Reading Reviews #8

The Role of Women in a Society

Maathai pointed out the fact that governments aren't doing their job. That being true, let me tell you a story which may give you another angle to look from.

As more and more places in modern China show great respect to women and treat both genders similarly, there are a lot of savage territories deep inside the mountains and forests where women are still treated like crap. A recent piece of news shock the Chinese society with a news title of <the woman married to the mountains> that tells the story about how a woman who was kidnapped and sold to a faraway village, after several failed attempts to escape and the delivery of her baby, started trying to accept her fate by really thinking what she could do in the mountains. Since she was the only educated woman among dozens of people in the village, she started to get closer to the kids and be their teacher. The only school in the village has no teacher for most of the time because the villagers couldn’t afford to hire one (you can tell from the fact that they even need to buy wives from the outside world due to the lack of women). She got more and more famous around the neighborhood and was known as “the prettiest country teacher”, but the fact that she was kidnapped was acquiesced in by the local people. Although after she had some exposure, her father called the police and tried to save his daughter from the village, the authority showed little interest in the case, considering it as “domestic dispute” and sent just a few policemen to run the task. They were blockaded by villagers who refused to let go the women because they had already paid for it. In the end she was let go with the term of not taking her child with her. She got out, escorted by the weak police force, and was terminally separated from her kid. Besides the sad experience of the woman, what makes it much worse is the title of the news “the woman who married to the mountains” which should be “the woman who was kidnapped and raped by the mountains”. However, many commenters, especially from rural areas, applauded for the woman’s “virtue”, ignoring the fact that she was a commercial to the villagers. The “inspiration” by a victim’s thorough contribution really shouldn’t be celebrated.

You may feel that the village is evil, every villager is evil, and the authority is alike. I feel the same way too. These villages are not educated, earn their income mostly from farming and other physical activities, and I think that is the main reason why their women have such a low status and why most families want boys over girls. The only duties for women in such villages are childrearing and sex providing. They are not treated as “human”. No matter they don’t have “human rights”.

Though a bold and inhumane thing to say, I have to admit that to reverse this kind of situation, propagating the idea of gender equality is absolutely useless. The women in such villages are economically useless, so how could they be equal to men? Most of them exist just to provide offspring and pleasure. As the “outside world” shows more respects to women, parents in such villages who would try to sneak their daughters out to escape from a life of being nothing, plus the culture of favoring boys over girls, resulting in the major decrease in the population of women in the village, thus giving rise to human trafficking. This is an endless, vicious loop.

Could the government subsidize the place to educate them in order to give a chance to the women there to contribute to local economy? This could work, if only the governments want to do that. People in such villages are culturally stubborn, and worse, the women have no idea that they could have a better life. If we as the outsiders do not care about them, they would never find it out.

With the belief that China (with all complications) is walking on the road that America finished years ago, and Africa today is on the road that China had done some years ago, in todays’ Africa there are much more such villages (and tribes and the alike). The underlying reason may be that most African income depends on physical activities in which men dominate due to natural gifts. Saving African women starts from saving their economic mode. Again, although most women are naturally less powerful physically than men, they are no less powerful mentally. In a healthy, fair economic mode, women could contribute an awful lot of income, and this is when their voices started to be heard. If women stay to be economically useless, how could they be treated as equal?