This article is dated September 11, 2013, three days before the Indian court that held the rape trials of men accused of the horrific rape of a female college student on a bus, the injuries from which caused her death, handed down death penalties for the defendants (death by hanging).

I've written about the Indian (and Chinese) practice of aborting female fetuses.  A culture that refuses to change is a culture that WILL die, and it cannot happen soon enough as far as I'm concerned.  I hope it will happen before I die, sometime in the next 30 years or so. 

At CNN.com

Where have India's females gone?

By Carl Gierstorfer, Special to CNN

updated 5:01 PM EDT, Wed September 11, 2013

 

(CNN) -- The New Delhi rape case left the whole world wondering why India is treating its women so badly. In fact, discrimination against women already starts in the womb: India has some of the most distorted sex-ratios in the world. There are regions where fewer than 800 girls are born for every 1,000 boys. For many reasons Indian culture prefers sons. An expensive bride-price, or dowry, is only one of them.

 

So day-by-day, thousands of parents circumvent rarely enforced laws and have their baby daughters aborted after an ultrasound scan has revealed the sex of the fetus. It is estimated that India has been losing [aborted] up to 12 million baby girls over the last three decades.

 

I wanted to find out what it means for a society if such a significant number of women are missing.

In one village just two hours drive outside Delhi, I met Narinder, a schoolteacher, and his family. He had three brothers and only one of them got married. There weren't enough brides, because the village has been aborting their daughters for decades.

 

Narinder told me that he had already reached out to an agent who would find him a bride from afar. In fact, he planned to share this bride with his brothers.

 

I felt sorry for Narinder, because he totally understood that his misery was due to the fact that his village has been actively selecting for sons. Still, in a quiet moment, he confided to me, that if his purchased wife would be pregnant, he'd make sure it was a son. I was perplexed. Everyone in this village knew it was wrong to prefer sons over girls, everyone experienced the problems firsthand.

 

And still, like sleepwalkers, they continued their way, because culture dictates that sons are a blessing and daughters a curse. [Let them die off! Narinder, looking for a wife, plans to "share" his wife with his brothers? Get bent, dude! Go find a goat or a sheep and "share" it with your brothers. It's better for the perpetuators of this culture to die once and for all, and with it this sick culture - from Mother Earth once and for all. They will be the cause of their own demise.]

 

After the Delhi rape case, the whole world looked at India in disbelief, its urban middle class took to the streets. I returned to India to meet Shafiq Khan, a former Maoist rebel, who realized that violence is not the way forward. Shafiq now uses his wit and bravery to make inroads into rural India's patriarchal societies. 

 

We hit the dusty streets, down to Haryana where Shafiq introduced me to women who do not have a voice, women for whom nobody demonstrates. They are abused and raped and sold like cattle and nobody cares. They are called Paro, or strangers. They are the sort of women Narinder will buy -- those who make up for the scores who are never born.

 

Akhleema and Tasleema, two sisters from Kolkata, were born into a poor family, before her aunt sold them via an agent to two brothers in Haryana, who could not find a bride. Within weeks, Akhleema was beaten so hard by her husband, that she lost hearing in her left ear. Both spend their time cooking, cleaning and tending the fields. They have no rights, no voice and, most shockingly: there is no way back. They have children with their men and it is culturally unacceptable to leave them behind.

 

But where are all these trafficked women coming from? In a cruel paradox, it's the poor northeastern states of India, like West Bengal or Assam, where sex-ratios aren't that skewed, that make up for large parts of all the missing women.

 

Assam is beautiful, even during the dry season. The Brahmaputra winds its way through the plains, quietly and peacefully.

 

"But don't be mistaken", Shafiq says. Because during the rainy season, the river erupts over its banks, destroys fields and villages. In these already poverty-stricken regions, flooding takes away the little people have. Thousands of families are pushed into poverty and helplessness. They end up in flood shelters, vulnerable and easy prey for traffickers, like Saleha and her husband Husain. Their daughter Jaida went missing two years ago. They saw a man entering the hamlet and talking to Jaida. She vanished without a trace.

 

In a remote village on the dusty floodplains we meet Halida. She had just turned 14, when a man kidnapped her while fetching water. For two days he raped Halida, told her that he would bring her to Delhi in order to sell her. Halida could escape, but now she cannot go to school anymore, because all the children know of the rape and tease her. The parents, day-laborers, cannot find work anymore, because they are ostracized by the whole village. The rape destroyed the family.

 

While the trafficker may have lost his prey, it's unlikely that he will ever be punished. The police are corrupt and the more destruction there is, the easier it will be for him to find new victims.

 

Thus closes a vicious circle in which millions of India's women are trapped. The prejudices against women are so deeply engrained in the cultural fabric, that only a combined effort, old and young, urban and rural, will be able to break it once and for all.

Blatant Murder of Female Infant in India

From CNN

Indian father accused of killing baby 'for being a girl'

By Sara Sidner, CNN

updated 12:22 PM EDT, Thu June 14, 2012

Bangalore, India (CNN) -- Nineteen-year-old Reshma Banu sits on the stairs outside her parents' home, staring at the tiny screen on her cell phone.

The video on the screen has her mesmerized: a very short home video of her baby girl, Afreen. The moments captured are precious because they show Banu's only child alive and well.

Afreen died in the hospital. She was three months old. Authorities say the baby was admitted to the hospital with bite marks, cigarette burns and a dislocated neck. Police say she was killed by her father.

"After my delivery my husband had come to see me and the baby. He said, 'It is a girl, why did you give birth to a girl?'"

He wanted a boy, an heir. Girls were too expensive, he said. A couple of days after giving birth, Banu says her husband gave an ultimatum.

 

"For her wedding we will require a hundred thousand rupees (about US$1,800 dollars) for all the expense. If you can get that amount from your mother, then keep her, but if you can't, then kill her," Banu recalled her husband as saying.

She didn't believe he meant it and was sure he would change his mind once he held his soft, bright-eyed baby girl. Three months later, her baby is dead, and her husband is under arrest, accused of beating the baby to death. Police say he confessed to the killing.

This is by no means the first case of its kind in India. Attitudes, traditions, and economics have come together to make being a girl a dangerous prospect in the country, doctors say. Most of the time girls are disposed of long before they are born.

How? Sex-selective abortions.

India has a growing gender gap: The 2011 census showed that for every 1,000 boys six years or younger there were only 914 girls. It is the lowest child sex ratio since India's independence in 1947.

The United Nations has said India is the most dangerous place to be a girl. Dr. Anand Krishnan at All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), who has studied the gender gap for years, agrees.

"Yes, largely this is from the point of view of mortality statistics for girls versus boys," Krishnan told CNN.

Sex-selective abortions are against the law in India but are still happening at an alarming rate, he said.

His study shows a surprising trend: Sex selective abortions among the educated and well-off seem to be more prevalent than among the desperately poor and uneducated. Despite greater prosperity, their mindsets have not changed and they have the money to pay for ultrasounds and abortions.

"A boy is seen as a better investment. They prefer boys," Krishnan said.

"Girls are mostly aborted here. The people want more boys. There is a shortage of girls," Chandravati said without hesitation.

The villager was taking care of her neighbor's newborn baby girl. She cooed at the baby while blowing cigarette smoke into its tiny little face, oblivious to the dangers second-hand smoke could pose.

She told us the poorest people don't have the money to abort, so they are forced to keep girls, but those who can afford an ultrasound and abortion get rid of female fetuses.

"So much money is required to get them married. Where will the money come from?" she said. "Everything is so expensive these days."

But India is a country filled with in-your-face contradictions. When it comes to women and girls it is a place where the discarding of girls is juxtaposed with the fact that India has a female president and speaker of the House -- and its most powerful politician is a woman, Sonia Gandhi.

Indira Gandhi, Sonia's mother-in-law, became India's first woman prime minister and one of the world's first female heads of government.

In 2011 the latest census data showed the literacy rate for girls is growing faster than for boys.

Banu, whose husband is accused of killing their baby, and her parents say they always believed a baby -- boy or girl -- was a blessing. Her mother, Maqbool Bi, had four girls and a boy. Though the family is poor, she raised her girls with great hope for their futures.

"With all that is there in my heart, my heart breaks every time I recall what happened [to my granddaughter]. Even when I was starving I raised my children, all four of them. I used to pray to God to save me from seeing any of my children die before my own eyes. My children should succeed in life. They should make us proud," she said.

Banu now lives with her parents in a tiny two-room home filled to a bursting point with family members.  She will spend her life struggling with the fact that she never got the chance to raise her first child because the baby was born a girl.

With tears welling in her eyes, Banu said, "She had just come into the world. She was like a flower bud, and he killed her. I lost my daughter. What can be worse than this?"

Indian Girls Shed "Unwanted" Names

I just don't know what to say when confronted with an article like this, and it takes a lot (as you well know) to render me speechless:

285 Indian girls shed 'unwanted' names

By CHAYA BABU - Associated Press | AP – 6 hrs ago

MUMBAI, India (AP) — More than 200 Indian girls whose names mean "unwanted" in Hindi chose new names Saturday for a fresh start in life.

A central Indian district held a renaming ceremony it hopes will give the girls new dignity and help fight widespread gender discrimination that gives India a skewed gender ratio, with far more boys than girls.

The 285 girls — wearing their best outfits with barrettes, braids and bows in their hair — lined up to receive certificates with their new names along with small flower bouquets from Satara district officials in Maharashtra state.

In shedding names like "Nakusa" or "Nakushi," which mean "unwanted" in Hindi, some girls chose to name themselves after Bollywood stars like "Aishwarya" or Hindu goddesses like "Savitri." Some just wanted traditional names with happier meanings, such as "Vaishali" or "prosperous, beautiful and good."

"Now in school, my classmates and friends will be calling me this new name, and that makes me very happy," said a 15-year-old girl who had been named Nakusa by a grandfather disappointed by her birth. She chose the new name "Ashmita," which means "very tough" or "rock hard" in Hindi.

The plight of girls in India came to a focus as this year's census showed the nation's sex ratio had dropped over the past decade from 927 girls for every 1,000 boys under the age of 6 to 914. Maharashtra state's ratio is well below that, with just 883 girls for every 1,000 boys — down from 913 a decade ago. In the district of Satara, it is even lower at 881.

Such ratios are the result of abortions of female fetuses, or just sheer neglect leading to a higher death rate among girls. The problem is so serious in India that hospitals are legally banned from revealing the gender of an unborn fetus in order to prevent sex-selective abortions, though evidence suggests the information gets out.

Part of the reason Indians favor sons is the enormous expense of marrying off girls. Families often go into debt arranging marriages and paying for elaborate dowries. A boy, on the other hand, will one day bring home a bride and dowry. Hindu custom also dictates that only sons can light their parents' funeral pyres.

Over the years, and again now, there are efforts to fight the discrimination.

"Nakusa is a very negative name as far as female discrimination is concerned," said Satara district health officer Dr. Bhagwan Pawar, who came up with the idea for the renaming ceremony.

Other incentives, announced by federal or state governments every few years, include free meals and free education to encourage people to take care of their girls, and even cash bonuses for families with girls who graduate from high school.

Activists say the name "unwanted," which is widely given to girls across India, gives them the feeling they are worthless and a burden.

"When the child thinks about it, you know, 'My mom, my dad, and all my relatives and society call me unwanted,' she will feel very bad and depressed," said Sudha Kankaria of the organization Save the Girl Child. But giving these girls new names is only the beginning, she said.

"We have to take care of the girls, their education and even financial and social security, or again the cycle is going to repeat."

No Country for Little Girls

Warning: not suitable for children.

From Yahoo News/AP
Despite economic growth, India lets its girls die

By MUNEEZA NAQVI, Associated Press Muneeza Naqvi, Associated Press – Wed May 4, 4:51 pm ET
MORENA, India – The room is large and airy, the stone floors clean and cool — a welcome respite from the afternoon sun. Until your eyes take in the horror that it holds. Ten severely malnourished children — nine of them girls.

One year and 9-month-old Sania cries
(Photo from article)


In this photo taken Wednesday, April 13, 2011,
one year and 9-month-old Sania cries as she
 is weighed only 5 kilograms (11 pounds) on a scale after
eating  a meal at a ward for malnourished children at a
government hospital in Morena in the Central Indian
State of Madhya Pradesh.

The starving girls in this hospital ward include a 21-month-old with arms and legs the size of twigs and an emaciated 1-year-old with huge, vacant eyes. Without urgent medical care, most will not live to see their next birthday.

They point to a painful reality revealed in India's most recent census: Despite a booming economy and big cities full of luxury cars and glittering malls, the country is failing its girls.

Early results show India has 914 girls under age 6 for every 1,000 boys. A decade ago, many were horrified when the ratio was 927 to 1,000.

The discrimination happens through abortions of female fetuses and sheer neglect of young girls, despite years of high-profile campaigns to address the issue. So serious is the problem that it's illegal for medical personnel to reveal the gender of an unborn fetus, although evidence suggests the ban is widely circumvented.

"My mother-in-law says a boy is necessary," says Sanju, holding her severely malnourished 9-month-old daughter in her lap in the hospital. The woman, who goes by one name, doesn't admit to deliberately starving the girl but only shrugs her own thin shoulders when asked why her daughter is so sick.

She will try again for a son in a year or two, she says.

Part of the reason Indians favor sons is the enormous expense in marrying off girls. Families often go into debt arranging marriages and paying elaborate dowries. A boy, on the other hand, will one day bring home a bride and dowry. Hindu custom also dictates that only sons can light their parents' funeral pyres.

But it's not simply that girls are more expensive for impoverished families. The census data shows that the worst offenders are the relatively wealthy northern states of Punjab and Haryana.

In Morena, a sun-baked, largely rural district in the heart of India, the numbers are especially grim. This census showed that only 825 girls for every 1,000 boys in the district made it to their sixth birthdays, down from an already troubling 829 a decade ago.

Though abortion is allowed in India, the country banned revealing the gender of unborn fetuses in 1994 in an attempt to halt sex-selective abortions. Every few years, federal and state governments announce new incentives — from free meals to free education — to encourage people to take care of their girls.

In Morena, a Madhya Pradesh state government program offers poor families with one or two daughters a few thousand rupees (a few hundred dollars) for every few years of schooling, and more than 100,000 rupees ($2,250) when they graduate high school.

But while a handful of Indian women have attained some of the highest positions in politics and business — from late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to Pepsi CEO Indra Nooyi — a deep-rooted cultural preference for sons remains.

Even the government has accepted that it has failed to save millions of little girls.

"Whatever measures that have been put in over the last 40 years have not had any impact," India's Home Secretary G.K. Pillai said last month when announcing the census numbers.

In Morena's homes, villages, schools and hospitals lie some of the answers to why the country keeps losing girls.

In the district hospital's maternity ward, a wrinkled old woman walks out holding a just-born girl wrapped in a dirty rag like an unwelcome present. Munni, who uses only one name, is clearly unhappy. Her daughter-in-law has just given birth to her sixth girl in 12 years of marriage.

Will the daughter-in-law go through another pregnancy?

"Everyone wants boys. A boy takes care of you in your old age," Munni says.

As a mother-in-law, Munni will likely have enormous control over her son's wife, influencing how many children she has and nudging or bullying her to bear a son.

According to the current CIA "World Factbook," the United States has a birth ratio of 955 girls per 1,000 boys. In China, where families with a strong preference for boys sometimes resort to aborting their baby girls, there was a birth ratio of 885 girls per 1,000 boys.

District hospital head R.C. Bandil said his facility strictly obeys the law against using sonograms to reveal the gender of a fetus, adding that the sex ratio at birth there is as high as 940-945 girls per 1,000 boys.

Bandil said that for ages 6 and under, however, the ratio fell to 825 girls per 1,000 boys.

Part of the reason lies in the hospital's malnutrition ward.

"Women cry when they have girls," nurse Lalitha Gujar says as she spoons powdered coconut, peanuts and sesame seeds into bowls of fortified milk to nourish the tiny children.

All nine mothers of the sickly infant girls say they want sons — to look after them when they get old, because their sisters-in-law have more sons, because their mothers-in-law demand male children.

"If a woman has a boy, for a month she will be looked after. If she has a girl, she'll be back in the fields in three days," says Sudha Misra, a local social worker.

An exhausted mother who faces neglect, poor nutrition and blame for producing a daughter is likely to pass on that neglect, social workers say. For an infant, that can mean the difference between life and death.

"A malnourished child will get sick and the chances of death are very high," Bandil says.

Males get first priority. "First the husband is seated and fed, then the brothers and then whatever is left is fed to the girls," says Bandil. "If there are two mangoes in the house, first the boy will get to eat."

For the very poor, the pressures to bear sons result in mistreatment of both the baby girl and mother. And rich women are not immune to this mistreatment if they fail to bear male children.

For those with money, it's often about being able to locate a radiologist who, for a cost, will break the law and reveal the sex of the fetus, or being able to fly abroad for such tests.

A 2007 study by the rights group ActionAid India found that gender ratios were worse in urban areas, and that sex-selective abortions were more common among wealthier and higher-caste people who could afford ways to learn the gender of fetuses.

The law is not enough to combat "a society that values boys over girls," says Ravinder Kaur, a professor of sociology at New Delhi's Indian Institute of Technology.

"Laws are good because they may act as a deterrent" she says, but sex-selective abortions continue underground because "people find more devious ways."

The Census Tells the Tale

India's lost girls - and what the hell is India going to do?  Twenty years of girls are now gone - millions of girl babies aborted, and those boys that were born at the beginning of this period are going to be looking for wives.  Who are they going to marry? 

Census spotlights India's 'missing girls'
by Rupam Jain Nair Rupam Jain Nair – Sat Apr 2, 10:52 pm ET
NEW DELHI (AFP) – The problem of India's "missing girls" has been put under a harsh spotlight by new census data showing the ratio of female to male children at its lowest level since independence in 1947.

According to the latest national headcount, there are now just 914 girls for every 1,000 boys under the age of six, down from a ratio of 927 for every 1,000 a decade ago.

Despite India's steady economic rise in the past 10 years, the figures show the social bias against having girls remains as strong as ever, with illegal sex-selective abortions facilitated by cheap ultrasound technology.

"The figures should make us think 100 times before we call ourselves citizens of a progressive nation," said Delhi University social scientist Gitika Vasudev.

India's sex ratio has been falling continuously since 1961, when it stood at 976 girls for every 1,000 boys, and Vasudev said the latest data was "proof of India's collective failure" to protect girl children.

The global average is 1,050 girls for every 1,000 boys.

Married women in India face huge pressure to produce male heirs who are seen as breadwinners, family leaders and carers when parents age.

Girls are often viewed as a burden to the family as they require hefty dowries to be married off.

"Measures put in place over the last 40 years have not had any impact on the ratio," conceded India's home secretary G.K. Pillai, announcing the need for a "complete" family planning policy review.

India has a long history of female infanticide -- of girls suffocated, poisoned, drowned or left to die.

More common now, thanks to technological advances, is the abortion of female foetuses, or "female foeticide" -- a simple, cheap and difficult to police process with ultrasound tests costing as little as $10.

Signboards at clinics stipulating: "No sex determination tests done here" often pay little more than lip service to the law, and portable ultrasound machines mean tests can be carried out in the most remote villages.

As many as half a million female foetuses are estimated to be aborted each year in India, according to a 2006 study by British medical journal Lancet.

Social activists say legal safeguards have been rendered toothless by official apathy.

"It's not difficult to trace doctors who perform these tests but the government has not found it important enough to nab them," says gynaecologist D.P. Roy, director of "Beti ka Saath" or "A Daughter is a Companion", a voluntary group in the northern state of Haryana.

"Instead of spending money on seminars and public meetings, the government should post a cash reward for anyone who helps catch offenders," she said.

In the last few decades, successive governments have launched an array of schemes to change attitudes towards girls, including offering cash incentives, but they have had little impact.

There had been hopes that the growing affluence produced by India's rapid economic rise would help erode long-held prejudices, but some analysts say it has actually reinforced them.

"It's a misconception that English-speaking, suave, rich Indians do not use sex determination tests," said P.M. Kulkarni, a demography expert at New Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University.

"Shockingly, some rich Indians believe they have a right to choose whether they want a boy or a girl," Kulkarni said. "Society has to change, mindsets have to change, attitudes need to change to save the girl child."

******************************************

What's going to happen when the young men of India realize there aren't enough females of marriageable age for every man who wishes to marry?  Will forced child marriage become even more prevalent? Trafficking in females? Abduction and rape? Will young males from one village raid other villages for their females? Could regional wars break out - and spread? Think I'm exaggerating what could happen? 

Female "Gendercide" in India and China Taking Enormous Toll - With Consequences

March 8, 2011 is the International Day of Women.  I've posted about this subject before.  This article brings it home in a very understandable way.  The generations of these men to come will say "Make war, not love."  This isn't funny
From The Daily Beast, posted at Yahoo News

Ominous rise of a bachelor generation
Niall Ferguson Niall Ferguson – Sun Mar 6, 10:43 pm ET
NEW YORK – According to the United Nations, there are far more men on the planet than women. The gender gap is especially pronounced in Asia. In this week’s Newsweek Niall Ferguson looks at the ominous rise of a bachelor generation.

In 1927, Ernest Hemingway published a collection of short stories titled Men Without Women. Today, less than a century later, it sums up the predicament of a rising proportion of mankind.

According to the United Nations, there are far more men than women on the planet. The gender gap is especially pronounced in Asia, where there are 100 million more guys than girls. This may come as a surprise to people in the Western world, where women outnumber men because—other things being equal—the mortality rate for women is lower than for men in all age groups. Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen calls it the mystery of Asia’s “missing women.” [Mystery is a bad word choice - it's no mystery why there is such a severe shortage of women in India and particularly in China - they are killing the female babies.]

The mystery is partly explicable in terms of economics. In many Asian societies, girls are less well looked after than boys because they are economically undervalued. The kind of domestic work they typically do is seen as less important than paid work done by men. And, of course, early marriage and minimal birth control together expose them to the risks of multiple pregnancies.

When Sen first added up the missing women—women who would exist today if it were not for selective abortion, infanticide, and economic discrimination—he put the number at 100 million. It is surely higher now. For, even as living standards in Asian countries have soared, the gender gap has widened. That’s because a cultural preference for sons over daughters leads to selective abortion of female fetuses, a practice made possible by ultrasound scanning, and engaged in despite legal prohibitions. The American feminist Mary Anne Warren called it “gendercide.” Notoriously common in northwestern India, it’s also rampant in the world’s most populous country: China.

In China today, according to American Enterprise Institute demographer Nicholas Eberstadt, there are about 123 male children for every 100 females up to the age of 4, a far higher imbalance than 50 years ago, when the figure was 106. In Jiangxi, Guangdong, Hainan, and Anhui provinces, baby boys outnumber baby girls by 30 percent or more. This means that by the time today’s Chinese newborns reach adulthood, there will be a chronic shortage of potential spouses. According to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, one in five young men will be brideless. Within the age group 20 to 39, there will be 22 million more men than women. Imagine 10 cities the size of Houston populated exclusively by young males.

The question left open by economists is what the consequences will be of such a large surplus of young men. History offers a disquieting answer.

The question left open by economists is what the consequences will be of such a large surplus of young men. History offers a disquieting answer. According to the German scholar Gunnar Heinsohn, European imperial expansion after 1500 was the result of a male “youth bulge.” Japan’s imperial expansion after 1914 was the result of a similar youth bulge, Heinsohn argues. During the Cold War, it was youth-bulge countries—Algeria, El Salvador, and Lebanon—that saw the worst civil wars and revolutions. Heinsohn has also linked the recent rise of Islamist extremism in countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan to an Islamic youth bulge. Political scientists Valerie Hudson and Andrea den Boer warn that China and India could be the next countries to overdose on testosterone.

That has scary implications. Remember, most of Hemingway’s stories in Men Without Women are about violence. They feature gangsters, bullfighters, and wounded soldiers. The most famous story is called simply “The Killers.”

It may be that the coming generation of Asian men without women will find harmless outlets for their inevitable frustrations, like team sports or videogames. But I doubt it. Either this bachelor generation will be a source of domestic instability, whether Brazilian-style crime or Arab-style revolution—or, as happened in Europe, they and their testosterone will be exported. There’s already enough shrill nationalism in Asia as it is. Don’t be surprised if, in the next generation, it takes the form of macho militarism and even imperialism. Lock up your daughters.

Niall Ferguson is a professor of history at Harvard University and a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. He is also a senior research fellow at Jesus College, Oxford University, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His latest book, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, was published in November. 

The Poker Bride: A Story of Escape from Sexual Slavery

A book review, from The Wall Street Journal online:
From Far East to American West
Thanks to a poker game, she escaped the grim fate of so many Chinese women in 19th-century America.

By MELANIE KIRKPATRICK
In 1923, an old woman arrived on horseback in the central Idaho town of Grangeville. She rode down from the remote Salmon River Canyon where she had lived for 50 years with her late husband. She had never seen a train, been to a movie or ridden in a car. A local newspaper dubbed her a modern Rip Van Winkle.

Thus begins one of the more curious stories in the history of American immigrants. The woman, Polly Bemis, was Chinese. She had left her village in the Pearl River Delta, in southern China, more than a half-century earlier, sold by her starving parents to brokers who roamed the countryside looking for pretty girls to work in the sex trade in California. She was shipped to San Francisco, where she was purchased for a wealthy Chinese merchant in a mining town in the Idaho Territory. The year was 1872.

Not long after Polly arrived in Idaho, the merchant lost her in a poker game to a saloon keeper by the name of Charlie Bemis. When Charlie was badly injured in a shootout over a gold stake, Polly nursed him back to health. He then did something almost unheard of for a white man in the Wild West: He married her.

Polly's story, as told by Christopher Corbett in "The Poker Bride," is also the history of the first Chinese immigrants to arrive in the American West. While Mr. Corbett's focus is on the women, he provides a colorful overview of the Chinese experience in general and the appalling discrimination they suffered.

Before the transcontinental railroad, a ship could cross the Pacific Ocean faster than the Pony Express could travel from the West to the East Coast. So in 1848 the news of gold in California reached Hong Kong before it reached Boston. Thousands of Chinese risk takers set sail for what they called the Golden Mountain. In the U.S., they were dubbed "Celestials" or "Sojourners" or "Chinamen," a designation that did not become a slur until later, Mr. Corbett says. Mark Twain, Bret Harte and Ambrose Bierce—all writers he describes as sympathetic to the Chinese—called them "Chinamen."

At first, Mr. Corbett observes, Americans welcomed Chinese as exotic "curiosities." But as their numbers increased, so did public sentiment against them. Chinese, who were willing to work for low wages, were accused of stealing jobs from Americans. Virtually all newspaper accounts "portrayed the Chinese as thieving, shifty, and untrustworthy."

Yet at the height of the Chinese Must Go campaign of the 1880s, there were only about 100,000 Chinese in the country. Given that there were 50 million people in the U.S. at that time, Chinese accounted for a mere one-fifth of 1% of the national population. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred the entry of Chinese for 10 years. The Geary Act of 1892 required Chinese in the U.S. to carry residency permits. Charlie Bemis may have married Polly in 1894 in part to reduce the risk that she would be deported.

Polly was one of the lucky ones. Most Chinese women who reached the U.S. in the second half of the 19th century were forced into prostitution. Under the discriminatory laws of the day, which were aimed at encouraging Chinese workers to go home, wives were prohibited from coming to join their husbands in the U.S. Young Chinese women were either smuggled into the country or allowed to enter by officials who knew that they were destined for the sex trade.

There was a class system among prostitutes, Mr. Corbett notes, and Chinese women ranked at the bottom. Chinese prostitutes rarely worked in high-class brothels alongside white women. The most fortunate, like Polly, were sold as concubines. But most were destined for "cribs" or "hog ranches"— essentially huts partitioned by curtains—where they serviced many men in a single night. Mr. Corbett quotes a reporter of the day who visited San Francisco's Chinatown and who related the pitch of a Chinese crib girl: "Two bittee lookee, flo bittee feelee, six bittee doee."

The crib girls usually succumbed to venereal disease at a young age. As recounted in an 1869 article in the San Francisco Chronicle, an ailing prostitute would be locked into a "hospital," where she would be given a cup of water, a cup of rice and an oil lamp. If she wasn't dead by the time the lamp went out, the doctor would hasten the process along. "They come for a corpse, and they never go away without it," as the reporter put it.

Mr. Corbett is a journalist, formerly with the Associated Press and now teaching at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, and "The Poker Bride" has a journalistic quality. The book is crammed full of quotations from contemporaneous sources and from books by scholars who have written on the Chinese experience. But it's too much of a good thing. While the quotations often add authority and color, they can also be distracting and impede the narrative flow.

At the close of "The Poker Bride," a photo shows Polly at home on the Bemis ranch. She is standing with two horses and a bushel basket at her feet. Her hair is pinned up neatly in a bun, and she is dressed in an ankle-length cotton dress that is protected by a long white apron. The only thing that differentiates her from other American frontierswomen is her face.

Before settling down on the ranch, Polly had run a boarding house and worked as a nurse. By all accounts she was energetic, hard-working and generous to those in need. In short, she thrived. Her success was not typical of the Chinese in America at that time. But on one level it reflects the essence of the American immigrant experience.

Ms. Kirkpatrick is a former deputy editor of the Journal's editorial page.

***********************************************************************

The trafficking of women and especially children for sexual exploitation is rampant today.  It is worse than it ever was.  In China, where there is a growing and severe shortage of marriageable age females, these crimes will only get worse.  Already the Communist authorities are worried about potential political unrest due to the unavailability of marriageable-age women.  There are millions of young men ready to marry - and they cannot find a mate.

This is what happens in a society that does not respect the natural balance between the sexes, but aborts female fetuses by the millions and exposes female infants to die in gutters and gullies because sons are preferable.  The entire problem is exascerbated by the "one child" rule in over-populated China.

India faces similar problems, although they do not have a "one child" rule - yet.  In India it is easy for even the poorest families to obtain an ultrasound of a pregnant woman's fetus to determine the child's sex.  Female fetuses are routinely aborted because of the cultural preference for sons.  Add to that the practice of systemically murdering widows in the age-honored (although long outlawed) practice of sutee - well, you get the picture. 

These two countries represent more than two-fifths of the world's entire population.  Instead of serious discussions about the warped cultural values that allow female fetuses, infants and grown women to be killed with impunity, the governments are allowing the increasing sexual imbalance beween males and females to spin out of control.  In China, I believe the present imbalance is 134 males for every 100 females of "marriageable" age.  Contrast that ratio with the traditional birthrate of 105 males to 100 females:

The reason for the difference, says Christopher Wills, professor of ecology, behavior and evolutionary biology at the University of California at San Diego, is that Mother Nature stacks the deck in favor of male births. Nature gives males an edge at birth because male fetuses and babies are less hardy than female fetuses and babies. So, by the time males reach the age at which they can reproduce, there should be a one-to-one ratio.   Article.

Just on a guess, after I read this book review earlier today, I did a quick search under "poker bride" and - sure enough - a story emerged that has nothing to do with the book of 19th century sexual slavery in the United States per se, but everything to do with the inequities visited on females by perverted societies:

From ctv news online:

Pakistan girl was to be poker debt bride
Associated Press
Date: Tuesday Feb. 27, 2007 11:29 PM ET
KARACHI, Pakistan — Police are seeking 10 men, including several tribal elders, accused of pressuring a Pakistani woman to hand over her teenage daughter as payment for a 16-year-old poker debt, officials said Tuesday.

In the latest case highlighting how conservative customs threaten women's rights in Pakistan, Nooran Umrani alleges that, despite paying off her late husband's debt of $165, she was threatened with harm if she failed to hand over her daughter, Rasheeda.

The 17-year-old was to be surrendered as a bride for the son of Lal Haider, the man who won the card game years before, Umrani told reporters on Monday in Hyderabad, 100 miles northeast of Karachi.

Umrani said her husband was a gambler who ran up the debt at a poker game when Rasheeda was 1 year old. He promised Haider that he would get Rasheeda in lieu of payment when she grew up, the mother said.

Koral Shah, a Hyderabad police officer, said both families belong to the Umrani tribe of Pakistan's impoverished Baluchistan province.

He said a group of elders from the tribe came to Hyderabad in January to investigate the case and had ruled that, under tribal custom, the girl should be married to Haider's 23-year-old son Abdul Ghani.

Police want to arrest the elders, he said.

Police said Tuesday the mother and daughter were in their protection and that an investigation was opened against Haider, his son and eight others.

"We are investigating the matter and vigorously searching" for the men, Hyderabad police chief Irfan Bhutto said.

President Gen. Pervez Musharraf has vowed to give women more rights in line with his policy to project Pakistan as a moderate, progressive Islamic nation.

In December, Musharraf signed into law a bill that makes it easier to prosecute rape cases in the courts, and the country's ruling party recently introduced a bill to outlaw forced marriages, including under tribal custom in which women are married off in order to settle disputes.

So, warped religious values too, have a role to play in the growing grievous issue of gender imbalance in the so-called "developing" nations.  Developing, my ass.

I would say ha ha, you deserve what you get, stupid males in stupid backward countries and believers in stupid backward religions, and I hope you all go the way of the do-do bird, except that it is always women and children who suffer for the stupidity of men, no matter where. 

I feel a great deal of sympathy for the Amazons, they may have had it right after all. 

A Pledge to the Goddess to Stop Female Foeticide

From IndiaExpress.com: Ambaji pilgrims pledge before goddess to fight female foeticide Amrita Didyala Posted: Oct 13, 2008 at 0313 hrs IST Ahmedabad, October 12 A total of five lakh ‘Sankalp Patras’ signed to save the girl child and curb sex discrimination Pilgrims at the famous Ambaji temple in Banaskantha district found a new way to check the dwindling female sex ratio in the state - ‘Sankalp Patras’. The Ambaji Temple Committee members made the devotees sign the ‘Sankalp Patras’ to curb sex discrimination and female foeticide, along with a pledge to save the girl child. A total of five lakh ‘Sankalp Patras’ were signed. R.J Patel, District Collector of Banaskantha and Chairman of the Ambaji Temple Committee, said: “Out of the 25 lakh pilgrims who visited Ambaji Temple, a total of 5 lakh devotees signed the Sankalp Patras in a span of 5 days between September 11 and 15.” He added: “While the idea has been implemented for the first time at any religious place, the chances of its success are quite high as people have willingly taken a pledge before the goddess and are most likely to abide by it. In fact, we did not have to make too many efforts to persuade the devotees. All we had to do was to put up notice boards along with the Sankalp Patras.” The Ambaji Development Authority also plans to implement the same method to make devotees pledge for saving the girl child by making the Sanklap Patras available in the soon-to-be developed replicas of the 51 Shaktipeeths at the Gabbar mountain. Patel said: “We have plans to extend the experiment to other religious destinations in the area as well. This is for the first time that such an experiment has been undertaken at a religious place in the state. However, with the active participation of future devotees, the awareness campaign is bound to be effective.”

Did a Shortage of Women Cause the Viking Age?

Viking Age Triggered by Shortage of Wives? Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News Sept. 17, 2008 -- During the Viking Age from the late eighth to the mid-eleventh centuries, Scandinavians tore across Europe attacking, robbing and terrorizing locals. According to a new study, the young warriors were driven to seek their fortunes to better their chances of finding wives. The odd twist to the story, said researcher James Barrett, is that it was the selective killing of female newborns that led to a shortage of Scandinavian women in the first place, resulting later in intense competition over eligible women. "Selective female infanticide was recorded as part of pagan Scandinavian practice in later medieval sources, such as the Icelandic sagas," Barrett, who is deputy director of Cambridge University's McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, told Discovery News. Although it's believed many cultures throughout world history have practiced female infanticide, said Barrett, he admits that "it is difficult to identify in the archaeological record," so the claim "must remain a hypothesis." To strengthen the argument, however, Barrett has reviewed and dismissed several other proposed causes for the Viking Age. Improved seafaring technologies are often cited as the trigger, but he points out that an earlier migration from Scandinavia to Britain took place in the fifth and sixth centuries. "Thus the development of the Viking ship cannot have been a cause of movements of this kind," he said. "Ships capable of carrying warriors over long distances are a necessary pre-requisite for the Viking Age, but clearly they did not cause it." What's more, he points out, the sailing time from Norway to Ireland is quite short -- perhaps a week using vessels of the time -- so the Vikings were probably capable of raiding Ireland well before the official start of their reign of terror. The study is published in the current issue of Antiquity. Barrett also dismisses other proposed causes of the Viking Age, such as climate change, overpopulation in Scandinavia, economic woes and more. An intriguing archaeological clue is that much of the bounty plundered from Britain -- particularly from monasteries -- wound up later in the graves of Viking wives. The items included precious metals, fine cloth, jewelry and other handicrafts. Barrett's analysis of Nordic historical records found that Scandinavian men often served as warriors, frequently forming "military brotherhoods," until they were able to marry and establish their own households, which were key to prestige and power. According to Barrett, honor and religious fatalism -- the idea that the time and manner of death is predestined -- also fueled the Vikings, helping explain why men were willing to risk death in violent battles and risky seafaring. The Viking religion held that "the cosmos began in the frozen emptiness...and will end in fire with the last battle," said Barrett. Despite the infanticide, he still believes the Vikings "highly valued" women. Aside from lavishing bridal prospects with plundered goods, they held solemn burials at sea for women. In fact, one of the most important known Viking Age burials, involved numerous goods and two female skeletons encased in a ship called the Oseberg. Soren Sindbaek, assistant professor of medieval and Renaissance archaeology at Denmark's University of Aarhus, told Discovery News that the new paper "is very right in pointing out the inadequacy" of former explanations for the Viking Age. "We need indeed to seek for an individual, social motivation behind the fact that a large number of young men chose to set out on extremely risky voyages in hopes of acquiring wealth and esteem in foreign lands," Sindbaek said. "Barrett points to the wish of disadvantaged young men to acquire resources necessary to set up a family as crucial," he added. "This is the 'marriage imperative,' which I think Barrett succeeds in substantiating within the limitations of the evidence." Barrett suggested additional studies on the Vikings since would help "to understand how small-scale societies -- and issues of a very human scale -- can have a large impact on world history, positive and/or negative."

*********************************

Female infanticide is practiced in India and China (I've posted about that here before) because of a cultural bias for males. In India, although the practice has been outlawed by the national government, female fetuses are identified through walk-up ultrasound vendors and aborted. In China, ultrasound has caught on among the emerging middle class, but China is still mostly rural and in the rural areas they don't have ultrasound vendors and even if they did, the rural poor can't afford it. If a female child is born and is unwanted its neck is broken at birth by the midwife or the child is left outside away from the village to die of exposure and be scavenged by wild animals and carrion eating birds. The "lucky" ones are given over to state orphanages where they languish from lack of care and often die before they are two. The imbalance between the ratio of males to females has become acute in both countries. Government policies to "encourage" couples to produce and nurture female infants have not been able to remedy the imbalance. What happens to a society when there aren't enough females for men looking for mates?

Female Infanticide in India

A frank look at a problem most people in the west aren't even aware exists in the world's "largest democracy." Girls at risk amid India's prosperity By Nick Bryant BBC News August 18, 2007 India is in the throes of a revolution of rising expectations, a country animated by a providential sense of its own possibility. Already, it is close to dislodging Japan as the world's third largest economy, if purchasing power is taken into account. And by 2040 should have eased past China to become the planet's most populous country. Though progress can be agonisingly and needlessly slow, especially in the countryside, living standards are improving, along with literacy rates and life expectancy. In Mumbai not so long ago, I visited what can only be described as a gentrified slum, where a young father sat in front of his colour television mesmerised by the fast-moving ticker racing across the bottom of the screen. He was checking on the value of his share portfolio, and happily it was increasing with each occasional blink of his eyes. Daring to dream Even in the shanties, still stinking and overcrowded, people are daring to dream. The signs of change are everywhere. Inequalities aside, the crude equation that increased wealth will lead ultimately to decreased suffering should apply to most of India's social and economic maladies. Yet there is one problem that prosperity is actually aggravating. I saw this for myself in a hospital in Punjab, where we filmed a young mother giving birth, with the help of a surgeon's scalpel, to her second daughter. The Caesarean section was a complete success, and the safe arrival of such a beautiful ball of life should have been greeted with uncomplicated delight. But the mother had failed once again to provide her husband with a son and heir, so it was a singularly joyless occasion. Old attitudes Handed the little girl, not yet 10 minutes old, the women of the family were disapproving and edgy, fretful perhaps of how they would break the news to the men folk, who had not even come to the hospital. On the maternity ward a few minutes later, I was asked by one of the ladies - the mother's sister, I think - whether we would like to name the baby girl. We demurred, of course. Then came an even more extraordinary request: did we want to take the baby, not just to hold, but to have? In another time, she might have been killed. For this prosperous Punjabi family, we seemingly offered a less savage means of disposal. In modern-day India, sex selection, the all-too-common practice by which female foetuses are terminated before birth, conforms to a very different and disturbing calculus: increased wealth brings increased access to prenatal ultrasounds and sonograms. New and more widely available technology, the engine of India's relentless economic growth, is also fuelling female foeticide. Illegal According to a study by Unicef, a higher percentage of boys are born now than 10 years ago in 80% of India's districts. Only last month in the state of Orissa, the skulls of 40 female foetuses and newborn girls were discovered in an abandoned well. More distressing still, sex selection is worst in the most affluent parts of the country: Punjab, Haryana, Gujarat. In northern Punjab, for example, there are just 798 girls under the age of six for every 1,000 boys. The national average is 927. Even though it is illegal in India for a doctor to reveal the gender of an unborn child, the law is rarely enforced. Over the past 20 years, it has been estimated that some 10 million female foetuses have been aborted. Girls are unwanted because they are seen as a financial burden. Land holdings can pass to in-laws and dowries, which themselves are illegal, siphon money from families. First birthday Why pay 50,000 rupees to your new in-laws when you can pay 500 rupees for an abortion? You do not even have to leave home. Many unscrupulous doctors carry portable ultra-sound equipment in the boots of their cars. Increased consumer choice is one of the hallmarks of the new India. Tragically, it is being applied, with almost industrial efficiency, to depress the female birth rate.