For what avail the plough or sail, or land or life, if freedom fail? Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Declaration of Independence is more than just a piece of paper. It is a symbol of our country’s independence and commitment to certain ideas. A reminder of the goals we should always be working for, and about the people who have fought so hard to make these ideas possible: independence!
….specially to women in the United States.
THE BURDEN OF WOMANHOOD:
Here are 10 of the worst countries in the world to be a woman today:
• Afghanistan: The average Afghan girl will live to only 45 – one year less than an Afghan male. After three decades of war and religion-based repression, an overwhelming number of women are illiterate. More than half of all brides are under 16, and one woman dies in childbirth every half hour. Domestic violence is so common that 87 per cent of women admit to experiencing it. But more than one million widows are on the streets, often forced into prostitution. Afghanistan is the only country in which the female suicide rate is higher than that of males.
• Democratic Republic of Congo: Rapes are so brutal and systematic that UN investigators have called them unprecedented.
• Iraq: has imprisoned women in an inferno of sectarian violence that targets women and girls. Families fear risking kidnapping and rape by sending girls to school.
• Nepal: Early marriage and childbirth exhaust the country’s malnourished women, and one in 24 will die in pregnancy or childbirth. Daughters who aren’t married off may be sold to traffickers before they reach their teens. A low-level civil war between government and Maoist rebels has forced rural women into guerrilla groups.
• Sudan: Abduction, rape or forced displacement have destroyed more than 1 million women’s lives since 2003. The janjaweed militias have used systematic rape as a demographic weapon, but access to justice is almost impossible for the female victims of violence.
• Guatemala, where an impoverished female underclass faces domestic violence, rape and the second-highest rate of HIV/AIDS after sub-Saharan Africa. An epidemic of gruesome unsolved murders has left hundreds of women dead, some of their bodies left with hate messages.
• In Mali, one of the world’s poorest countries, few women escape the torture of genital mutilation, many are forced into early marriages, and one in 10 dies in pregnancy or childbirth.
• In Pakistan, women are gang-raped as punishment for men’s crimes. But honour killing is more widespread, and a renewed wave of religious extremism is targeting female politicians, human rights workers and lawyers.
• In Saudi Arabia, women are treated as lifelong dependents, under the guardianship of a male relative. Deprived of the right to drive a car or mix with men publicly, they are confined to strictly segregated lives on pain of severe punishment.
• In Mogadishu, a vicious civil war has put women, who were the traditional mainstay of the family, under attack. In a society that has broken down, women are exposed daily to rape, dangerously poor health care for pregnancy, and attack by armed gangs.
• In India… story By John W. Anderson and Molly Moore
When Rani returned home from the hospital cradling her newborn daughter, the men in the family slipped out of her mud hut while she and her mother-in- law mashed poisonous oleander seeds into a dollop of oil and forced it down the infant’s throat.
As soon as darkness fell, Rani crept into a nearby field and buried her baby girl in a shallow, unmarked grave next to a small stream.
“I never felt any sorrow,” Rani, a farm laborer with a weather-beaten face, said through an interpreter. “There was a lot of bitterness in my heart toward the baby because the gods should have given me a son.”
Each year hundreds and perhaps thousands of newborn girls in India are murdered by their mothers simply because they are female. Some women believe that sacrificing a daughter guarantees a son in the next pregnancy. In other cases, the family cannot afford the dowry that would eventually be demanded for a girl’s marriage.
And for many mothers, sentencing a daughter to death is better than condemning her to life as a woman in the Third World, with cradle-to-grave discrimination, poverty, sickness and drudgery.
“In a culture that idolizes sons and dreads the birth of a daughter, to be born female comes perilously close to being born less than human,” the Indian government conceded in a recent report by its Department of Women and Child Development.
Daisy Says: Happy Fourth of July!
