Women still have a way to go

When it comes to women’s liberation and freedom, people generally look toward the United States for inspiration.

Any visitor from the developing world must be impressed by the freedom, literacy and socioeconomic empowerment of women.

And that’s just how I felt, until I read about a survey that concluded Americans will be ready for a woman as president in 2008, more than 225 years after independence!

Coming as I do from South Asia, an area that is home to one-fifth of humanity and about which the American media often portrays as having world’s largest number of illiterates and poor, as well as cases of female infanticide, child marriage and crimes against women I thought the poll raised the question of the relationship between women’s freedom, literacy, economic independence and political empowerment.

That’s because when it comes to the political empowerment of women, South Asia has taken the lead. The developed countries including the United States took decades if not centuries to give voting rights to women, while in South Asian countries, that right was there from the very first election after independence in the mid-1900s.

Today, the most powerful woman in India is the Italian-born Sonia Gandhi, the chairwoman of the ruling United Progressive Alliance and president of the Congress Party.

The eastern Indian State of Bihar, where only one out of every three woman knows how to read and write, has had a woman chief minister, Rabri Devi, for more than seven years. The western Indian State of Rajasthan, from which the largest number of stories about female infanticide and child marriage originate, elected a woman chief minister in 2003.

Since 1992, one-third of the seats in elected village councils and city governments are reserved for women. And we must not forget Indira Gandhi, who was the first female prime minister of India in 1966. However, the first step actually was taken by India’s southern neighbor, Sri Lanka, way back in 1961, when Sri Lankans elected Sirimavo Bandaranaike as the world’s first woman prime minister. Her daughter, Chandrika Kumaratunga, has been the president of the country for the past several years.

America’s key ally in the fight against terrorism, Pakistan, elected Benazir Bhutto, its first woman prime minister, in 1988. Thus, Bhutto also became the first female to head the government of an Islamic state.

When I put these facts to participants in a UND panel discussion on feminism and asked why the United States lags so far behind when it comes to women’s political empowerment, one woman answered, “Maybe we are a bit conservative.” But a moment later, she asked me an equally difficult question: “Has political empowerment really helped women in your region? If most women continue to suffer, then the empowerment and certain women’s achievement is of no use.”

Later, I reviewed some statistics: Fewer than 40 percent of the women in South Asia are literate. Nearly 45 percent of the world’s illiterate women hail from that part of the globe. The majority of them earn less per capita than in any other part of the world. And, in general, discrimination begins before birth through female infanticide.

So, I ask myself: First, is there any relationship between women’s freedom and political empowerment? And second, which is more important, political empowerment or socioeconomic emancipation, freedom and liberty?

While South Asia so far has preferred the first, Americans seem to have gone for the second.