When my father pulled up to the curb, I quickly kissed them both good-bye and jumped out of the car. I was just about inside when I heard a funny sound that sounded like my name. I stopped in my tracks and turned around. There was Suzy, standing up outside the car on wobbly knees, wig slightly askew.
With her arms outstretched, she said gently, “Good-bye, Nanny, I love you.” I hugged her so hard I was afraid she might crumble. And then I ran to catch my plane.
I never saw my sister alive again.
Funds of $1.9 billion get attention. So do decisions to drop Planned Parenthood. Controversial decisions often make headlines in the short term, but, as the old Armenian saying goes, “The dogs barked; the caravan passed by,” the attention usually quickly dissipates. Not this time. In keeping with the new activism by and about women around the world, American women rose up to protest the bizarre treatment of Planned Parenthood. They appeared at rallies decked out in pink T-shirts that read “Women’s Health Matters.” They carried placards that said “Stop the War on Women” and “I Stand with Planned Parenthood.” It was an astonishing show of support.
A who’s who of celebrities soon joined the protest. The kids’ novelist Judy Blume sent a Twitter message that said, “Susan Komen would not give in to bullying or fear. Too bad the organization bearing her name did.” Representative Jackie Speier of California announced, “Komen’s decision hurts women. It puts politics before women’s health.” The comments roared in like a storm. So did the donations to Planned Parenthood. More than $3 million for its breast cancer program was donated in the first forty-eight hours after the news of the Komen cut broke. New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg said he would give $250,000 of his own money and match every dollar that Planned Parenthood raised up to another $250,000. Oil tycoons donated money, and so did indie rock bands.
Rebecca Traister and Joan Walsh wrote in Salon magazine, “The overreach by the Komen foundation, while surely intended to strike yet another blow on the side of antiabortion activism, succeeded instead in waking a powerful constituency—armed with precisely the language and emotional heft they [American women] have been lacking for too long.”
Facebook exploded with support for Planned Parenthood, and radio stations were inundated with callers demanding a retraction of the foundation’s decision. And three days after the announcement of the cut was made, the women of the U.S. got an apology and a retraction.
On Friday, February 3, Nancy Brinker, the president as well as founder of the organization, said, “We want to apologize to the American public for recent decisions that cast doubt upon our commitment to our mission of saving women’s lives. We have been distressed at the presumption that the changes made to our funding criteria were done for political reasons or to specifically penalize Planned Parenthood. They were not.
“Our original desire was to fulfill our fiduciary duty to our donors by not funding grant applications made by organizations under investigation. We will amend the criteria to make clear that disqualifying investigations must be criminal and conclusive in nature and not political. That is what is right and fair.”
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This kind of protest demonstrates the power that women have to alter their own lives, to gain control over their own bodies. And now there’s another tool in the arsenal for protest—the Internet. A call for action can come almost instantly after an incident, via cyberspace, containing all the data you need, including e-mail contacts, phone numbers and mailing addresses, and even a form letter so you don’t have to worry about composing your own.
Here’s an example. Women Living Under Muslim Laws, along with a group known as Violence Is Not Our Culture, often instigate calls for action. Sometimes it’s because a woman has been jailed without trial or a government has ruled unfairly toward women. Activists are accustomed to receiving such calls on their computer screens and following through with action. When the government of Afghanistan was planning a meeting in Bonn, Germany, to discuss the so-called peace process, an action call went out from WLUML on November 24, 2011, saying,
In the wake of the exclusion of Afghan women from the “peace process” at the Bonn Conference taking place on the 5th of December 2011, WLUML vigorously denounces:
• the ethical incoherence of States that engaged in a devastating war in Afghanistan under the fallacious pretext to protect “poor oppressed Muslim women living under the burqa,” and now prevent them from participating as full-fledged citizens in the peace process in their country, all while engaging with their oppressors
• the moral responsibility of these States, which are delivering Afghan women, bound and gagged, to the very same Taliban and warlords they pretended to save them from, just a few years ago
• the political short-sightedness of alliances, such as with Taliban and warlords, which fearfully remind us of other past historical compromises that cost so many lives
• the fallacy of the so-called “democratic process” taking place in Germany, but without the “untermensch” of the day: Afghan women
They provided e-mail contacts for the government representatives and each of the delegates. Responses poured in from around the world. Before the conference even began, its agenda and delegation list were changed to include women who would speak up about women’s rights.
The Stop Stoning Forever campaign is another case example. Women Living Under Muslim Laws teamed up with Violence Is Not Our Culture and Justice for Iran to announce the release of a new publication, Mapping Stoning in Muslim Contexts, a report that named the fourteen countries where the punishment of stoning is still in practice, either through judicial (codified as law) or extrajudicial (outside the law) methods. Mapping reports carry a surprising amount of weight in the form of naming and shaming the countries that still condone stoning.
Historically, stoning has been used in many religious and cultural traditions as a form of community justice or capital punishment. Although there is no mention of stoning in the Quran, the practice has come to be associated with Islam and Muslim cultures. WLUML says laws that rendered stoning a legally sanctioned punishment emerged with the revival of political Islam during the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. Sharia law, the Islamic legal system, says that men will be buried to their waists and women to their breasts for the execution and that the stones thrown must not be so large as to kill the person quickly. The death is to be slow and painful. WLUML reports that women are stoned far more often than men. In Afghanistan recently, a twenty-nine-year-old woman called Amina was stoned to death for adultery. The man accused with her was lashed eighty times and freed.
When a woman has been sentenced to be stoned to death, the joint campaign puts out an action call. Women and men around the world respond with letters to the judiciary or government official sent by e-mail and fax. WLUML claims that public pressure has decreased the number of executions and that several punishments have been cancelled or postponed after their calls for action are made public. However, in places like Afghanistan, the sentence is usually carried out without judicial authority and therefore escapes the protests that these women are prepared to stage.
WLUML says stoning poses a serious threat to both women and men living in Muslim societies today. Sexual relationships outside marriage, along with same-sex relations, are criminalized in most codified interpretations of sharia law. Any sexual relationship outside a legal marriage is considered a crime punishable by a hundred lashes if the accused is unmarried and death by stoning if married.
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Whether as activist reformers or public policy–makers, women have learned that the quickest way to establish their own space is by running for parliament and occupying the same space as men. Afghan member of parliament Fawzia Koofi, who plans to run for the presidency in the next election, says, “There’s pride in being a member of parliament; there’s a sense of success. Initially in Afghanistan there was a lot of resistance from men because our arguments were asking for changes in the law. The men tried t
o stop us by cutting the microphone when one of us was talking in the parliament. They don’t do that anymore. We’re strong. We won’t go back or give up. It’s time for them to give up.”
Farida Shaheed says there are plenty of encouraging changes in Pakistan too, such as more young professional women making strides in the workplace and more girls getting an education. “On the other hand, a great conservativism is permeating Pakistani society. We need to be vigilant, make sure we are going forward, not moving backward, where everything is determined by superstition and what someone else says.” Still, she thinks women have come a long way from feeling their place has been ordained, that they are stuck with their lot in life and simply have to live with it. “Women need to come together so they can be each other’s supporters and fight for equality rights. What we discovered in Pakistan is the fewer women who enjoy their rights, the faster the state can take those rights away from you. And it can happen very quickly.”
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One can’t help wondering what it is that stops men from embracing changes that would improve the economy and stop conflict. The thing is, people become habituated to what they have, and having a woman who takes care of you, a woman you can control, a woman who gets nothing in return, feels normal and essential to men who have never known a different life. They are perplexed by the criticism and afraid of what change will do. Some men truly cannot picture that their lives will be better if they treat their daughters, sisters, mothers and wives as fully human. Establishing rights has historically been a long, slow and sometimes confusing process.
Joanna Kerr shares an interesting interpretation about the way her own male colleagues in South Africa and elsewhere, who are mostly human rights champions, view the changes in attitudes toward women and girls. “They tell me, ‘It’s so in our face, in our private space, because we all have mothers or sisters or wives or girlfriends and the kind of relationships that are being transformed through gender equality come up against our histories, our hearts and minds. It gets inside our skin in such a way, it creates discomfort.’ ” She says the struggle for women’s rights is not the same as the struggle to end racism, or even the fight for gay rights, because somehow gender equality feels different. “All of us have ideas about how women and men and girls and boys should behave. And gender is the most significant identifier of how individuals interact with each other. If you have never met someone before and you didn’t quite know whether the person was a male or a female that you were speaking to, you feel uncomfortable because you don’t know what social rules to apply. Whereas when we don’t know their nationality, their ethnicity, their social class, we still know how to interact. But gender, the rules of gender, are so deeply, deeply imbued and embedded in all of us that when we start changing the rules we don’t quite know how to behave.”
It is a recognizable dilemma. But one that society needs to come to terms with. There are consequences for not taking women seriously, as Gloria Steinem says: “If you leave inequality in the home, you’ve left the model for racism and class there as well. You can directly measure the degree of democracy in society by the degree of democracy in the home. You can predict the degree of violence in the street or foreign policy by the amount in the home because everything is normalized in the home.”
History is on the side of women’s empowerment, which is one of the great moral imperatives of our time. And now that the international economists have pointed to enhancing women’s rights as the ticket to financial heaven, institutional change is likely to speed up. Certainly young women—teenagers and twenty-somethings—are poised to make their demands known and to take action if they aren’t met.
One hundred and sixty young girls in Kenya are knocking on the door of change and are about to make history by suing their government for failing to protect them from being raped. Young women like Asmaa Mahfouz in Egypt are suggesting that the men join the movement to emancipate women, and so is Mazn Hussan.
In Afghanistan, Noorjahan Akbar and Anita Haidary have launched the most powerful change agent that Afghan women have ever known with their organization Young Women for Change. They have also invited men to join the movement. Gloria Steinem thinks their stories are the art of the possible. She says, “Women are certainly the way forward. Men are also the way forward. Progress lies in the direction we haven’t been.” If Akbar’s and Haidary’s plan to emancipate the women and girls of Afghanistan and throw off the restrictive aspects of old customs takes flight, they could alter the future for 15 million people.
I told Akbar that the women in Cairo said they had breached the barricade of fear, and I asked her if she had as well. She has a small voice that matches her delicate frame, but she speaks precisely. “I am still afraid very often. I think anyone who has joined YWC has had fear because people who dare to speak out against injustice face backlash, and any new idea is bound to be rejected before being accepted, especially if it challenges societal norms and rules. However, I deeply believe in the equality of humankind, and I know that regardless of how tired, depressed or afraid I am, I will not give up on myself or the millions of women in Afghanistan who can be equal, who deserve to be treated equally. When we rise for what is right, what is our right, when we have a truth we’re willing to stand up for, we have nothing to lose.”
From Asia and Africa to the Americas, these women and their sisters and mothers are showing the way forward. They aren’t victims, they’re victors. Like 3.5 billion beautiful rosebuds, half the world’s population is about to bloom into the future.
CONCLUSION
Here Come the Girls
As the summer of 2012 morphed into fall and the fresh start that that season brings, I went back to Afghanistan. I decided to return to that fractious, troubled place because Alaina Podmorow, fifteen, a Canadian girl from the interior of British Columbia who had devoted much of her young life to bettering the lot of girls in Afghanistan, was going to Kabul for the first time, and I wanted to be there to see her meet the kids she’d been helping since she was nine years old. She also planned to try to connect with the co-founders of Young Women for Change, an encounter between young women from two sides of the world that I wanted to witness.
For all the pessimists who claim the women’s movement is over and that young people don’t care, Alaina Podmorow’s story is an injection of hope. I met her in the fall of 2006, when I was in B.C.’s beautiful Okanagan Valley to give a speech sponsored by Canadian Women 4 Women in Afghanistan about conditions for women in that conflict-ridden country. The auditorium was packed. During the question period that followed, I could hear a voice calling out but couldn’t match a face to it. I strained my eyes over the large crowd and finally spied a pint-size girl on her feet, dwarfed by the adults around her. But the words she spoke made her a giant in the room that September night.
Alaina Podmorow, then only nine years, had no trouble making her position clear. “Those girls you’re talking about—they’re my age. This has to stop,” she said, with all the indignation a girl-child can summon. The audience erupted into applause.
Alaina had held up a pure, clear light in the midst of the renewed darkness that had descended on Afghanistan as the hard-won post-9/11 improvements started slipping away in 2006 in the face of an insurgency that was gaining ground. My adult audience surely cared about the resurgent brutality and hoped for change. But Alaina’s reaction came from the unvarnished innocence we each had begun with before we were beaten up by “the way things have always been.” Later, when I got to know Alaina, she told me that when she arrived home after the event, pamphlets tucked into her satchel and the girls in Afghanistan on her mind, she couldn’t stop thinking about how to help her “sisters” halfway across the world. By the next morning, she had a plan. She would start Little Women 4 Little Women in Afghanistan (LW4LWA), and together with her classmates and preteen friends she would hold bake sales and bottle drives and car washes to raise enough money to pay teachers in Afghanistan so that kids her age could go to school.
“I felt I had a power within me,” she said. “I knew I could do something that would make a difference to the girls of Afghanistan.” Her first fundraiser, a silent auction, made enough money to hire four teachers. “I’d made a difference and felt amazing knowing that. If one girl can make a difference, imagine what would happen if a powerful force of girls got together.” She lit a torch in the process, building awareness and spreading the facts about the lives of girls in Afghanistan, and carried it all the way to the prime minister’s office and then blazed its light from Kabul to Kandahar.
Alaina at fifteen is the quintessential Canadian girl, her wavy hair in a ponytail one minute and flowing over her shoulders the next as she flies down a soccer field, focused on the goal with victory in her eyes, or pitches forward on her snowboard, cruising down the slopes near her home in the B.C. interior. Lainy, as she’s known to her friends, also dances and performs in the school musicals and sings like an angel. Since she was nine, she has started chapters of LW4LWA across Canada, enlisting dozens of girls who are equally determined to restore the right to education to girls their age on the other side of the world. She’s done hundreds of interviews, been featured in a documentary, won the Me to We award presented annually by Craig and Marc Kielburger and Canadian Living magazine. It’s an award given to ordinary Canadians making an extraordinary difference in the world for thinking less about me and more about we. It comes with a $5000 donation to the charity of the winner’s choice. And she was the ambassador for Canada to the Day of the Girls held on the UN’s International Girls’ Day in New York City on October 12, 2012. She is equally unfazed whether she is chatting with Prime Minister Stephen Harper on Parliament Hill or Peter Mansbridge on CBC TV. She sees the many barriers in the way of her goal to educate girls in Afghanistan simply as nuisance factors that need to be overcome. Her slogan is “education = peace,” and she has already spent six years of her life working to make those words a reality. She’s a girl who makes us all feel proud because somehow she represents the best we can be.
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