Makoni and Taking Action

I think women in America often get blinded to some of the higher degrees of inequality facing women around the world. Women are here in the states fighting for equal workplace opportunities, equal educational opportunities, and just equal respect in general. However, the global struggle for women’s rights is one that has to overcome situations far worse than we are facing here. One of the blog posts on the Clio website caught my eye in how different the severities of sexist treatment are globally. The July 2008 post about a woman from Zimbabwe, Betty Makoni, was the most memorable of the five or so posts that I read. In her country, they haven’t even had the chance to fight for women’s higher education. From the Penguin Atlas, we saw on page 81 that fewer than 75% of girls in Zimbabwe who start primary education complete it. They struggle daily to survive without getting raped, tortured, or hurt by men in authority. I can’t imagine a life where as a young girl I wasn’t safe from sexual violence at my elementary school. As women, we should be concerned with the well being of our entire gender, not just the issues that directly affect our daily lives. I realize that problems with sexual violence are prevalent here in the States as well as abroad. However, I think it is safe to say that there is a very different focus of the daily feminist struggle from country to country. As Offen states in the title of this particular blog post, we can inspire people by not only seeing this obvious problem, but by taking action.