Ascent of Women (7 page)

As the researcher Brigitte Hlbmayr points out in
Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust
, “Unlike the cases in Rwanda and former Yugoslavia where rape was used as a strategy of war, sexualized violence was not an inherent part of the genocidal process during the Holocaust. Instead it was part of the continuum of violence that resulted from genocide. Rape was not an instrument of genocide, but was the byproduct of intentional annihilation.”

Like the judges at Nuremburg, film directors and publishers
have hesitated to expose the brutal truth about rape. But that too is changing. Lynn Nottage was awarded the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play, aptly titled
Ruined
, which chronicles the plight of women in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Pulitzer citation hailed
Ruined
as “a searing drama set in chaotic Congo that compels audiences to face the horror of wartime rape and brutality while still finding affirmation of life and hope amid hopelessness.” The play tells the story of Mama Nadi, the proprietor of a local establishment that acts both as a shelter for women who’ve been damaged or “ruined” by the civil war and a bar/brothel for the nationalist and rebel soldiers who keep it raging on. Always the shrewd businesswoman, Nadi sides neither with the women she shelters nor with her militant patrons until the war outside closes in and there are choices to make and truths to face.

Two years later, a film called
Incendies
(
Scorched
) became another example of the new truth-telling. Adapted from a play by Wajdi Mouawad, a Lebanese-Canadian writer, and directed by the Quebec filmmaker Denis Villeneuve, it was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2011, even though it takes the audience where few have dared to go before with a story in which twins fulfil their mother’s dying wish. They travel to the Middle East, where they discover they were born of rape by the man who ran the prison where their mother was incarcerated. That man turns out to be their brother as well as their father. It is a searing and courageous tale of the humiliation of rape, the will to survive and the scorched-earth patterns of rapists.

Whether committed inside or outside a war zone, rape punishes women twice. First they suffer the physical abuse and then the never-ending memory and shame, which threaten and retreat like
tidal surges throughout the rest of their lives. Justice can only come from acknowledgement and the conviction of the perpetrator.

That’s what the girls in Kenya are counting on. And when they stand in the dock in a Nairobi court in late 2012, magistrates from around the world will be buffeted by the hot winds of change that have blown from Africa.

TWO

Scriptured Oppression

Religion has been misused politically not only in Afghanistan but in every other part of the world.

— D
R
. S
IMA
S
AMAR
,
chair of the Afghanistan
Independent Human Rights Commission

D
o you remember at what point in your life you realized that something was amiss, and that society played a huge, mostly negative, role in reinforcing gender bias? I remember the late, great Norma Scarborough, founder of the Canadian Abortion Rights Action League, telling a story about the exact moment when she realized there was an unfair playing field for women. There was a contest in her community—a spelling bee, if I recall correctly. Norma was nine years old, smart as a whip and something of a tomboy. She won the contest and then watched the contest organizer switch the prizes for first and second places so that she would get the doll carriage and the boy who came second would get the bike. “I wanted the bike,” she’d roar every time she told the story, to the delighted recognition of her audience. That was the event that introduced her to the thorny topic of sexual equality.

I experienced a similar aha moment. I was ten or eleven years old, picking through the mail scattered on my mother’s kitchen table. Christmas was just around the corner, so most of the
envelopes contained holiday greeting cards. I read each one, often having to decipher the grownup handwriting conveying Christmas wishes. In some cases, there was a family photo tucked into the card; in others, the face of the card itself featured the family. It was fun to see kids I knew, all dressed up and grinning for the ubiquitous family portrait. But about halfway through the pile, I came across a card that stopped me. What was going on here? In the photo on the front of the card, the father was sitting in a big comfortable armchair, leaning back, holding a pipe in one hand and looking totally relaxed and self-satisfied. The mother was sitting on the edge of the sofa across from him, leaning forward, as though she was ready for flight. She was flanked by young boys in the same pose. Another boy, standing behind the sofa, was leaning forward too. All of them were staring at the man in the easy chair as though he was some sort of deity: the adoring family gazing at the patriarch. It shouted male power and female subservience, the father’s benevolence, the mother’s angelic devotion. To be fair, it was the style in the 1950s to create family portraits in
Father Knows Best
fashion.

The Christmas card was supposed to express feelings of peace on earth. It didn’t for me. Instead it raised a red flag that has being flying in my consciousness ever since. I still have that card tucked away with my late mother’s keepsakes. I look at it from time to time just to remind myself about where women have been and how much further we have to go. As Agnes Macphail, the first woman to be elected to the Canadian House of Commons, declared in parliament on February 26, 1925, “I don’t want to be the angel of any home. I want for myself what I want for other women—absolute equality. After that is secured, then men and women can take turns at being angels.”

To “love, honour and obey” was the mantra for most North American women at the time that Christmas photo was taken. Historically women had to accept various religiously or culturally sanctioned acts all over the world—marital rape, female genital mutilation, foot binding, honour killing, polygamy and a dozen other miseries that defined their status. Women everywhere existed in financial purdah, and when their husbands died or otherwise abandoned them, they realized they had no right to the man’s income. Even today, a conservative estimate suggests 30 percent of the women who dwell on this earth are subjected to daily violence, are forbidden to work or leave their homes without a husband, brother or son to escort them, or go to school or wear what they want to wear or dance the way they want to dance or speak up the way they want to speak up. Half of the population in places like Pakistan, Congo, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia—and numerous other countries—are still subjected to state-sanctioned, culturally condoned misogyny.

How did women become second-class citizens in the first place? Why is it that the international community still excuses the abuse of women and denies them equality rights in the name of culture and religion? And how is it that women continue to step boldly forward in one instance and slide two steps backward in the next?

Many fine minds have turned to the question, particularly during the second wave of feminism, picking up on the work of thinkers such as Simone de Beauvoir, who shed light on the dark roots of women’s presumed inferiority.

The theory that biology is destiny belongs to Beauvoir and comes from the blockbuster book she wrote in 1949,
The Second Sex
. Her meticulously researched argument suggests that men fundamentally oppress women by characterizing them as “the
other.” Man sees himself as the subject of life and woman as the object: he’s essential, she’s not. Women’s inferiority is taken for granted. Although Beauvoir writes that biology is not enough in itself to explain how women became “the other,” it does account for the fact that women and men have never shared the world in terms of equality. She accuses men of creating a false aura of sanctity around women as an excuse to organize society without them, preserving them in the domestic sphere. And she writes that the religions invented by men reflect this wish for domination.

Although they were rarely included in the mid-twentieth-century discussions about women’s oppression, Middle Eastern women were also contributing to the debate. At about the same time as Beauvoir published
The Second Sex
, Doria Shafiq was challenging the legal, social and cultural barriers for women in Egypt. A feminist, poet and political activist, Shafiq called for a woman’s right to vote and to run for political office when she founded the Daughters of the Nile Union in 1948. When she was refused a job at Cairo University because she was a woman, she became editor of
The New Women’s Magazine
, which gave her a platform for the reforms she wanted for women. She led a paramilitary force of Egyptian women to resist the British at the Suez Canal and called for a boycott of Barclay’s Bank when it refused to let women open bank accounts. But Egypt in the 1950s was no place for gender reform. In 1957, Shafiq was placed under house arrest by President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s regime. For eighteen years she was forbidden to leave her home; her magazines were closed, her name was banned from the media and her Egyptian writings were destroyed. In 1975, she committed suicide. By then there was hardly a trace left of the work she’d done. Women in Egypt are trying to resurrect her story today.

Betty Friedan created a stir in 1963 when she published
The Feminine Mystique
, referring to the malaise women in America suffered as “the problem that has no name.” Rather than being arrested as Shafiq was, Friedan became a household name when she exploded the myth of domestic bliss. Her words were like balm to millions of frustrated women who’d been told they could find happiness and fulfilment vicariously through their husbands and children.

Germaine Greer, the Australian scholar and journalist, followed in 1970 with
The Female Eunuch
, a book that called on women to reject their traditional roles in the home and break the mould that society had imposed on them, to question traditional authority figures such as doctors, psychiatrists and the clergy and to explore their own sexuality.

The triumvirate of blockbusters from Beauvoir, Friedan and Greer led the way for women such as the American history professor Gerda Lerner. In her 1986 book
The Creation of Patriarchy
, Lerner argued that in the Neolithic period women were valued as a resource because they could have children to add to the workforce and help produce food surpluses. But the status was short lived; as she points out, by the second millennium BCE, in Mesopotamian societies, the daughters of the poor were being sold into marriage or into prostitution to advance the economic interest of the family.

I asked the Canadian feminist writer Michele Landsberg, whose 2011 book
Writing the Revolution
chronicles the history of change for women in Canada, what she thought about how women became oppressed in the first place. “All feminists brood from time to time about why it is that men in every nation, in every culture, at every time in human history—with very few exceptions—have
sought to dominate and control women,” she said, “especially seeking to dictate rules about our bodies, sex and reproduction. Figures like the Venus of Willendorf suggest that prehistoric people must have been in awe of female reproductive power. Creating life must have seemed a great and even fearsome mystery. It strikes me that men invented religion in order to meet and overmatch women’s awesome powers. All religions, after all, have at their core the will to control and dominate women’s sexuality and reproduction while elevating men’s dominion over women.”

Indeed, a deity invariably played a role in the status of women. At times the consequences in the lives of women have been deadly.

~

On March 11, 2002, a fire broke out at a girls’ boarding school in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. The blaze was reported to have started on the top floor at Makkah Intermediate School No. 31 at about eight in the morning. Firefighters said it was caused by “an unattended cigarette.” There were eight hundred girls registered at the school, most of them from Saudi Arabia, but also international students from Egypt, Chad, Guinea, Niger and Nigeria. The school was overcrowded, and it didn’t have required safety features and equipment such as emergency exits, fire extinguishers and alarms. The flames spread quickly and the school filled with smoke. The girls, most of them still in their rooms getting ready for breakfast and morning classes, raced to the exits, but the guards posted there refused to unlock the gates so that they could escape. Why? In their haste to leave the burning building the girls had not dressed properly—they were not wearing head scarves—and their male relatives were not there to receive them on the street. The
girls were screaming to be let out, and passersby stopped to help as the school turned into an inferno.

Then the Mutawa’een, or religious police—officially known as the Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice—turned up and beat back the crowd, reminding them that the girls would be committing a sin if they came out of the school without covering their heads. According to eyewitness accounts, they told the incredulous crowd, which now included parents of some of the girls, that they (the religious police) did not want physical contact to take place between the girls and the firefighters for fear of sexual enticement. Some reporters claimed that the few girls who got out were pushed back into the burning building by the guards and the Mutawa’een. When the firefighters rushed inside to rescue the girls, they were also admonished by the religious police.

In its report, Human Rights Watch quoted one of the firefighters, who said, “Whenever the girls got out through the main gate, these people forced them to return via another. Instead of extending a helping hand for the rescue work, they were using their hands to beat us.”