I am a woman and I am writing from India. So, what is special about that, you may ask.
Save the girl child of India
The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN-DESA), has now officially declared that India is the most dangerous place for a girl child to be.
India is the country that gave the world the second woman prime minister (Indira Gandhi in 1966). India has sent its women to space; its women have marked their places in sports, the corporate world, Hollywood and just about everywhere else, too.
But I will not bore you with statistics and data that you can check out on your own here, here and here. The point of my post is to bring to light the reasons behind this statement. First, there are some sociocultural pieces I would like to highlight.
- In India, a girl is ‘married off’ and sent away to live with her husband and in-laws. It is called the joint-family system (couple, children, husband’s parents, sometimes even the husband’s brother’s family in some cases) opposed to the nuclear family system Read more…
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This week, we kick off in New York. Allison Charleston writes on Monday about the value of giving back to the community – something that can be so hard to do while juggling children. Now, this mom is ready to start volunteering again.
On Tuesday, we’re off to Canada, where Multitasking Mumma talks about one of the more expensive aspects of raising children: daycare expenses. Finding someone who you trust to take care of your child can be hard, even more so when you get the bill!
On Tuesday evening, we will have a Human Rights post from Third Eye Mom, who learned about the plight of women in Guatemala on International Womens Day.
We stay in Canada on Wednesday, to hear from Kirsten Doyle. Kirsten tells us about her experiences growing up as an adopted child, and what it was like to meet her birth parents as an adult.
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Demonstrations in Morocco after the suicide of Amina Filali
Amina Filali was only 16 years old when she took her own life by swallowing rat poison. Her story has caused an outpouring of outrage and support from far beyond her small town in northern Morocco. According to reports, Amina was raped last year at the age of 15 by an older man. Instead of seeing her rapist punished for his crime, Amina was forced to marry him. A few months into an unconscionable marriage, her rapist/ husband was beating her, she told her mother. Her mother counseled her to try and bear it, according to the Moroccan daily al-Massa. Amina must have seen no way out, no future worth living. Read more…
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Imagine living in a place where your reproductive life was controlled by the government. A place that not only controlled the number of children you were allowed to have but also the timeframe. A place that enforced stiff fines, allowed forced sterilization and even forced abortions when you were breaking the law.
Imagine living in remote, impoverished parts of rural China. This is what life is like for most women in these far off, often forgotten parts of the world, a place that accounts for millions of China’s 1.3 billion people.
China’s controversial one-child policy was implemented by the Communist regime in 1978 as a way to control China’s soaring population and help alleviate some of the related negative social, economic and environmental consequences. Born at a time before China’s dramatic ascent as the world’s number two economy, the one-child policy was enforced as a way to keep China’s exploding population at bay. Read more…
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On Monday, we start off the week in Pennsylvania, USA, where TwinMom112 takes us into the world of twin parenting. This week she tells us about how she strives to treat her twin daughters as individuals and not as a “team.”
On Tuesday, our founder, Jen Burden, gives us our first inside scoop on the World Moms delegation that headed to Washington, DC last week for the UN Foundation Volunteer Summit for Shot@Life! She got to meet, for the first time ever, 3 World Moms Blog writers!!
Later on Tuesday, Nicole Melancon of Minnesota, USA writes for our Human Rights column and the topic is China’s 1 baby policy. We are loving this new column!!
On Wednesday, we are in the deep south with Margie Bryant of Arkansas, USA. Guess what, people? Margie is ENGAGED! Congratulations, Margie!! We look forward to hearing all about it!
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Recently, we had a beautiful Saturday Sidebar question from our Sidebar editor Eva Fannon, titled, ‘
I have a dream’. This is my longer answer to that question:
Martin Luther King spoke about the ghosts of racism. Here, in India, racism exists too – but a different kind of racism. It is called the caste system.
Peaceful demonstrations against the reservation system. New Delhi, India.
If you do not have a prior knowledge of the caste system, briefly it is like this – there is the concept of a higher (or forward or upper) caste of people comprising of Brahmins and such. The lower (or backward) caste comprises of Dalits and such. The lower castes were economically, educationally and socially underprivileged. And so the Indian government created laws, sixty years ago, which alloted a percentage of college seats and jobs for them so that their standard of living could improve. With that background, now you may read on…
Any Indian, who has been a victim of the caste system, could write volumes about it, but I will restrict myself to giving you just one link here for now to understand this better. It is called Reservation system based on caste. Someone unfamiliar with the caste system would be appalled reading just the first few lines of this wiki entry. But this general wiki link is the most muted version of the actual reality.
Reservations in educational institutions and government jobs for the so-called “underprivileged” do not happen the way they were intended to some sixty years ago, before Indian Independence. Uplifting the social and educational status of people should be the goal of such reservation systems, and it should be based on their financial and economic background rather than on the caste system.
Imagine, there is a law, which actually allows my own classmate–whose father could be my father’s colleague–to get admission into an engineering institution Read more…
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