Global Feminism

Out of all the texts that we've had to read so far I found The Penguin Atlas of Women in the World by Joni Seager one of the most interesting and helpful books in understanding women's issues around the world. Unlike other books we've read thus far, The Penguin Atlas gives more stats and figures about various aspects of women's lives on an international level. Also, with being a visual learner, this book helped me to see and understand more about the issues we are learning about. Plus the broader prospective on all women (not just American women) was interesting to see.

After the introduction Seager starts the book off with a color coded map of the world according to which countries have signed and ratified, just signed, or haven't signed the CEDAW (UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women). According to the map all countries around the world (with the exception of Iran, Sudan, and Somalia) have signed the CEDAW, pretty much all of them have ratified it as well except for one, the U.S has (as of yet) to ratify it. I'm not going to lie, I was shocked by that. During high school history class I had heard about the progress of the Women's Movement in the U.S, and thought that comparatively women in this country were further down the path to equality than those in other countries. Or, that is at least what I thought was the case in high school. The books colorfully illustrated pages disbanded my formerly conceived notions about women in the modern world, and it allowed me to see the realities of their situation.

One last thing that stuck out to me in the book was that it mentioned the circumstances of other minorities, not just women. For example there was a section on global homosexuality that also shook my rudimentary knowledge to the core. For a long time now I had been dreaming of potentially moving to Europe, with my ideal destination being France. All because I had the notion that Europe was a more accepting place in terms of homosexuality then anywhere in North America. Then, to see the statistics, and to see that Canada was more far more accepting and progressive in terms of homosexuality than some of the European Union was (including France) left me dumb founded. Just goes to show what studying this book has done for me, and probably for many others as well.

Women in the World- War and Rape

I usually make every effort to stay away from titles that have the words atlas and maps in them - I tend to have a horrible sense of direction and an inability to read maps well. However, “The Penguin Atlas of Women in the World” is a true exception. The book is captivating and as I flipped through the pages, I was enthralled with the colorful maps, graphs, and how visually friendly the book is. I was also impressed with the depth of subjects covered, from lesbian rights, murder, abortion, gender preference and breast cancer to fieldwork, migration, plastic surgery and women in the government and military. The book has fascinating statistics and unique topics that I don’t often think about. The atlas points out the continued discrepancy between men and women in countries throughout the world in every aspect of social, economic, and political life; it left a powerful impression on me. I particularly liked the two World Tables in Part 8 on Demography and Health and School, Work and Power on page 108. They were straightforward in understanding the countries who respect women and where they fare better in life.

An area that greatly disturbed me was the section regarding women and rape in war zones on page 101. Seager points out that in Iraq, women continue to be kidnapped, raped and tortured by gangs and religious extremists. Russia and India were highlighted as well. When I viewed women in the military on page 103, between 16%-23% of the women in Russia are active in armed services. Also, women in India are required to serve their countries and are currently in active duty in the armed forces. In these countries, women are fighting and serving their country but continue to be abused and raped. The atlas also states that, “many women serving in the US military in Iraq have been raped by their fellow soldiers. In 2006, 2,947 within-military sexual assaults were reported, and 2,688 in 2007.” These statistics are shocking!

Rape, sexual assault, and harassment are nothing new in the military, but today, more and more women serve in the military. The military is still a “man’s world” and woman are faced with resentment and blame from other soldiers if they report the abuse. Any soldier who reports sexual assaults in the military is seen as betraying the people she serves with, not the other way around. Women shouldn’t have to think about protecting themselves against the people they work with. They feel helpless and depressed because the very people who are supposed to look after them are the ones who are abusing them. They are not the enemy. They are let down from their own country. Many don’t know who to turn to and end up returning home emotionally unable to relate to their families and friends. They lose self-respect and feel they have lost control of their lives. Some are prone to self-destruction while others end up having panic attacks and can’t cope with everyday life. They often turn to drugs or alcohol for escape and others turn to suicide.

The Penguin Atlas of Women in the World

The Penguin Atlas of Women in the World gave a really strong picture of women, feminism, and gender on a global level. It was a refreshing change of pace but also quite overwhelming. Its one thing to look at the US and search through my own experience but to look at these issues on the global scale is eye opening.

I was in the group focused on power. One thing in particular that grabbed my attention was the section on crisis zones. Widespread rape of women by soldiers during times of armed conflict included Russia, South Africa, and India. These areas also had a high percentage of women in active armed forces, which led me to wonder if these countries put women in active duty as bodies and numbers to be killed without a second thought because these countries provide data that suggests women are valued less than men. Are they being used as expendable entities and not human beings?

I just want to know how this occurred. How did this widespread, worldwide, believed notion that women are less than men come to be? Who looked at women and men and had enough power and a highly valued opinion to compare the two and deem women less than and have a startling amount of other people agree and follow? How did we get to where we are? And more importantly why does it take so long to change people’s minds? The fact that female genital mutilation is still occurring in 2009 is disgusting and heartbreaking. The Atlas says that, “An estimated 130 million girls and women in the world have undergone genital cutting; each year, another 2 million join their ranks.”

In my opinion, this book is valuable to this class and it was a great way to gain a large amount of new knowledge about the entire world and it's attitudes and laws towards women. I know that a lot of the facts and pictures within the pages of it will stay with me and maybe my knowledge of it will find a way to be passed along. At the end of our group's discussion the only solution we could come up with was time and education. This book is a great tool for education.

Abortion is not the same thing as female infanticide. To choose to kill a child because of its sex is completely despicable. Many women abort their pregnancies because they cannot afford or risk rising the child-but they go into their abortions without knowing what the sex of their child will be. At three months, women can no longer have abortions because it’s deemed too dangerous; but at three months, women wouldn’t be able to know their babies’ respective sexes and would thus be unable to commit female infanticide.

Coming from a culture that is closely tied to, at least, one of the countries where female infanticide rates are the highest in the world, I am not really surprised about these stats or these practices. I have grown up knowing about son preferences, and while extremely grateful that my parents chose to carry me to term and raise me, have always been assaulted with messages that sons were the more valuable investment.

While I understand, but would never condone, the reasoning behind why poorer families would participate in this practice, it is the richer, more affluent families that I completely despise. Why would anyone with such vast resources stoop so low as to kill infants, let alone female infants? They do not have the excuse of not being able to care for her, nor do they have the excuse of not being able to pay the taxes or fines that are imposed by the government for having more than two children (in China’s case). They are the ones with the most power and so it should be their responsibility and duty to stop the government from passing such laws and to at least attempt to save their daughters.

Where are our priorities?

While glancing through "The Penguin Atlas of Women in the World," I found my jaw continually dropping as I read various surprising statistics and shocking facts. The section titled Body Politics particularly affected me, and left me wondering where our priorities are as a society. It was interesting to contrast the breast cancer graphs with the page on beauty. First I learned that the United States has the highest rate of breast cancer in the world, and then I turned to the beauty page to discover that Americans spent $13 billion on cosmetic procedures alone in 2006. I wondered, how can we justify spending this exorbitant amount of money on mostly superficial procedures, while people that we know and love are fighting breast cancer ever day? This is only one example of the skewed priorities in our culture though. We spend millions of dollars on cars or fancy clothes everyday while there are people living on the streets and lacking health care. For me, reading this book went behind simply highlighting women 's place in the world; it helped to remind me of problems that I see, and empowered me to want to make changes in the way I personally feed into the issues within our society. 

Women in the World: Taken-Trafficking

This past June, I was sitting in my room reading a magazine when my dad walks in looking quite serious and lays a dvd on my bed and says "You need to watch this as soon as you get a chance". Before I even looked at the dvd I was perplexed. Rarely does my dad watch movies, let alone feel the need to tell me that I really need to see them because, the romantic comedies I enjoy aren't exactly his cup of tea. I then looked at the cover and saw "I don't know who you are, but if you don't let my daughter go I will look for you, I will find you and I will kill you"-TAKEN. The back read...

"Seventeen year-old Kim is the pride and joy of her father Bryan Mills. Bryan is a retired agent who left the Secret Service to be near Kim in California. Kim lives with her mother Lenore and her wealthy stepfather Stuart. Kim manages to convince her reluctant father to allow her to travel to Paris with her friend Amanda. When the girls arrive in Paris they share a cab with a stranger named Peter, and Amanda lets it slip that they are alone in Paris. Using this information an Albanese gang of human traffickers kidnaps the girls. Kim barely has time to call her father and give him information. Her father gets to speak briefly to one of the kidnappers and he promises to kill the kidnappers if they do not let his daughter go free. The kidnapper wishes him "good luck," so Bryan Mills travels to Paris to search for his daughter and her friend"

I watched it the next morning and was blown away by the plot, acting and ending especially. I had been familiar with the Global Sex Trafficking and what an epidemic it's become. I've even watched a documentary on it a year ago. But there was something that intrigued me more by this film. I think it was how disgustingly easy the process of capturing and enslaving young women was.

Women in the Worlds' section on Global Sex Trafficking caught my interest the most (partly because of my progressed interest after seeing the movie). I specifically looked at France, seeing it listed as a destination country and then looked at Russia which is both a source and destination. Interestingly enough, Europe is listed as having the highest prosecutions and convictions. The entire process is both gut wrenching and depressing. The saddest part to me was to skim through the book and see how well these countries have been and are doing in so many other areas and then this topic arrives. That is both shocking and terrifying because that means the actions are that much easier to hide and there for easier to get away with.

FGM in Egypt

When looking through the penguin atlas, what was the most surprising thing to me was the extraordinarily high level of female genital mutilation that takes place in Egypt. According to the atlas, FGM in Egypt happens to over 90% of girls under the age of 14. An article I found on Newscientist said that although FGM is illegal by ministerial decree, the practice continues to be condoned by religious leaders and carried out by parents who do not want their daughters to be disadvantaged. Looking at an informational article through religioustolerance.org, I learned that it is starting to become a controversial topic in Egypt right now. The practice of FGM is a deeply engrained cultural tradition that is defended through religion, but has little to do with religion, and while there are a growing number of people resisting this practice, the opposition is taking it as an attack on Islam itself. Neighboring Islamic countries do not practice FGM as much as Egypt,
To my mind, Egypt’s national development would indicate that such practice would not take place, at least with such prevalence. FGM is a very old tradition in some parts of the world, but I have always associated it with less developed countries where the women and the people in general, have less education and less options. Egypt is not one of these places, and yet when flipping through the penguin atlas, the treatment of women in that country is undeniable poor.