Saturday Morning Reads

Good Morning!

NPR is showcasing a number of articles on the Arab Women’s movements that have resulted from the Jasmine Revolution.  These studies include portraits of women that are fighting backlashes as well as seeking more input to their nation’s governance.  Arab women are planning to flex their new found muscles come March 8 and International Women’s day.

Images of women marching alongside men in countries like Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain and Jordan led to predictions that women’s rights would also make huge strides forward.

She had been optimistic initially, when she celebrated President Hosni Mubarak’s resignation in February. She had spent days sitting in Cairo’s Tahrir Square alongside thousands of others. She said she found the sight of men and women protesting together an inspiration.

“I think the youth that were in Tahrir … people my age or people that were demonstrators or whatever, were OK with the concept of men and women having equal rights,” said Kamel.

“In the months that followed, the feminist honeymoon was lost,” she said.

In the six months since Mubarak was ousted, the only woman who has joined Egypt’s transitional government is a holdover from the old regime. Women are running in the upcoming presidential election, though none is expected to be a serious contender. Most telling, said Kamel, was that the women who took part in the protests in Tahrir have been increasingly painted as vagrant or “loose” women in the Egyptian press.

“They went from being heroes to being vilified,” said Kamel. A few months after the Tahrir Square protests, women hoped to assert their newly found voices in a demonstration on International Women’s Day, March 8.

Though more than 1,000 people joined a Facebook group for the event, only a few hundred ended up marching. They were quickly surrounded and harassed by men led by a sheik from Al Azhar University.

“People just gathered, each woman was standing there — she had like five men around her, and she was trying to argue. It got physically abusive after a while. The protests didn’t last for even an hour,” said Kamel.

Saudi women have been getting mixed signals from a government that is expanding their rights and holding them back at the same time.  This link also comes from the NPR series on Women and the Arab Spring.

The 28-year-old businesswoman and other Saudi women interviewed for this story say they are tired of waiting for rights most other women around the world take for granted.

The mixed signals especially bother them. In a historic speech in September, Abdullah pledged to add women to his all-male advisory council and allow them to take part in the next municipal elections. Two days later, a court in the port city of Jeddah sentenced a young mother to 10 lashes for driving a car.

The king later set the sentence aside. Even so, analysts say it was an unusually harsh punishment for violating a female-driving ban that isn’t enshrined in law.

Ruba, a 21-year-old university student, calls the sentence shameful. She believes it was a backlash against the decision to offer women political rights. Ruba, like several women in this story, asked that only her first name be used to protect her family.

“Of course, it felt like a game of tug-of-war between the liberals and the conservatives,” she says. “When the liberals pulled harder and won, the conservatives pulled even harder.

“So it just felt like women were that rope between the two parties.”

Myanmar is home to one of the most famous Asian woman political leader to have received the Nobel Prize for Peace. An Suu Kyi may be much freer than she has been in previous years but Myanmar’s women continue to suffer.  Forced marriage is up 70%  and the interesting thing is the brides are being shipped off to China.  Rather interesting that a country that has produced a bumper crop of male babies as a result of its population control policies now has to import/kidnap women from other countries.

The women from Myanmar, some arriving as young as 14, went to China with dreams of better-paid jobs that would help lift their families out of poverty.

Instead, upon arrival they are forced to marry. The men, often poor farmers, find Chinese brides hard to come by because cultural preference and a one-child policy enforced since 1978 have led to a higher ratio of men versus women.

The women recount being drugged by traffickers and brokers – distant relatives, friends of friends, neighbours and fellow villagers – and waking up to find they’d been sold as brides. They tell of being paraded in marketplaces, locked up and forced to get pregnant.

“The trafficking of women and girls for forced marriage is quite a serious problem and trends over the last couple of years indicate that it is increasing,” said David Brickey Bloomer, child protection director at Save the Children in Myanmar, adding at least a quarter of victims are under 18.

Forced marriages made up 70 percent of Myanmar’s trafficking cases last year, UNIAP, the United Nations’ inter-agency project on human trafficking, said.

Myanmar authorities recorded 122 cases of forced marriage in 2010, Bloomer told TrustLaw, while UNIAP-supported initiative the Strategic Information Response Network (SIREN) put the 2009 figure at 85.

World Vision, the only other aid agency besides Save the Children which works on anti-trafficking in Myanmar, said 51 women were trafficked this way in the first seven months of 2011 alone. The average price of a Myanmar bride is $5,000, it said.

So, all’s not so well in the US for women as we all know.  Rock Center–the new News Magazine on NBC with Brian Williams–had a compelling story on how North Carolina frequently forcibly sterilized many young girls and women.  Black women were most impacted.  Their stories are heartbreaking.  You can watch the segment at the link.

Elaine Riddick was 13 years old when she got pregnant after being raped by a neighbor in Winfall, N.C., in 1967.  The state ordered that immediately after giving birth, she should be sterilized.  Doctors cut and tied off her fallopian tubes.

“I have to carry these scars with me.  I have to live with this for the rest of my life,” she said.

Riddick was never told what was happening.  “Got to the hospital and they put me in a room and that’s all I remember, that’s all I remember,” she said.  “When I woke up, I woke up with bandages on my stomach.”

Riddick’s records reveal that a five-person state eugenics board in Raleigh had approved a recommendation that she be sterilized. The records label Riddick as “feebleminded” and “promiscuous.” They said her schoolwork was poor and that she “does not get along well with others.”

“I was raped by a perpetrator [who was never charged] and then I was raped by the state of North Carolina.  They took something from me both times,” she said.  “The state of North Carolina, they took something so dearly from me, something that was God given.”

It wouldn’t be until Riddick was 19, married and wanting more children, that she’d learn she was incapable of having any more babies. A doctor in New York where she was living at the time told her that she’d been sterilized.

“Butchered.  The doctor used that word…  I didn’t understand what she meant when she said I had been butchered,” Riddick said.

North Carolina was one of 31 states to have a government run eugenics program.  By the 1960s, tens of thousands of Americans were sterilized as a result of these programs.

This is a shameful period in the state’s history.  It’s something that should never happen but did.

Project Social Art has started a series aimed at shaming men who cat call women on streets.

Last Saturday, we were on our way back from a friend’s birthday celebration when a guy began to harass Marie on the street. He was a young, white male who seemed to be somewhat intoxicated or high. We brushed off his proposition to which he responded with, “Oh, come on. Please! I will pay you.” There he was, blatantly offering to purchase Marie’s body in exchange for money.

Later than night, when Anna was on the subway with her sister, she experienced yet more harassment on a sexual level. A group of about eight Hasidic Jews were staring at Anna and Melania through the glass window in between cars. At first, the ladies thought this was quite funny because it was very entertaining to see eight men trying to squeeze their heads into the window to all get a better look. Nevertheless, the situation turned ugly when one of the men started making oral sex gestures and his friend started gesticulating money offers. Soon, Anna realized they were trying to offer her money in return for sexual services. She looked at Melania who was eating a sandwich at the time and said, “Wrap up that sandwich. We are going into that car.” Melania was hesitant, but Anna told her that they had to do this for all the other women out there, “We have to show these men that they cannot do things like this.”

The Riot has developed a Cat Caller form to query the harasser.  Here’s an example of the ‘survey’ to hand your obnoxious unwanted harrasser.

So, maybe we could just need to show up at Republican Presidential Rallies and just start handing them out to the candidates.

I’m turning into a bit of an admirer of Thomas Edsell.  This is a something he just wrote for the Atlantic and it’s pretty humorous.  “Is God Really Telling Rick Perry to Run for President?”  The article argues that maybe “God” really isn’t very fond of Rick Perry whose state is suffering through a drought of Biblical proportions and whose performance at debates is the stuff comics dream of.  Oh, and then there are all those brush fires.

Earlier in the year, at a May fundraiser in Longview, Texas, Perry told a group of businessmen and women, “At 27 years old, I knew that I had been called to the ministry. I’ve just always been really stunned by how big a pulpit I was gonna have. I still am. I truly believe with all my heart that God has put me in this place at this time to do his will.”

If you accept the idea that individuals can interpret God’s views toward their political ambitions, the available evidence suggests that Perry got it all wrong. From the word go, the signals have been of Biblical proportion — but they are nearly all downright negative. Throughout the summer months, as Perry first considered and then decided to run for the White House, Texas turned into a hellhole. For example: this evocative map of the country produced by the U.S. Drought Monitor lends itself to the interpretation that a terrible punishment has been inflicted on the state Perry was brought up in and which he now governs.

I actually think it’s Mother Earth teaming up with Mother Nature to send him a really big message.

Okay, so that’s a little this and that for a Saturday morning.  What’s on your writing and blogging list this morning?