I remember the Afghan women who showed me their ill-set bones that broke from vitamin D deficiency after the Taliban barred women and girls from leaving their homes or opening their curtains (lest a passing man be defiled by their faces – hard-line Islam their neat excuse for a particularly toxic brand of misogyny).
Sometimes these women are so engaged in the brute business of survival they have no space to think about more. And sometimes they have a cherished, quietly tended vision of the change they want: of political power, of job opportunities, of justice and safety.
In 2008, I met Rose, an activist for democracy in Zimbabwe – one of hundreds of women who were systematically raped by supporters of President Robert Mugabe when they tried to do political organizing to end his brutal reign.
In Santiago de Chile in 1998 I met young women who were sexually assaulted on their first day at the engineering college by men determined to prevent them from enrolling. The women quit.
In Tehran in 2003, I met three young women who earned engineering degrees – but who were beaten by religious paramilitaries until bruises stained their legs like dark stockings, because they let their head scarves slip back off their foreheads and spoke to some boys in a coffee shop.
Two weeks ago, in India’s rural province of Rajasthan, I met low-caste girls whose mothers had defied their fathers to insist they go to school. The girls had turned up on the dot of 9 a.m., their worn uniforms well pressed, their hair slicked down. But they sat alone and in the dark, because they were too short to reach up and open the shutters, and their teachers had not come – because only women deign to teach in a low-caste girls school, and the teachers can’t bear the sexual harassment they face when they take public transport, which is all they can afford, to get to work. The girls sat in quiet rows with their books open, trying to sound out words, lips working, fingers sliding along the tattered pages.
There is a universality to sexual harassment, to sexual violence, to the struggle for reproductive rights, and to the more quotidian question of how to work and care for children and older family members. Women in the developed world see this.
I think the thing we don’t see, though, is how the same system that has lifted us up and brought so much progress on these fronts is connected to the system that keeps these women down.
We subsidize agriculture – and dump our farming excess into the markets of African and Asian farmers, three-quarters of whom are women. You can’t stage a revolution when you earn $1 a day growing millet. Our hunger for iPhones and Kindles fuels the market for coltan, the mineral that lies at the root of the vicious war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a war fought literally on the bodies of women, some 300,000 of whom have been raped in the decade of the war. Our desire for the latest H&M frock drives the sweatshops of Bangladesh, where women sew for 12 hours a day and earn $3. That barely covers the cost of a place to sleep, a meal and bus fare.
The globalization theory, of course, is that the $3-a-day garment worker job allows the Bangladeshi woman to send money back to the village where her daughter will go to school. Go she might – but will the teacher be there?
I wonder if, in 1911, Clara Zetkin had a clear vision of the change that was needed, and the change that would come. I wonder whether she would tell us all today to keep the faith, that the next 100 years will bring change to every corner. And I wonder whether that would be enough, for Rose in Zimbabwe, or those little girls in Rajasthan.
