The War on Women

This morning I was listening to Morning Edition on NPR and Mona Eltahawy was discussing her provocative piece in the current issue of Foreign Policy, "Why Do They Hate Us?" "They" being the Arab world and "Us" being women. Go read it. On the Morning Edition segment she answers her question with the fact that women are the vectors of culture and religion. "Our wombs are the future. And if you don't control the future by controlling women's bodies, you've lost control generally." Many of these countries are U.S. allies. C.J. Cregg, press secretary extraordinaire (played by the fabulous Allison Janney) exemplifies the anger we should all be feeling in these two clips from The West Wing. 

The first clip is from the episode "Enemies Foreign and Domestic" and references a real event that occurred on March 11, 2002.

And this clip is from the episode "The Women of Qumar." Qumar is a fictional oil-rich Middle East state and U.S. ally. The United States has just renewed its air base in the country by selling them an arms package.  

What's happening to women in the Arab world is horrific, but even in America, as the latest in the culture wars shows, women--vis-a-vis their bodies--are under attack. Margaret Sanger stated, "No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her own body." It should also be obvious as Steven Conn says that "Free societies allow their citizens to make their own reproductive decisions; repressive ones restrict them." 

"Women hold up half the sky" is a Chinese proverb behind the title of Pulitzer Prize winners Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn's book Half the Sky. This book explores how educating and empowering women, especially in the developing world, is not only a moral issue but an economic and political issue for our global good. I am placing this book on hold at my library to better learn about the oppression women face worldwide and what can be done about it. 

 And because I just saw V for Vendetta last night at Brewvies, I will part with this quote by Gloria Steinem: 

"This is no simple reform. It really is a revolution. Sex and race because they are easy and visible differences have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups and into the cheap labor on which this system still depends. We are talking about a society in which there will be no roles other than those chosen or those earned. We are really talking about humanism."