these two sisters devoted one to the other and best friends is heartbreaking in itself. Sister Nancy, whom Susan called Nanny, tells the story of the last time she saw her beloved sister.

After my sister was released from M.D. Anderson [Cancer Center at the University of Texas in Houston], I tried to come home every other week for a visit. One particular Sunday afternoon on the way back to the airport, Suzy spoke to me again about doing something to help the sick women in the hospital. This practically tore my heart out because here she was, hardly able to manage a whisper, and she was worrying about other people. I couldn’t bear it.

When my father pulled up to the curb, I quickly kissed them both good-bye and jumped out of the car. I was just about inside when I heard a funny sound that sounded like my name. I stopped in my tracks and turned around. There was Suzy, standing up outside the car on wobbly knees, wig slightly askew.

With her arms outstretched, she said gently, “Good-bye, Nanny, I love you.” I hugged her so hard I was afraid she might crumble. And then I ran to catch my plane.

I never saw my sister alive again.

Funds of $1.9 billion get attention. So do decisions to drop Planned Parenthood. Controversial decisions often make headlines in the short term, but, as the old Armenian saying goes, “The dogs barked; the caravan passed by,” the attention usually quickly dissipates. Not this time. In keeping with the new activism by and about women around the world, American women rose up to protest the bizarre treatment of Planned Parenthood. They appeared at rallies decked out in pink T-shirts that read “Women’s Health Matters.” They carried placards that said “Stop the War on Women” and “I Stand with Planned Parenthood.” It was an astonishing show of support.

A who’s who of celebrities soon joined the protest. The kids’ novelist Judy Blume sent a Twitter message that said, “Susan Komen would not give in to bullying or fear. Too bad the organization bearing her name did.” Representative Jackie Speier of California announced, “Komen’s decision hurts women. It puts politics before women’s health.” The comments roared in like a storm. So did the donations to Planned Parenthood. More than $3 million for its breast cancer program was donated in the first forty-eight hours after the news of the Komen cut broke. New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg said he would give $250,000 of his own money and match every dollar that Planned Parenthood raised up to another $250,000. Oil tycoons donated money, and so did indie rock bands.

Rebecca Traister and Joan Walsh wrote in
Salon
magazine, “The overreach by the Komen foundation, while surely intended to strike yet another blow on the side of antiabortion activism, succeeded instead in waking a powerful constituency—armed with precisely the language and emotional heft they [American women] have been lacking for too long.”

Facebook exploded with support for Planned Parenthood, and radio stations were inundated with callers demanding a retraction of the foundation’s decision. And three days after the announcement of the cut was made, the women of the U.S. got an apology and a retraction.

On Friday, February 3, Nancy Brinker, the president as well as founder of the organization, said, “We want to apologize to the American public for recent decisions that cast doubt upon our commitment to our mission of saving women’s lives. We have been distressed at the presumption that the changes made to our funding criteria were done for political reasons or to specifically penalize Planned Parenthood. They were not.

“Our original desire was to fulfill our fiduciary duty to our donors by not funding grant applications made by organizations under investigation. We will amend the criteria to make clear that disqualifying investigations must be criminal and conclusive in nature and not political. That is what is right and fair.”

~

This kind of protest demonstrates the power that women have to alter their own lives, to gain control over their own bodies. And now there’s another tool in the arsenal for protest—the Internet. A call for action can come almost instantly after an incident, via cyberspace, containing all the data you need, including e-mail contacts, phone numbers and mailing addresses, and even a form letter so you don’t have to worry about composing your own.

Here’s an example. Women Living Under Muslim Laws, along with a group known as Violence Is Not Our Culture, often instigate calls for action. Sometimes it’s because a woman has
been jailed without trial or a government has ruled unfairly toward women. Activists are accustomed to receiving such calls on their computer screens and following through with action. When the government of Afghanistan was planning a meeting in Bonn, Germany, to discuss the so-called peace process, an action call went out from WLUML on November 24, 2011, saying,

In the wake of the exclusion of Afghan women from the “peace process” at the Bonn Conference taking place on the 5th of December 2011, WLUML vigorously denounces:

• the ethical incoherence of States that engaged in a devastating war in Afghanistan under the fallacious pretext to protect “poor oppressed Muslim women living under the burqa,” and now prevent them from participating as full-fledged citizens in the peace process in their country, all while engaging with their oppressors

• the moral responsibility of these States, which are delivering Afghan women, bound and gagged, to the very same Taliban and warlords they pretended to save them from, just a few years ago

• the political short-sightedness of alliances, such as with Taliban and warlords, which fearfully remind us of other past historical compromises that cost so many lives

• the fallacy of the so-called “democratic process” taking place in Germany, but without the “untermensch” of the day: Afghan women

They provided e-mail contacts for the government representatives and each of the delegates. Responses poured in from around the world. Before the conference even began, its agenda and
delegation list were changed to include women who would speak up about women’s rights.

The Stop Stoning Forever campaign is another case example. Women Living Under Muslim Laws teamed up with Violence Is Not Our Culture and Justice for Iran to announce the release of a new publication,
Mapping Stoning in Muslim Contexts
, a report that named the fourteen countries where the punishment of stoning is still in practice, either through judicial (codified as law) or extrajudicial (outside the law) methods.
Mapping
reports carry a surprising amount of weight in the form of naming and shaming the countries that still condone stoning.

Historically, stoning has been used in many religious and cultural traditions as a form of community justice or capital punishment. Although there is no mention of stoning in the Quran, the practice has come to be associated with Islam and Muslim cultures. WLUML says laws that rendered stoning a legally sanctioned punishment emerged with the revival of political Islam during the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. Sharia law, the Islamic legal system, says that men will be buried to their waists and women to their breasts for the execution and that the stones thrown must not be so large as to kill the person quickly. The death is to be slow and painful. WLUML reports that women are stoned far more often than men. In Afghanistan recently, a twenty-nine-year-old woman called Amina was stoned to death for adultery. The man accused with her was lashed eighty times and freed.

When a woman has been sentenced to be stoned to death, the joint campaign puts out an action call. Women and men around the world respond with letters to the judiciary or government official sent by e-mail and fax. WLUML claims that public pressure
has decreased the number of executions and that several punishments have been cancelled or postponed after their calls for action are made public. However, in places like Afghanistan, the sentence is usually carried out without judicial authority and therefore escapes the protests that these women are prepared to stage.

WLUML says stoning poses a serious threat to both women and men living in Muslim societies today. Sexual relationships outside marriage, along with same-sex relations, are criminalized in most codified interpretations of sharia law. Any sexual relationship outside a legal marriage is considered a crime punishable by a hundred lashes if the accused is unmarried and death by stoning if married.

~

Whether as activist reformers or public policy–makers, women have learned that the quickest way to establish their own space is by running for parliament and occupying the same space as men. Afghan member of parliament Fawzia Koofi, who plans to run for the presidency in the next election, says, “There’s pride in being a member of parliament; there’s a sense of success. Initially in Afghanistan there was a lot of resistance from men because our arguments were asking for changes in the law. The men tried to stop us by cutting the microphone when one of us was talking in the parliament. They don’t do that anymore. We’re strong. We won’t go back or give up. It’s time for them to give up.”

Farida Shaheed says there are plenty of encouraging changes in Pakistan too, such as more young professional women making strides in the workplace and more girls getting an education. “On the other hand, a great conservativism is permeating Pakistani
society. We need to be vigilant, make sure we are going forward, not moving backward, where everything is determined by superstition and what someone else says.” Still, she thinks women have come a long way from feeling their place has been ordained, that they are stuck with their lot in life and simply have to live with it. “Women need to come together so they can be each other’s supporters and fight for equality rights. What we discovered in Pakistan is the fewer women who enjoy their rights, the faster the state can take those rights away from you. And it can happen very quickly.”

~

One can’t help wondering what it is that stops men from embracing changes that would improve the economy and stop conflict. The thing is, people become habituated to what they have, and having a woman who takes care of you, a woman you can control, a woman who gets nothing in return, feels normal and essential to men who have never known a different life. They are perplexed by the criticism and afraid of what change will do. Some men truly cannot picture that their lives will be better if they treat their daughters, sisters, mothers and wives as fully human. Establishing rights has historically been a long, slow and sometimes confusing process.

Joanna Kerr shares an interesting interpretation about the way her own male colleagues in South Africa and elsewhere, who are mostly human rights champions, view the changes in attitudes toward women and girls. “They tell me, ‘It’s so in our face, in our private space, because we all have mothers or sisters or wives or girlfriends and the kind of relationships that are being transformed
through gender equality come up against our histories, our hearts and minds. It gets inside our skin in such a way, it creates discomfort.’ ” She says the struggle for women’s rights is not the same as the struggle to end racism, or even the fight for gay rights, because somehow gender equality feels different. “All of us have ideas about how women and men and girls and boys should behave. And gender is the most significant identifier of how individuals interact with each other. If you have never met someone before and you didn’t quite know whether the person was a male or a female that you were speaking to, you feel uncomfortable because you don’t know what social rules to apply. Whereas when we don’t know their nationality, their ethnicity, their social class, we still know how to interact. But gender, the rules of gender, are so deeply, deeply imbued and embedded in all of us that when we start changing the rules we don’t quite know how to behave.”

It is a recognizable dilemma. But one that society needs to come to terms with. There are consequences for not taking women seriously, as Gloria Steinem says: “If you leave inequality in the home, you’ve left the model for racism and class there as well. You can directly measure the degree of democracy in society by the degree of democracy in the home. You can predict the degree of violence in the street or foreign policy by the amount in the home because everything is normalized in the home.”

History is on the side of women’s empowerment, which is one of the great moral imperatives of our time. And now that the international economists have pointed to enhancing women’s rights as the ticket to financial heaven, institutional change is likely to speed up. Certainly young women—teenagers and twenty-somethings—are poised to make their demands known and to take action if they aren’t met.

One hundred and sixty young girls in Kenya are knocking on the door of change and are about to make history by suing their government for failing to protect them from being raped. Young women like Asmaa Mahfouz in Egypt are suggesting that the men join the movement to emancipate women, and so is Mazn Hussan.

In Afghanistan, Noorjahan Akbar and Anita Haidary have launched the most powerful change agent that Afghan women have ever known with their organization Young Women for Change. They have also invited men to join the movement. Gloria Steinem thinks their stories are the art of the possible. She says, “Women are certainly the way forward. Men are also the way forward. Progress lies in the direction we haven’t been.” If Akbar’s and Haidary’s plan to emancipate the women and girls of Afghanistan and throw off the restrictive aspects of old customs takes flight, they could alter the future for 15 million people.