Again the Question: Why Separate Women's Events and Titles?

From Haaretz

Keeping the queen off the chess board

Men and women competed separately in Eilat [in October], raising questions about the need for a gender divide.

     
By Eli Shvidler | Oct.31, 2012 | 6:36 AM

The European Chess Club Cup, which Eilat hosted earlier this month, boasted not only 34 men's teams but also eight women's teams.
    

Although Judit Polgar, the highest ranked women's chess player in the world, did not show up, the tournament did draw world champion Yifan Hou, 18, who won the title when she was just 16. Other prominent names included Humpy Koneru of India (No. 2 in the world ), former world champion Alexandra Kosteniuk, Slovenian Anna Muzychuk (No. 4 in the world) and European champion Valentina Gunina of Russia.

    

Kosteniuk, by the way, defeated Hou, No. 3 in the world, in the first round.

    

Although these women are all extremely talented, still they competed against each other and not the men. The World Chess Federation awards separate men's and women's titles.

    

Why the gender divide? Do the women play less well than the men, and if so, why? Does it have to do with comprehension of the game, with being more emotional, impatient, naive? Or is it due to inherent discrimination in the system?

    

If change is going to come, Hou - the youngest world champion ever - is in a good position to jump into the fray. She helped China win the team world championship by three points over runner-up Russia and added to her horde of medals an Olympic silver with her national team, as well as a second straight European Club Cup championship with the Monte Carlo.

    

Hou participates in many men's tournaments. She shared first place at one tournament in Gibraltar among a field of 55 male chess grandmasters - 11 of them with a rating of over 2,700 points. She told Haaretz that playing male grandmasters is an important opportunity to amass experience at the highest levels.

    

There are clear differences between women's chess and men's chess, according to Hou. She says men's strategic thinking is different from that of women, and that the men have more ideas. Women's chess is more emotional, even suffering from excessive emotion, Hou says. [Bullshit!  She's obviously being coached my chauvinist males who have brow-beat this crap into her head.  That's why she'll settle for a women's world chess champion title and never seriously make a run toward the real thing -- the title that heretofore has always been held by a male.]  She says that's the reason it is good to mix in games against men with games against women.

    

Still, the overall difference between men and women in Eilat was clear. The women players barely barely left the tables. Even Hou rarely allowed herself to get up, spending most of the time focused on the board. In contrast, the men took strolls and did not sit at the board when they weren't mulling over the next move.

    

Vitali Golod, coach of Israel's national women's chess team for the past seven years, says psychological preparation is essential for female players. He says half the battle is convincing them that everything is fine.

    

Beyond that, it's better to focus on a thoroughly rehearsed plan without piling on variations, Golod says, adding that it is very important for female players to have a plan that lets them obtain a good position on the board and attempt to guess which opening will be created in the game. Otherwise, there's a risk of over-anxiety, he says.

    

Golod believes when a woman loses it's better not to go to her immediately but rather to wait a little to allow her to calm down. He says women usually don't stay to analyze a game after it's over, in contrast to male chess players. He says he's asked women about this and they have told him they were sick of seeing their opponent's face. He adds that women also tend to tire more quickly than men. [Certainly physical differences come into play in terms of endurance and exhaustion, but the rest of  Golod's comment -- it's just so typical and something women, who internationally compose only 7% of all chessplayers in the world, hear every single day.  After awhile, they begin to believe the lie!]

    

Man-beaters

 

Judit Polgar, 36, and her two sisters demonstrate time and again that even if there is truth to what Hou and Golod say, women can defeat men on the board. Sofia Polgar, the middle sister, recently played 17 men simultaneously and beat them all.

    

The Polgars, a Jewish family from Hungary, have been associated with dominance and unrivaled quality in women's chess for three decades. The trio's father, Laszlo Polgar, is a psychologist who believes that geniuses are made, not born.

    

Initially he forbade his daughters from playing against other women, which led the Hungarian Chess Federation to ban the family. After the ban was lifted the Polgar girls won the 1988 and 1990 Chess Olympics in Thessaloniki and Novi Sad, and took silver at the 1994 competition in Moscow.

    

Judit, the youngest, is the only woman among the world's top 10 chess players. She beat former world champions Gary Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov and continues to represent Hungary, on the men's team.

    

Susan (Zsuzsa ), at 43 the oldest of the sisters, is a former women's world champion.

    

Sofia, who is married to Yona Kosashvili, a Georgian-born Israeli who is a chess grandmaster in his own right, teaches chess and is working to increase the game's popularity. She says there are several female chess players who can put up a fight against male players at the highest levels and that there is no reason for women to be inferior to men in chess. According to Sofia, the main differences are cultural and have to do with women's commitments to their families, which have shortened or ended the careers of many female players.

    

Sofia recalls that when Judit was eight or nine their family recognized that she had the makings of a champion. Judit's way of thinking was different from most female chess players, Sofia says, adding that she displayed a sharp mind, a desire to take tactical positions and an approach devoid of excessive emotion. Judit is professional in every respect, says Sofia. The difference between her youngest sister and male chess players is that the burdens of raising children and other family duties fall mainly on her, as wonderful as her husband is.

     

Although Sofia is married to a chess grandmaster she is barely active in the game, perhaps aware of the demands on a woman seeking to be among the top players in the world. She says that when they were young she and her sisters had to put in seven to eight hours a day on chess, working with and without professional coaches.

     

The girls began beating their father at chess by the time they were eight, she adds.

What Does This Mean - Having It All?

I haven't been blogging much recently.  I am dealing with some inconvenient health issues and, frankly darlings, at nearly 61, although I feel internally as young as I always have (eternal youth), my body and energy level are not cooperating.

How much, then, I was touched and disturbed by this article I just finished reading at The New York Times.  I have started down the road of the last third of my life which will, I hope, last a good 30 years or so - but no one comes with a guarantee, do they.  What I see happening in this country is profoundly upsetting and discouraging.  As a product of that generation of women talked about in the article -- you know, the so-called pioneers -- I can only shake my head and ask myself "Why the hell did you even bother, Jan?" 

Elite Women Put a New Spin on an Old Debate
By JODI KANTOR
Pulished: June 21, 2012

If a woman has a sterling résumé, a supportive husband who speaks fluent car pool and a nurturing boss who just happens to be one of the most powerful women in the world herself, who or what is to blame if Ms. Supposed-to-Have-It-All still cannot balance work and family?

A magazine article by a former Obama administration official has blown up into an instant debate about a new conundrum of female success: women have greater status than ever before in human history, even outpacing men in education, yet the lineup at the top of most fields is still stubbornly male. Is that new gender gap caused by women who give up too easily, unsympathetic employers or just nature itself?

The article in The Atlantic, by Anne-Marie Slaughter, a Princeton professor who recently left a job at the State Department, added to a renewed feminist conversation that is bringing fresh twists to bear on longstanding concerns about status, opportunity and family. Unlike earlier iterations, it is being led not by agitators who are out of power, but by elite women at the top of their fields, like the comedian Tina Fey, the Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg and now Ms. Slaughter. In contrast to some earlier barrier-breakers from Gloria Steinem to Condoleezza Rice, these women have children, along with husbands who do as much child-rearing as they do, or more.

The conversation came to life in part because of a compelling face-off of issues and personalities: Ms. Slaughter, who urged workplaces to change and women to stop blaming themselves, took on Ms. Sandberg, who has somewhat unintentionally come to epitomize the higher-harder-faster school of female achievement.

Starting a year and a half ago, Ms. Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, injected new energy into the often circular work-or-home debate with videotaped talks that became Internet sensations. After bemoaning the lack of women in top business positions, she instructed them to change their lot themselves by following three rules: require your partner to do half the work at home, don’t underestimate your own abilities, and don’t cut back on ambition out of fear that you won’t be able to balance work and children.

The talks transformed Ms. Sandberg from little-known executive to the new face of female achievement, earning her untold letters and speaking invitations, along with micro-inspection of her life for clues to career success. She hired a sociologist, Marianne Cooper, to help her get the research and data right. When Ms. Sandberg confessed in a recent interview that, contrary to her work-hound reputation, she leaves work at 5:30 p.m. to eat dinner with her children, and returns to a computer later, she earned yet another round of attention, and her words were taken as the working-mom equivalent of a papal ruling.

But her advice also spurred quiet skepticism: by putting even more pressure on women to succeed, was she, even unintentionally, blaming the victim if they did not?

Enter Ms. Slaughter’s article, posted Wednesday night, in which she described a life that looked like a feminist diorama from the outside (a mother and top policy adviser for Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton) but was accompanied by domestic meltdown (workweeks spent in a different state than her family, a rebellious teenage son to whom she had little time to attend). As she questioned whether her job in Washington was doable and at what cost, she began hearing from younger women who complained about advice like Ms. Sandberg’s.

“Women of my generation have clung to the feminist credo we were raised with ... because we are determined not to drop the flag for the next generation,” Ms. Slaughter wrote. “But when many members of the younger generation have stopped listening, on the grounds that glibly repeating ‘you can have it all’ is simply airbrushing reality, it is time to talk.”

“Although couched in terms of encouragement, Sandberg’s exhortation contains more than a note of reproach,” Ms. Slaughter continued, an insinuation of “ ‘What’s the matter with you?’ ”

Instead, Ms. Slaughter said, the workplace needs to adapt, and women who opt out have no need to apologize.

In an interview, Ms. Slaughter added that she was motivated to write in part by her concern about the number of women serving in high posts under President Obama — and now that the first round of female appointees is leaving, she said, they are mostly being replaced by men. “I don’t think there is sufficient appreciation across the administration as a whole of the different circumstances facing women and men,” she said.

Unlike in earlier eras, when Germaine Greer would publish one book and then Betty Friedan would weigh in months later, a new crop of feminist bloggers and writers now respond instantaneously. The women they were writing about followed along in real time on Thursday as well, reading the debate as they were living it, inhaling Ms. Slaughter’s article and the responses as they stole a few minutes from work or raced off to pick up their children. By Thursday afternoon, Ms. Slaughter’s confession-slash-manifesto was breaking readership records for The Atlantic’s Web site, according to a magazine representative.

Many responded with enthusiasm for Ms. Slaughter’s recommendations (more latitude to work at home, career breaks, matching work schedules to school schedules, even freezing eggs). Some defended Ms. Sandberg or expressed solidarity with their husbands, who they said feel just as much work-life agita as they do. More than a few said they were irritated by what they called outdated language (“having it all”) and a clichéd cover illustration (Baby, check. Briefcase, check).

“Irresponsibly conflating liberation with satisfaction, the ‘have it all’ formulation sets an impossible bar for female success and then ensures that when women fail to clear it, it’s feminism — as opposed to persistent gender inequity — that’s to blame,” Rebecca Traister wrote in an article on Salon.com.

For her part, Ms. Sandberg remained silent, declining a request to address the Atlantic article. But Ms. Slaughter said in an interview that the Silicon Valley executive was one of the many readers who e-mailed her as soon as the article came out. Her message: they had to talk more about this, and soon.         

A version of this article appeared in print on June 22, 2012, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Elite Women Put New Spin On Old Debate.

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."

OINK! Sexism Rears Its Head in Nalchik Interviews

Oh for Goddess' sake!  As if it's not bad enough these women, some of the best female chessplayers in the world, are playing for peanuts, the questions they are having to answer in these video "interviews" are absolutely ridiculous!  How insulting!  What are these organizers thinking?  Are they thinking at all?

Take a look at the "official" website for the Women's Grand Prix-Nalchik:

Ju Wenjun - about chess, life and hobbies
- Does the Chinese grandmaster want to marry?
- What clothes does she wear?
- Does she like to dance?

These and other questions are in the exclusive interview with Ju Wenjum specially for an official site of Grand-prix

And this --

Alisa Galliamova - about family, chess and life (in Russian) - What stile of clothes does the double champion of Russia prefer? - How many times does she spend in a beauty salon? - How often does she go to the discos? - Is she in love now? These and other questions are in the exclusive interview specially for official site Gran Prix.

Does anyone ask Shirov about his love life?  Maybe they should, ha!  Honestly, darlings, does anyone ask a male chessplayer whether he wants to get married and have children?  What clothes he likes to wear?  Does he like to dance and go to the discos?  Is he in LOVE right now?  How often do they get their hair done?  Could you see Kasparov answering such questions?  Aronian?  Topalov?  GIVE ME A FRIGGING BREAK!

I Want My Own Name Back --

'Sis sent this article to me.  I think it ties in quite eloquently, despite being from half a world away (Japan), to the interesting fact my friend Ann passed along to me a few days ago that I mentioned in an earlier blog that, in the United States of America, between the years 1907 and 1920, a female citizen of this country LOST HER CITIZENSHIP if she married a man who was not also a citizen of the USA.  Under the eyes of this law, a woman ceased to exist as an independent person (or legal entity) when she married.  Absolutely, incredibly disgusting!

I wonder if the citizenship statutes that govern our laws today in the USA contain some equally horrible aspects denigrating a woman's being as well.  For sure in Japan they still do!
Government to face first suit on surnames
Tue, Jan 11 11:05 AM EST
By Yoko Kubota

TOKYO (Reuters) - After nearly fifty years of persevering with a life under her husband's surname, 75-year-old Kyoko Tsukamoto is taking the Japanese government to court so that she can at least bear her own name when she dies.

"My husband and I still love each other, but this and the issue of Tsukamoto are different," she said.

The former teacher uses her maiden name, but due to Japanese civil law requirements she had to take her husband's name when she married to make the union legal.

But debate over the surname issue, long a sore point with some women, has heated up as more women stay in jobs after marriage and juggle two names -- their maiden name at work and their registered name on legal documents.

"I thought that I would get used to my husband's name, but I could not, and a sense of loss grew inside me," Tsukamoto said.

"Now I am 75 and I was shocked to realize that I can't do things anymore that I used to be able to do last year. That's when I thought that I am Kyoko Tsukamoto and I want to die as Kyoko Tsukamoto."

Tsukamoto is one of five people planning to file a lawsuit against the government and local authorities as early as February, saying the civil code that requires married couples to register under the same surname violates equal rights among married couples, as well as personal rights.

Men are allowed to take their spouses' name, but it is rare.

The group will seek compensation for what it says is the legislature's failure to enact change, the first such case to be debated in open court in Japan, the only country in the Group of Eight major industrialized nations with such a surname rule.

Hopes grew that the government would submit a bill to amend the civil code after the Democratic Party of Japan, which has advocated letting married couples keep separate names if they wish, took power in 2009. But opposition from a coalition ally caused the plan to stall.

"There were expectations that it could be enacted but unfortunately this did not take place. They do not want to wait any longer," said Fujiko Sakakibara, lead lawyer for the group.

TRADITIONAL FAMILY
The rule is tied to Japan's traditional concept of the family, which in the past ensured that property, businesses, and surnames were passed on to men within the family unit.

Some say it is outdated. In certain cases, couples repeat marriages and divorces between each other to avoid having to register their children as out of wedlock births, partly because the civil code limits inheritance rights for such children.

Tsukamoto, with her husband since 1960, is going through her second marriage with him after divorcing once in 1965 to get her maiden name back. They re-married when they had their third child but her husband has rejected requests for a second divorce.

Those against change say it's a matter of family unity and are wary of the impact on children's identities. They also warn of a possible increase in divorce.

Tsukamoto began studying women's issues at the age of 63, after she was freed of duties to nurse her parents. She has since taken up an activist's role.

"Others were getting by well in society and I have thought that perhaps I was stupid to insist on this ... Now things are changing in a good direction, unimaginable in 1960," she said.

(Editing by Elaine Lies)

The More Things Seem to Change, the More They Stay the Same...

Redux.

I know there are millions of people, in the USA and in Europe (which presents itself as more sophisticated and urbane than us "cowboys" in the wild wild West), who think that women have achieved absolute equality with men.  Unfortunately, the title of the following article gives a bad name to the absolutely blameless Neanderthal humans.

Ukrainian women berate 'Neanderthal' PM for sexist remarks
Mykola Azarov enrages feminist groups by suggesting women are unsuitable for high political office
Luke Harding in Moscow
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 24 March 2010 19.50 GMT

Ukraine's new pro-Russia prime minister, Mykola Azarov, has enraged feminist groups by suggesting that women are unsuitable for high political office and incapable of carrying out reforms.

Women's groups in Ukraine have angrily reported Azarov – who presides over an all-male cabinet – to the country's ombudsman following his remarks last week. They accuse him of gender discrimination and holding Neanderthal views.

Speaking on Friday, Azarov said Ukraine's economic problems were too difficult for any woman to handle.

"Some say our government is too large; others that there are no women," he said. "There's no one to look at during cabinet sessions: they're all boring faces. With all respect to women, conducting reforms is not women's business."

Ukraine's new woman-free government was capable of working 16 hours a day with "no breaks and weekends", Azarov boasted.

The prime minister's gaffe echoes comments made recently by the man who appointed him – Ukraine's new president, Viktor Yanukovych. During February's election campaign, Yanukovych declared that his female opponent, Yulia Tymoshenko, should "go to the kitchen".

Today, Azarov's political enemies denounced him as an unreconstructed dinosaur. They said his derisory remark, snubbing half of the country's 46 million population, underlined just how out of touch he is with ordinary Ukrainians.

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

Against this current backdrop, I put forth for your consideration:

March 22, 2010, 6:09 pm
Using Quotas to Raise the Glass Ceiling
By THE EDITORS (The New York Times)
In 2002, Norway enacted a law requiring that 40 percent of all board members at state-owned and publicly listed companies be women by 2008.

Since then, Spain and the Netherlands have passed similar laws. Now Belgium, Britain, Germany, France and Sweden are considering legislative measures involving female quotas. And although Germany is also debating such a law, Deutsche Telekom, which is based in Bonn, announced last week that it would voluntarily introduce a quota aiming to fill 30 percent of upper and middle management jobs with women by the end of 2015.

Do quotas work? Would they work in the U.S.? Does the U.S. need them?  Viewpoints by:

Marit Hoel, Center for Corporate Diversity, Oslo
Amy Dittmar, University of Michigan
Peter Baldwin, author, “The Narcissism of Minor Differences”
Sharon Meers, former managing director at Goldman Sachs
Linda Hirshman, author, “Get to Work”

The More Things Seem to Change, the More They Stay the Same...

...don't you think it's strange.  Girl, put your records on, play me your favorite song, your gonna find yourself someday...  Corinne Bailey Rae

I assume in honor of International Women's Day a week or two ago, there have been several articles cropping up recently about women - both ancient and modern. I know I run the risk of each of these articles not getting the attention each deserves by grouping them together this evening - but these two seem to fit together, so here goes:

On the streets of Alexandria, Egypt, a mob led by Peter the Lector brutally murdered Hypatia, one of the last great thinkers of ancient Alexandria.
Mary Evans Picture Library / Alamy
History & Archaeology
Hypatia, Ancient Alexandria’s Great Female Scholar
An avowed paganist in a time of religious strife, Hypatia was also one of the first women to study math, astronomy and philosophy
By Sarah Zielinski
Smithsonian.com, March 15, 2010
I will not go into detail about the horrific way that Hypatia was killed by a mob of men incited by a so-called Christian. Suffice to say that in our collective memories of her great accomplishments, she has achieved eternal life and glory.

From The New York Times
Bias Called Persistent Hurdle for Women in Sciences
By TAMAR LEWIN
Published: March 21, 2010
A report on the underrepresentation of women in science and math by the American Association of University Women, to be released Monday, found that although women have made gains, stereotypes and cultural biases still impede their success.  . . .

Five years ago, Lawrence H. Summers, then the president of Harvard, sparked a firestorm when he suggested that “there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude” reinforced by “lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination.”  . . .

The association’s report acknowledges differences in male and female brains. But Ms. Hill said, “None of the research convincingly links those differences to specific skills, so we don’t know what they mean in terms of mathematical abilities.”

At the top level of math abilities, where boys are overrepresented, the report found that the gender gap is rapidly shrinking. Among mathematically precocious youth — sixth and seventh graders who score more than 700 on the math SAT — 30 years ago boys outnumbered girls 13 to 1, but only about 3 to 1 now.

“That’s not biology at play, it doesn’t change so fast,” Ms. Hill said. “Even if there are biological factors in boys outnumbering girls, they’re clearly not the whole story. There’s a real danger in assuming that innate differences are important in determining who will succeed, so we looked at the cultural factors, to see what evidence there is on the nurture side of nature or nurture.”

The report found ample evidence of continuing cultural bias. . . .

More tomorrow night.  Right now, I've got to put my records on and do some serious boogeying for aerobic fitness, muscle toning and (hopefully) weight loss.  Found two new favorites to add to my mix:  Praful ("Sigh") and Spencer Day ("You'll Come Back to Me").

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.

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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. 

The Never-Ending Question...

(Image: Famous medieval chessplayer Paolo Boi and "Satan" as a seducing woman) Since the first days of Goddesschess, I've been fascinated by the eternal debate, variously phrased (usually in negative terms toward females): "Why can't women play chess as well as men?" Over time, we gathered together various articles and writings from the internet and called it "The Ever-Changing, Never-Ending Question" under Chess and Gender. Famous male chessplayers Fischer and Kasparov, among others, disparaged the chessplaying skills of females. (Both later modified their views on female chessplayers, allowing that at least some females could play as well as a man. They totally ignored the intriguing question of why all men -- as superior players -- didn't play equally well.) Chessbase has now weighed in on the subject in an article by newly-weds WGM Natalia Pogonina and Peter Zhdanov: Women and men in chess – smashing the stereotypes. It's light-hearted, but not light-weight. In particular, the couple have zeroed in on the very thing that could change the entire tenor of this never-ending discussion: how the question is framed. Personally, I think they're on to something significant by recognizing that more women than men do not play chess because women are, in general, more mature and intelligent than men. The question could thus be framed as "Why don't more men waste less time playing chess and contribute more to the betterment of society?" Yeah. I like how that sounds. The more serious question underlying this light-hearted discussion is why so many males have such a fear of recognizing females as equals; so much fear, in fact, that it has been institutionalized in patriarchal religious "laws" that give tremendous power to females as "temptresses" and "sinners" who lead poor, weak-minded, weak-spirited males astray along the path to Perdition. Geez, guys!

By Invitation Only

There are hundreds of thousands of blogs on the internet these days - pick a subject, you'll find a blog. How to narrow down what's worth reading? Frankly, I've no idea, darlings! What is one woman's garbage is another woman's treasure until the next rummage sale, as the saying goes... I happened across this blog by accident ("there is no such thing as coincidence...") The subject is one I find absolutely fascinating since, by inference, it touches on the subject of, as it is so often incorrectly framed - why can't women play chess as good as men? How the question is framed and thus, defining the focus of the research, is a topic that deserves it own blog! Change the perameters of the question and the focus of the research changes entirely - that takes me back to one of my favorite true stories about scientific research. But that's another topic :) After reading a blog entry at Twisted Physics, I framed the "topic" this way: how to define a paradigm (social, political, scientific, whatever) and just about anything else by using the power to exclude and omit. Think about it: when it comes right down to it, he who has the power to define the question controls what the ultimate answer will be. Please read By Invitation Only.