This
email forwarded to me seems to be representative of this sudden and growing
concern for women in Afghanistan. However,
the status of women in Afghanistan and everywhere across the world has been a
concern of feminist and women’s movements across the nation for about a
century. Nor is it the first time
the world has looked at the status of women in the world.
The U.N. made the mid-70s to the mid-80’s the decade of women.
But as with many social justice movements, national and international
attention comes and goes in waves. While
I am glad to see women’s issues being brought to the forefront of an
international concern in a way that is more mainstream, I have my concerns
One of the
issues that keeps resurfacing in this war is the role of women within the
Taliban. Sometimes the media
coverage of women in the Taliban makes me wonder if the media and our government
are going to try and turn this into a war about the status of women in Islamic
and Arabic societies. This concerns me because we are investigating the status of
women from a very biased standpoint. I
do not disagree that it is wrong for any woman to be punished for what she
wears, for going out alone, for driving. I
also do not think a man should be punished for having not having a beard or for
violating any laws and customs that dictate what men wear and do.
However, I really question whether we should “Americanize” them.
I also question how we expect to go in with guns blazing and change
something that is not just laws of the state, but laws (perceived or real) of
the religion and customs that people have grown up in?
Telling people that the customs they have been raised with are wrong and
that they need to change because the U.S. has been bombed and has decided as
revenge for that bombing we are going to take down the Taliban regime will not
inevitably improve the lives of women.
In fact it is
incredibly egotistical and false to think that the act of covering (as opposed
to the consequences) has any more of a negative effect on women than what our
culture expects women to look like.
In the US. media culture (what I
would argue is the new opium for the masses) women are encouraged to wear as
little as possible and to alter their bodies to fit a stereotype, the stereotype
of some male vision of what beauty should be.
And yes female genital mutilation, being killed because your husband dies
or you do not meet up to your in-laws’ expectations
are heinous acts, but violence in the home and violence against women by
society is not unique to Arabic cultures or Islamic fundamentalists religions.
In examining women’s and feminist movements throughout the world we see
that the struggles women face have a similar thread to them.
The oppression, objectification and control and their ability to express
themselves seems to exist in every culture, the differences occur the expression
and the punishment for deviating from the cultural dictates .
Specifically, Amrita Basu editor of a book on women’s movements in
different parts of the world identifies some of the universal women’s issues:
legal and political rights, violence against women, reproductive choice
(this includes birth control/abortion and issues in governmental population
control), sexual freedom, employment opportunities and discrimination, and
women’s political participation and presentation.
These
issues are real and relevant everywhere and the U.S. is no exception. To just put it in perspective, two statistics (of the
thousands out there) demonstrate this point:
In the U.S. it is estimated that a woman is raped every 1.3 minutes and
it is estimated that every 15 seconds a woman in the U.S. is battered.
Violence against women occurs in the U.S.
These are statistics regarding
intimate violence and they do not even begin to address the way our cultural
norms about beauty and what “women” should be and look like does to the
physical and mental state of girls and women.
Yes, in the U.S. we do not laws that dictate how a woman can dress, and
the U.S. does occasionally do things to condemn violence against women, but what
it does as a nation is little and inconsistent. 1994 marked the first time that the Federal government passed
an act to combat Violence Against Women, and despite the fact that the problem
continues, none of the attempts to re-fund and improve VAWA have passed.
The U.S. also has not passed an Equal Rights Amendment, an amendment that
would declare once and for all that we believe women are people and citizens
with the same rights and responsibilities under the law.
In fact, one of the major political parties took the Equal Rights
Amendment off of their platform. We
are even starting to address sexual harassment.
However, if there is anything our own experience should teach us, it is
that changing cultural norms is difficult.
So
it makes me leery to hear U.S. News media criticizing the status of women in
Afghanistan. I
truly hope they aren’t implying that if Afghanistan and female members of
traditional or fundamental Islam were to remove their covering and stop walking
behind their men and praying on different floors of a mosque that this would
somehow free them of oppression. It
scares me to think that the media and political leaders may be holding the U.S.
and the status of women in our society as some kind of goal for the women in an
oppressive Afghanistan regime, because while I will grant you that I would much
rather be an Atheist United States woman, the status of women in our society is
by no means the ideal or the model that should be used for women all across the
world.
This
said, I hope that cultural relativism will not make us shy away from talking
about the status of women in other countries.
My wildest dream for a possible positive to result from the tragedy of
war is that there will be a resurgence of women’s movements throughout this
and other countries and that it will allow women from many different countries
to connect and create dramatic social change over the similarities of their
collective oppressions.
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