Modern feminism in America, admittedly, is all about subtleties. At least in theory, women in the U.S. have equal access to education, work, political power, reproductive rights, sexual freedom and all of the other perks associated with an elevated socio-economic status. International Women’s Day, which took place Monday, is a day for Americans to fairly recognize how far we’ve come since the era of suffragist Susan B. Anthony, who never saw the right the vote before she died little more than a century ago.
It’s also a day (should be every day) to remember that women worldwide suffer from injustices that are anything but subtle. The Economist reported this week that the lesser social status of women creates a literal gender imbalance in many nations.
“Gendercide,” a term coined by author Mary Anne Warren, refers to the infanticide of baby girls and the abortion of female fetuses in countries where families have a cultural preference for sons over daughters. China is most infamous for contributing to the 100 million baby girls missing globally. Research conducted by The Pew Forum reports that China births 120 boys for every 100 girls — a ratio that is statistically impossible with incidental biological variation.
“China faces the prospect of having the equivalent of the whole young male population of America, or almost twice that of Europe’s three largest countries, with little prospect of marriage, untethered to a home of their own and without the stake in society that marriage and children provide,” The Economist reported in “The Worldwide War on Baby Girls.”
The devaluing of girls is bad for boys, too. Big duh. Besides the obvious lack-of-future-wives problem, fewer girls also means, eventually, higher crime rates and fewer women to help lead their families and communities out of “developing.”Though the gender ratio in China has often been dismissed as a byproduct of the nation’s one-child policy — higher stakes exaggerate gender preference — The Economist notes several crucial intricacies.
First, though China enacted the one-child policy in 1979 and has loosened the reigns over the last decade, the gender imbalance appears to have increased between 1990 and 2005.
Gendercide is also on the rise in a number of other countries that don’t limit childbirth, mostly Asian and formerly Soviet; from 2000 to 2005, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, South Korea, India, Serbia, Belarus, Bosnia, Cyprus, Hong Kong and Singapore all had male to female birth rates above the “natural ratio,” according to the United Nations.
In countries like India, where abortion rights are limited and prenatal gender testing has been banned since 1994 to prevent sex selection, a reported 107 to 100 male to female birth ratio means that parents are turning to back-alley abortions or killing baby girls after birth reveals their gender.
Though the gender imbalance is a less murderous reality when women have access to quality reproductive health, The Economist reported, “Sexual disparities tend to rise with income and education.”
It would be comforting to assume that, with economic and political stability — with increased access to the education, technology, and reproductive rights that generally empower women and free them from traditional roles — gendercide would disappear. Yet, as the evidence suggests, sexism is a pernicious force that can reign independent from economic or political disparities.
Though no individual, views on gender equality aside, would want to live in a woman-less society, a certain hypocrisy dominates family planning throughout much of the world: We want girls, but we don’t want to raise them. Even when all signs say that an educated woman can do just as much for her family as her male counterpart, the family name and the economics of marriage often take priority over the life of a child. In the case of gendercide, the degraded social status of “female” is made more physical with increased access to medical technologies, such as ultra-sound (for prenatal gender testing) and abortion.
Though the suffering of the modern American women pales in comparison to the legal inequalities addressed by the women’s suffrage movement, international gendercide is a reminder that neither laws nor economic logic protect us from the social devaluing of women and girls. This is one big reason that I believe, even in a theoretically egalitarian society, that feminism remains a relevant lens for evaluating the tangible effects of our social and political ideologies.
Though my subhead, “Third Waves,” refers to the onslaught of neo-feminists that have invaded blogospheres, zine racks, and (here) college newspaper opinion pages, I’d like to close my final column with a light-hearted, totally non-sequitur quote from the aforementioned first-waver, Susan B. Anthony:
“Bicycling has done more to emancipate women than any one thing in the world. It gives her a feeling of self-reliance and independence the moment she takes her seat; and away she goes, the picture of untrammeled womanhood.”
[email protected]
Women still vulnerable to social devaluation
Daily Emerald
March 10, 2010
0
More to Discover