Tapestries of Hope: On Myth, Rape, and Resiliency

Joining the push to pass the International Violence Against Women Act (IVAWA), Tapestries of Hope is an extraordinary documentary tracing a Zimbabwe myth about the curing powers of virgin blood, in particular that it can cure HIV/AIDS.

After a decade of actvism focusing on women and children and all forms of abuse ranging from her award-winning short film Flashcards to co-authoring the book, This is Not the Life I Ordered, Tapestries of Hope director Michealene Risley met Betty Makoni. As the founder of the Girl Child Network WorldWide, Makoni created the organization in 1998 as a community to protect and heal child victims of sexual abuse in Zimbabwe. In 2009, CNN named Makoni a Hero.

In a recent interview Michealene shared, "When I first met Betty Makoni, both of us were survivors. She asked me to come to Zimbabwe and I could not refuse."

Teacher and advocate Betty Makoni's desire to help girls comes from the fact she was raped as a child then lost her own mother to domestic violence. Yet from her personal pain, Makoni has built whole communities of girls who are experiencing true healing after profound harm. Enter the power of Tapestries of Hope's message. While watching the film, one cannot ignore that the myth that virgin blood can cure HIV/AIDS is creating the rape of female children from infancy to teenager in Zimbabwe, and that Makoni's Girl Child Network is saving them from otherwise horrific lives of continued gender-based violence (GBV).

This is why Michealene says one of the film's greatest reasons for being is to help people understand why the IVAWA is so vital. "My hope is that this movie gets Congress to sign and fund IVAWA. I truly believe this issue [GBV] is one of the most critical for this century. The passing of I-VAWA would have a tremendous affect on women around the globe, and this is the first time in the history of our country that this would happen."

Tapestries of Hope will continue to screen in theaters around the United States. In February, the movie will go to Video on Demand then video. If you are interested in a screening in your area, email the Tapestries of Hope web site.

BIG IDEAS: War. What is it Good For?

Kavita Ramdas and Isabel Allende /
Credit S. Smith Patrick

While perusing Jezebel recently, I was completely annoyed to read about a conservative pundit who was bemoaning the “feminization” of the Medal of Honor in the U.S. military. Bryan Fischer laments,

“When we think of heroism in battle, we used to think of our boys storming the beaches of Normandy under withering fire, climbing the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc while enemy soldiers fired straight down on them, and tossing grenades into pill boxes to take out gun emplacements. That kind of heroism has apparently become passé when it comes to awarding the Medal of Honor. We now award it only for preventing casualties, not for inflicting them. So the question is this: when are we going to start awarding the Medal of Honor once again for soldiers who kill people and break things so our families can sleep safely at night?”

(Emphasis mine.) Normally I would dismiss this kind of commentary for what it is: inflammatory and irrelevant...

Racing Toward Human Rights for Women

Stark truths open Women for Women International's Stronger Women, Stronger Nations Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) report, Amplifying Voices of Women in Eastern Congo. "Despite the signing of international peace agreements, a deadly 15 year war continues in DRC. International organizations estimate that between 3.5 and 5.4 million of excess deaths have occurred. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the DRC is 'the worst example of man's inhumanity to women.'"

This past Saturday morning my 2010 racing season ended in a race with the Women for Women International's Run for Congo Women UK team in Greenwich Park, London. Pictured here together we ran in support of acknowledging these harrowing facts, but also to motivate change for Congolese women. Since 1993, Women for Women International has globally supported over 275,000 women with training, over $21 million in direct aid, and over $67 million in micro-credit loans. In June 2010, the organization gained my attention while in South Africa post-Comrades while researching and writing about the public health of women and girls during the 2010 World Cup. Then, I kept thinking to myself, "If this is the continent's best for women, what is the worst?"

The Democratic Republic of Congo. In July, upon arrival back from South Africa to Paris, I pledged to Kate Hughes, Policy and Campaigns Officer for Women for Women International, that I would build Team Congo Paris in support of Run for Congo Women.

A Paris Team's Run for Congo Women

Racing together in the Paris Versailles, 20K de Paris, and finally the 6ème Foulées Villenogarennoises in Parc des Chanteraines, Team Congo Paris surpassed our fundraising goal of 1,000 GBP. This was due to the exceptional work of our top fundraisers and runners Alice Phan and Colleen Obrist along with supporters like the AMPE and the FCA and myriad other amazing male and female runners.

Alice Phan came to Team Congo Paris early on and ran almost every race and supported every endeavor. In fact, she raced beside me on November 7 with Colleen Obrist in the 5K at Parc des Chanteraines asking questions about Colleen's journey to run for Team Congo Paris. Diagnosed with MS in 2008, Colleen's sheer willpower is a testament to overcoming life challenges. In a recent interview, she shared, "People often say that it is too bad what happened to me, what a pity, etc., and yes, having MS is hard, but my problems seem trivial when compared to what some people have to live through in this world on a daily basis. My health situation and my future may be unpredictable, but at least I am not living in abject poverty, or fear that someone in my family is going to die, be raped, tortured, humiliated, or terrorized. There is not much I can do for my disease, but I will help others while I am still able."

On November 7, Alice then also raced beside me and Jennifer Hart in the 10K through pouring rain. With a degree in Women's Studies and a Master's in Sociology and also one in Personal Training, Jennifer, a personal trainer and owner of Hart Total Fitness, was triumphantly running five months after the birth of her second child. Yet, she had resumed running only four weeks after delivery and she completed La Parisienne at 3.5 months post-birth in just 44 minutes.

Years ago, Jennifer first heard stories about Congo while overseeing a series of workshops on gender and war at the University of Toronto. Recently, she shared how they affected her. "Some of the stories would make me cry, make me angry, and make me down-right fed up with the world. When I left school and began working, my charity work dropped and I missed it but didn’t know where to turn to help out in Paris. Then I had a daughter and I remembered some of the horror stories of women and children being raped and killed, and my life changed. I saw a posting by Kate Stence about Run for Congo Women and it took me less than 3 seconds to say, 'I want to be a part of that.'"

A London Team's Run for Congo Women

In Greenwich Park last Sunday, as I walked over to claim my race number in the UK Run for Congo Women's final race of the season, I began looking around for other women and men runners who were also racing with the UK team. Their team had raised over 8,000 GBP. I introduced myself to runners and then met devoted runner Chris Jackson, who has completed 11 marathons for Women for Women for International this year alone. As I stood before him, I took in again how profound I find his efforts.

On November 7, the same day Team Congo Paris raced our final race of the season together, Chris completed the New York City Marathon in 2 hours and 55 minutes. But, he shared how he felt so much support. "Loads of people I didn’t know seemed to know who I was?!? But there was also so many people along the course just telling you to keep going and that you were doing great. This gives you such a boost. I think the best moments were enjoying the views and how quiet, it was on the bridges, because all you could hear was foot-fall, but as you started to get to the other side of the bridge, you’d slowly get hit by this roar from the crowd. I really couldn’t believe how many people were out watching... Absolutely stunning."

That's exactly how I had felt watching the female elites cross the finish line at the Athens Classic Marathon on October 31 while in Greece.

As the first women crossed the finish line, the BBC reporter next to me was taping my ecstatic cheers. Yet, I wanted to share with him that he had to understand that Greece was the marathon's point of origin 2500 years ago. So many of us as athletes run marathons knowing the mythic story of the Greek soldier-runner who was a messenger running from the battlefield of Marathon to Athens to announce the Greek's victory, then died from exhaustion upon arrival. However, what many of us may not know is that every year for the past 28 the Athens Classic Marathon is run in memory of Grigoris Lambrakis, a brilliant athlete, scientist, politician, and pacifist who in April 1963 helped organize the Greece Pacifist Movement. As an advocate of social justice, Lambrikis had participated in myriad international meetings on peace yet his life ended shortly after a march in May 1963 due to deadly beatings.

"Peace and development go hand in hand," according to a campaign message sheet given to me today by Natasha Baranowski, Global Campaign Officer for Women for Women International's Join Me on the Bridge Campaign which advocates that stronger women build bridges of peace. Held on International Women's Day, last year the Join Me on the Bridge Campaign inspired 108 events and attracted around 20,000 participants in about 20 different countries. Next March 8, 2011, marks the 100th Anniversary of International Women's Day.

Overall, what can a runner -- or any individual -- do to help inspire change and help "race" toward human rights for Congolese women? Kate Hughes, coordinator of the London Run for Congo Women events, recently shared her thoughts. "I would ask the runners to keep talking about the conflict in DRC. Just because you have stopped fundraising doesn't mean that you have to stop raising awareness. Make sure that everyone you know, knows that you ran for Run for Congo Women and why it was that you felt so motivated to do that. Tell your friends and family, tell your local radio station or local press, just keep speaking about Congo until the violence and exploitation stops."

On December 5, Chris Jackson races the Luton Marathon, marathon 12, to support Congolese women. You can read about his last race of the 2010 season on his blog. At Gender Across Borders, you can read my article Traversing Truth: Running and Writing Female Rights.

Photo credit: Women for Women International

Whose Reality?

Jennifer Siebel Newsom and Jennifer Pozner

IMOW just hosted an awesome event with Jennifer Siebel Newsom, first lady of San Francisco and documentarian, and Jennifer Pozner, author and executive director of Women in Media, about the portrayal of women in media, and specifically reality television.

Newsom's film, Miss Representation, and Pozner's book, "Reality Bites Back," really lay bare just how the media distorts women's images, confining them to easily digestible stereotypes in front of the camera, and shutting them out of positions of power behind the camera. In fact, Newsom said something like 80 to 90 percent of positions of power--in politics, media, business, etc.--are held by men.

Both Pozner and Newsom said that one way to hold the media accountable about the way they portray women is to speak up. "Women sometimes discount their own authority," said Pozner. "But you are an authority, and even your own experiences give you authority." Pozner and Newsome encouraged women to write letters to the editors of newspapers and magazines, call in to talk shows, and generally "talk back to the media."

So what do you think about how women are portrayed in the media, and specifically reality television? Any ideas about how we can affect these distorted portrayals? And why don't women speak up more often?

How Vital is the International Violence Against Women Act?

Last week as I strolled through rainy Paris to La Poste to send off my absentee ballot to America, I kept reminding myself, Barbara Boxer will triumph. So will Kirsten Gillibrand. With election outcomes that cannot be called anything less than challenging, victory for these two women Senators seemed essential to help ensure the passing of the International Violence Against Women Act (IVAWA).

Originally introduced by John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, along with Boxer to the House and the Senate in February 2010, the International Violence Against Women Act (IVAWA) was highlighted by Her Blueprint in late August in a MAKE CHANGE article while the act was making its way through Congress. In late September, the bill stalled.

However, the same statistics remain: Amnesty International cites that "one out of every three women worldwide has been physically or sexually abused during her lifetime with rates of domestic violence reaching 70 percent in some countries."

Erin Kennedy, Policy Advocate for CARE, an organization that works to end global poverty by empowering marginalized women and girls to bring lasting change to their communities, recently shared her thoughts on why she has been advocating to gain more support for IVAWA.

Based in Washington D.C. along with a team of policy and advocacy professionals, Erin advocates CARE’s mission: to focus on pivotal policies and legislation that will impact poor women and girls and work to influence the U.S. Congress, the Administration, and other key agencies. Right now, her focus is on the International Violence Against Women Act for a variety of sound reasons.

As Erin shares, "There is unprecedented support and momentum for the legislation with over 150 U.S. groups including faith-based, human rights, refugee and women’s organizations that support the bill. In addition, support from the American public is strong as well. A 2009 poll found that 61% of voters across demographic and political lines thought global violence against women should be one of the top international priorities for the U.S. government, and 82% supported I-VAWA legislation when it was explained to them."

IVAWA promotes efforts to reduce women’s and girls’ vulnerability to violence through programs aimed at improving their economic status and ensuring access to educational opportunities. The legislation also aims to support community level efforts to change harmful norms that lead to social tolerance of violence against women and girls. IVAWA will also buttress programs to help women and girl survivors of violence gain access to the legal system, and ensure safety and support throughout the legal process. In these multi-sectoral holistic efforts, IVAWA supports the development of societies where women’s and girls’ rights are recognized and promoted, and the problem of violence against women is effectively reduced.

That said, thousands of bills are up for legislation and many never make it into practice. The reason, Erin says, that IVAWA is so essential is that it is a first. "IVAWA is the first coordinating effort by the U.S. government to tackle violence against women and girls throughout the world. It aims to address Gender-Based Violence (GBV) by increasing violence prevention and response efforts within U.S. foreign assistance and diplomacy."

In August, Her Blueprint also reported in Health Versus Harm: Zero Tolerance on Violence Against Women and Girls that Gender-Based Violence amounts to an uncontained crisis. Accordingly, IVAWA would direct the State Department, in coordination with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), to create, develop, then implement a comprehensive five-year strategy to prevent violence against women and girls for five to 20 countries which are experiencing significant levels of violence.

Erin asserts that through "decades of experience working with communities to address poverty in more than 70 countries globally, CARE has found that empowering women and girls yields dramatic benefits for families, entire communities, and nations. But we [CARE] has also found that violence against women and girls is one of the key barriers to empowering women and addressing issues of poverty and inequality. So a bill such as IVAWA, that addresses violence, is important not only because it will help to protect and empower women and girls, but also because this will help to reduce poverty and support community development efforts."

In February 2010, when the bill was introduced, Dr. Helene Gayle, president and CEO of CARE stated in a press release, "The introduction of IVAWA sends a strong message that the United States will not stand by while women and girls are repeatedly abused and subjected to violence. The passage of this legislation would be a historic proactive step forward in improving lives around the world, and I urge the American public and members of Congress to support it."

Pictured is an IVAWA advertisement supported by the Family Violence Prevention Fund and Women Thrive Worldwide, two of the 150 organizations pushing for this pivotal bill to pass.

CLIO TALKS BACK: Should economic emancipation – the right to earn an independent living – be the most important priority for women today?

Clio recently attended a panel discussion at Stanford University. The topic was “Beyond the Stalled Revolution: Reinvigorating Gender Equality in the Twenty-First Century,” and the panelists included a number of leading feminist scholars. The focus was on the United States.

Achieving women’s equality in the marketplace emerged as an important focus of the discussion. The terms “equal pay” and “glass ceiling” blended with concerns about the politics of appearance and the dilemmas of old age. Resolving the conflict many women face between “work” (as paid employment) and “family” (parenthood, especially motherhood) emerged clearly as a priority for action: paid maternity leave, a national childcare policy are absent in the United States of America. For many women, this is a long-standing dilemma, born of our society’s still deeply-entrenched convictions that men should be the breadwinners and women should care for the children, even in an economic climate where, for many, two incomes are increasingly necessary to sustain families.

In thinking about what she had heard, Clio revisited a comparable period in the development of English feminism during the 1920s and 1930s, following attainment of the vote for all women in 1928. It was then, in planning for the future, that English feminists began to disagree sharply over how to reformulate their political agendas. Two distinct currents emerged, each of which had important economic implications for women. And in the struggle that ensued between them, the words “feminism” and “feminist” turned into “dangerous” words. Clio thinks that knowledge of what has happened in another culture can be helpful in reflecting on our own.

In 1925, an editorial appeared in The Woman's Leader and the Common Cause, entitled "What is Feminism?" The editorialist recounted Rose Macaulay's definition: "attempts of women to possess privileges (political, professional, economic, or other) which have previously been denied to them on account of their sex." But, the writer added, "this is not enough:" This editorialist asserted that:

The mere throwing open to women of all privileges, political, professional, industrial, social, religious, in a social system designed by men for men is not going to carry us all the way to our feminist ideal. And what that ideal is, becomes clear when we define feminism as "the demand of women that the whole structure and movement of society shall reflect in a proportionate degree their experiences, their needs, and their aspirations."

This included, in the writer's estimation, the social recognition of motherhood as having an equal claim "to be economically produced and legally protected."

Embedded in these lines was the thinking of Eleanor F. Rathbone, Member of Parliament, who had succeeded Millicent Garrett Fawcett as president of the now-renamed National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship (NUSEC; formerly the NUWSS). For nearly two decades Rathbone had been insisting that women's needs should be dealt with in women's terms. Her important book, The Disinherited Family (1924), had laid out her views on the woman question in the guise of an appeal to those in post-war England who, like their French colleagues, were concerned about the low birthrate and the shrinking power of the nation. Sylvia Pankhurst, in her small book Save the Mothers (1930), joined the campaign by calling on the government to supplement the voluntary provisions of the 1918 Maternity and Child Welfare Act with an effective nationally-funded maternity care system. In the wake of the Soviet Russian measures on behalf of maternity, however, even Rathbone's proposal for a family endowment act, with an allowance to be paid to the wife/mother rather than to a wage-earning husband, encountered serious resistance, though it was based on government allocations established during the war to support British soldiers' wives.

Significant opposition to family endowment came from within the English feminist movement itself, spearheaded initially by Fawcett, who cautioned that such payments to women would undermine men's sense of responsibility as husbands and fathers. By degrading men's roles as economic providers, endowment would thereby destroy, rather than stabilize the family, Fawcett affirmed.

Rathbone, in her rejoinder to Fawcett, "The Old and the New Feminism," castigated the strictly egalitarian approach that had for so long been the most visible feature of British feminism. Closer in her arguments to the Continental feminists of pre-war Germany and France, she insisted that:

At last we can stop looking at all our problems through men's eyes and discussing them in men's phraseology. We can demand what we want for women, not because it is what men have got, but because it is what women need to fulfil the potentialities of their own natures and to adjust themselves to the circumstances of their own lives. . . . The achievement of freedom is a much bigger thing than the breaking off of shackles.

In 1927, the English feminist movement fractured over these issues of work-related protective legislation and endowment of motherhood. Tensions that had long been building manifested themselves as schism. In a period when nearly half of the women in England were still without a political voice (though they did obtain it in 1928), Eleanor Rathbone's brand of "new" feminism and the pursuit of state support for mothers made the advocates of formal legal equality for women extremely uneasy.

Some English partisans of individual equality viewed all legal "protection" or privileges for mothers or for working women as a trap. This view characterized the feminists associated with the Six Points Group, and with the publication Time and Tide and its editor-benefactress, Margaret Haig Thomas Mackworth, viscountess Rhondda. Following the franchise victory in 1928, Lady Rhondda wrote that "the real task of feminism" is to "wipe out the overemphasis on sex that is the fruit of the age-long subjection of women. The individual must stand out without trappings as a human being." To such advocates of pure equality in the law and in the workplace, it seemed reprehensible for other feminists to play the motherhood trump in the way it had been and would repeatedly be played, for instance, in France, Germany, and later in Sweden and other Scandinavian countries.

The schism between these two approaches to feminism, one highly relational and woman-centered and the other highly individualistic, subsequently became enshrined in the somewhat misleading formulation, "equality versus difference," which complicated finding solutions into the 1980s. Both factions desired equality, but each understood the term "equality" in a different manner. The split between them would be reinforced and reified by subsequent developments, in particular by the construction of an explicitly dependent motherhood and wifehood in the post-World-War II British welfare state.

Clio asks: if you had lived in England in the 1920s and 1930s, would you have been on the side of Millicent Garrett Fawcett and Lady Rhondda? Or would you have agreed with Eleanor Rathbone? Which version of “equality” would you have supported? What version do you support today? Is economic equality the most important form of equality? Let’s have a discussion……

Source: adapted from Karen Offen, European Feminisms, 1700-1950: A Political History (Stanford University Press, 2000), chapter 10.

MAKE CHANGE: Promote Peace

via Flickr / J.L. McVay

Though they aren't always at the front lines of battle, violence against women is too often used as a tool of war in conflict countries. In 2000, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1325 on women and peace and security. But since then, little progress has been made.

Our partner organization The Global Fund for Women is spearheading a petition to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, asking her to take the lead in implementing Resolution 1325.

The petition reads, in part:

"We know women and children bear the greatest brunt of war as violence against women is used to break and humiliate women, men and communities. On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of UN Security Council Resolution 1325, the global women’s movement asks that the United States takes the lead in ensuring, to the largest extent possible, that peace processes around the world have the full participation of women at all stages."

Take a moment to add your name to this important movement! Sign the petition today>>

Haiti Post-Quake: Cholera Outbreak

From The Economist, a Haitian mother and her child's health are in intense need due to the cholera outbreak 40 miles north of Port-au-Prince. Before the outbreak, the safety of women and children, the need for focus on long-term strategies in the tent cities, putting up water points, lights in the latrines, staying goal-oriented in terms of long-term moves versus camp eviction were all gaining higher importance. Yet, as of last week Haiti was again reminded how hard their country's short-term recovery because of cholera alone.

According to the Economist, "The [Cholera] outbreak originated in the Artibonite valley, 60km (40 miles) to the north. By October 27th more than 300 people had died and more than 4,500 cases were confirmed, according to the Haitian Ministry of Health."

However, as per most major news sources the outbreak is one that needs attention and comittment due to the fact Haiti remains a country in heavy and immediate crisis.

Photo credit: The Economist

1000 WORDS: Sing Her Praises

A singer in Sao Paolo, Brazil, warms up. From Isabela Senatore's series in Picturing Power and Potential, "Women in Music."

Haiti Post-Quake: The Past Ten Months and Counting

On January 12, 2010, Haiti was ravaged by a catastrophic 7.0 earthquake that extensively damaged the country's main city of Port-au-Prince. By January 24, over 52 aftershocks were recorded that measured at least 4.5. Ten months ago exactly, on January 20, the New York Times published Aftershocks, by Évelyne Trouillot sharing those first days post-quake.

The family has set up camp in my brother’s house. I live just next door, but it makes us feel better to be all in the same house. My brother, a novelist, is writing his articles; I am writing mine. From time to time a tremor will make us pause and run back outside, just in case, to be safe. I wonder how long we will have to be so cautious, and I long for normalcy.

We sleep; we listen to the radio; we exchange information. Mostly, we have been trying to stay alive and sane since that Tuesday afternoon a week ago when the earthquake changed our lives forever. It doesn’t help that the earth continues to convulse. Just this morning, we felt another tremor, the most violent since the earthquake itself. Let us hope it did not cause more deaths and damage.

In an already impoverished country, the level of displacement due to this cataclysmic environmental disaster escalated to epidemic proportions. With 230,000 deaths at least, 300,000 injured, and 7.8 billion dollars in damages, in August Her Blueprint published Haiti: Displacement, TB, and Progress?, which cited over 1.2 million people were living in tent cities and that safety and health concerns for women and children were fast-becoming a highly relevant issue post-earthquake. Although Évelyne Trouillot's eloquent Aftershocks calls in vain hope for the short-term aftershocks themselves to not bring more death and damage, what kind of long-term aftershocks are the country facing and what kind of strategies are evolving to protect the most vulnerable?

Six Months Post-Quake

Recently, I spoke with Joanne Blakemore who arrived to Port-au-Prince, Haiti on June 12, the quake's six month anniversary. With a background in third-world travel, humanitarian causes, and relief work, Joanne had done Katrina hurricane relief work as well in Mississippi.

"I was in Haiti pre-hurricane season. Commercial enterprise seemed to be functioning. Children seemed not to be starving. But, I thought it made Biloxi, Mississippi [post-Katrina] look like West Chester. The tents these women and children are living in are miniscule. You can’t stand up in them."

Outright distress, post-traumatic stress disorder, and health and safety concerns was the tone coming out of the camps when Ms. Blog broke the story along with AWID of MADRE's report, Our Bodies Are Still Trembling: Haitian Women's Fight Against Rape, and its findings regarding rape in the tent cities.

"Six months after the earthquake in Haiti, we see a continued crisis of safety and security in the displacement camps that has exacerbated the already grave problem of sexual violence. We found that women are being raped at an alarming rate-every day-in camps throughout Port-au-Prince. The Haitian Government, the UN, and others in the international community have failed to adequately address the situation. Women, especially poor women, have been excluded from full participation and leadership in the relief effort."

Enter acknowledgment of one of the biggest challenges of Haiti along with eviction, education, and myriad health concerns: the safety of women and children.

Nine Months Post-Quake

In September, the tent cities were still just as large as ever with around 1 million people displaced, and the weariness of those contained within them were again being expressed by major news outlets as were the overt safety concerns for women and children. On September 19, the New York Times published Haitians Cry in Letters: ‘Please — Do Something!’. The title of the article is culled from a direct quote from Ms. Saint Hilaire, 33, who shared in a letter posted to the boxes put up by the International Organization for Migration, about how she and her children are "stranded in a camp annex without a school, a health clinic, a marketplace or any activity at all."

"Please — do something!" she wrote from Tent J2, Block 7, Sector 3, her new address. "We don’t want to die of hunger and also we want to send our children to school. I give glory to God that I am still alive — but I would like to stay that way!"

Ten Months Post-Quake and Counting

On October 7, 2010, Bloomberg published Haiti Earthquake Camps Expose Women to Sex Violence, which cites that as a country Haiti had significant problems with sexual violence pre-quake, but that post-quake the numbers are staggering. “Living in squalid, overcrowded and spontaneous camps for a prolonged period has aggravated levels of violence and appalling standards of living,” the Refugees International report said. The humanitarian response to the earthquake “appears paralyzed.”

In fact, the title of the Refugees International October 6 report, Haiti: Still Trapped in the Emergency Phase, shares the exact issue at hand: long-term strategies are not taking shape or evolution. The report explains in detail how "enhancing proper leadership, enhancing the security for displaced women, improving camp management, bridging the communication gap, and decentralizing resources to promote recovery" are integral to moving past the emergency phase into effective long-term strategies for the country's recovery.

Photo credit: Ms. Magazine Blog

BOOKS: Survivor's Ed

After finishing her book, I am incredibly excited to hear Ingrid Betancourt, former Colombian senator and political hostage, tell her story in San Francisco on October 28 for IMOW's next Extraordinary Voices, Extraordinary Change Speaker Series event.

Betancourt's book, Even Silence Has an End, is completely engrossing. I read it cover to cover and frequently had to remind myself that it was a nonfictional memoir; the life she and other prisoners endure, for six and a half years, are unimaginable.

One thing that struck me in Betancourt's telling of her experience is her constant attempts to mentally and emotionally overcome her physical imprisonment. She writes about how, lining up to receive a daily meal, she and the rest of the prisoners became greedy and desperate to get the largest portion. She admits that she tries and fails over and over again to overcome the impulse to grab what she can for herself in the jungle, where it truly is a survival situation.

It's a lesson she tries to embrace over and over again--fighting against your most base nature to rise above circumstances beyond your control. Near the end of her captivity, Betancourt experiences and articulates this lesson most profoundly:

"Having lost all my freedom and, with it, everything that mattered to me--my children, my mom, my life and my dreams--with my neck chained to a tree--not able to move around, to talk, to eat, and to drink, to carry out my most basic bodily needs--subjected to constant humiliation, I still had the most important freedom of all. No one could take it away from me. That was the freedom to choose what kind of person I wanted to be."

An admirable goal indeed, and one that I've thought about in my daily life since reading the book. For all the painful physical struggles and the miserable injustice of having spent more than six years as a political prisoner, it seems to me that the hardest part of surviving captivity would be embracing your freedom to be a stronger, braver person.

CLIO TALKS BACK: Reconciling Women’s Employment with Motherhood in Sweden, 1930s: Alva Myrdal

www.nobelprize.org

Alva Myrdal

Women in many countries today think that the problem of reconciling motherhood with employment is a new problem. Unfortunately, it is an old problem, one that has been debated repeatedly throughout the previous century in many countries.

Among the first to address this issue and come up with workable solutions was the Swedish social reformer and political activist Alva Reimer Myrdal (1902-1986).

Sociologist, author, politician, diplomat, and Nobel laureate (Nobel Peace Prize - 1982), Myrdal first entered public life with her plans for reconciling women’s employment with motherhood in the 1930s. Myrdal was educated at the universities of Stockholm and Uppsala. She married the economist Gunnar Myrdal in 1924, the year she graduated, and working together (while raising three children of their own) they revolutionized the ideas of both Swedish socialists and the Swedish women’s movement.

Why Sweden? For a variety of reasons, including extensive emigration and a falling birthrate, Sweden in the 1930s had been experiencing severe problems with lack of population growth and replacement. Social Democrats in Sweden, who controlled the government then and since, had advocated the spread of birth control information in order to improve the living standard of the poor – but this approach was opposed by those who feared further population decline.

Alva Myrdal succeeded in reframing the view commonly held not only in the socialist movement but in many other sectors of society, including the religious right-wing – that married women should not be permitted to remain in the labor force. On the contrary, she insisted that women workers should be aided, not penalized, if they married and bore children. As Myrdal described her accomplishment, “The old debate on married women’s right to work was turned into a fight for the working woman’s right to marry and have children.” In order to implement such a policy, a support system for women including family planning, child care, sex education, and modification of domestic labor and even of domestic architecture would, she believed, have to be instituted by the government.

The Swedish government set up a Population Commission and appointed Alva Myrdal secretary of the Government Committee on Women’s Work. In that capacity, from 1935 to 1938, Alva Myrdal was able to realize enactment of many of her ideas, with help from her husband, who was a guiding member of the Population Commission. In her book Nation and Family, Alva Myrdal documented both the evolving ideology and the Swedish government’s implementation of her plan to facilitate a dual role for women – as participants in the labor force and as mothers of families. Among her proposals were several radical ideas – to attack the then-prevailing notions of sex-role socialization and to promote the participation of fathers as well as mothers in household and childrearing tasks. She extended her analysis in a subsequent book with Viola Klein, Women’s Two Roles: Home and Work, published in 1956 and most recently reprinted in 2003.

Clio recommends that everyone interested in this question of reconciling motherhood and employment revisit Myrdal’s writings and the subsequent solutions implemented by the Swedes which made their country one of the most prosperous and peaceful nations in the world.

Further suggested reading:

Alva Myrdal, Nation and Family: The Swedish Experiment in Democratic Family and Population Policy (London, 1945; reprinted 1968 by MIT Press; originally published in Swedish, 1940)

Yvonne Hirdman, Alva Myrdal: The Passionate Mind (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008; originally published in Swedish).