A Champion of Women's Rights in Wisconsin

How quickly we forget those battles that were fought in the 1960's for equal rights for women in this country.  It's better now, but we're still not there, and there are forces afoot in some political circles in this country that would like the clock to be turned back about 200 years!  Just as an aside, I had no idea until my friend Ann emailed me the other night that, between 1907 and 1920 in this country, a woman who was a United States citizen by birth lost her citizenship if she married a man who was not a U.S. citizen! 

Think about how it used to be - not so very long ago, in the "good old USA" - and think about how it still is for a majority of females in most of the rest of the world at this very minute.  Each of us - women and men alike, for men are the beneficiaries of the "liberation" of their female counterparts (whether they realize it or not) - owe thanks to Esther Doughty Luckhardt and countless women like her, who fought to give us in the west the rights we have today.  Thanks, Ms. Doughty Luckhardt. 

Obituary [Excerpted]
Esther Doughty Luckhardt
Luckhardt a pioneer of women's rights as member of state Assembly
By Amy Rabideau Silvers of the Journal Sentinel
Jan. 18, 2011

AP photo. Esther Doughty Luckhardt (right) signs the oath of office book
 before being seated as a member of the state Assembly in 1963. Lillian Quinn
 (left)  was the Assembly’s assistant chief clerk.

 Esther Doughty Luckhardt did not set out to champion women's rights but found things that needed changing during her long years in the state Assembly.

First elected in 1962, she was then the only woman to serve in the Assembly - and only the ninth to serve in Wisconsin history. Her opponent in that first race ran a campaign ad that read: "It's a man's job."

She later lost a 1969 bid to become the first woman ever elected to the state Senate. Luckhardt served in the Assembly for 22 years and was the longest-serving woman when she decided not to run for a 12th two-year term in 1984.

"I felt like I led the parade," Luckhardt later said.

Luckhardt died of congestive heart failure Friday. She was 97. Luckhardt was a lifelong resident of Horicon.

A self-described "rock-ribbed fiscal conservative," she entered politics more interested in promoting business and curbing taxes. Along the way, though, she kept bumping into basic issues of equal rights for women.

She found there was no convenient restroom for women anywhere near the Assembly chambers. During certain procedural times, legislators were to be escorted, but there were no female pages to escort her to the restroom. She eventually got those things changed, and daughter Patty Doughty even got to join the ranks of Capitol pages.

Then there was the name problem.

By state law, women were required to change their names with marriage and to use their married name when running for office. Long involved in Republican Party politics, she first ran for office after the death of her husband, Lyle Doughty.

She later remarried, but the voters wouldn't know who Esther Luckhardt was. And - given the fact her full maiden name was Esther Hulda Louise Schwertfeger - no one was sure what her legal middle name was.

"A name is valuable to a woman with a profession or in business or politics," she said in 1969. "No man has to make this change."

The law was eventually changed, but not right away in 1969.

"I got the bill passed, then Warren Knowles vetoed it on grounds it would create too many problems with credit," Luckhardt recalled. "They called me a flaming liberal at the time. The governor's veto was upheld."

She pushed for other changes, too, large and small.

Luckhardt took pride in revising state laws that allowed women to become licensed as engineers, plumbers, bartenders and in other fields, in addition to traditional professions such as nurse and teacher.

A dress code for women employees at the Capitol finally fell when Luckhardt and other female lawmakers began wearing slacks themselves.

Advocate for equality
"It's not that I'm a feminist or suffragette, but no one had paid any attention to women's interests before," Luckhardt said.

"I think she was proud of getting all of it - bits and pieces of legislation - that collectively gave women legal equality with men," said her son, Tom Doughty. "She believed in smaller government, less taxation, market regulation, personal responsibility. But when she saw these impediments that kept women from equal footing, she would get things changed."

Luckhardt also owned and operated an insurance and real estate business, including developing the Park Meadows subdivision in Horicon with her first husband.

She was long active with the former Lutheran Deaconess Hospital, including the creation of what became the Bethesda Fair as a hospital fund-raiser.

In 1987, Gov. Tommy Thompson appointed Luckhardt to serve on the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents, and later appointed her to the National Committee on Aging.

Afghan Women Fear Loss of Modest Gains

From The New York Times
A reminder that we really haven't come a long way, baby...

By ALISSA J. RUBIN
Taimoor Shah contributed reporting from Kandahar, Afghanistan
Published: July 30, 2010

MAHMUD-E RAQI, Afghanistan — Women’s precarious rights in Afghanistan have begun seeping away. Girls’ schools are closing; working women are threatened; advocates are attacked; and terrified families are increasingly confining their daughters to home.For women, instability, as much as the Taliban themselves, is the enemy. Women are casualties of the fighting, not only in the already conservative and embattled Pashtun south and east, but also in districts in the north and center of the country where other armed groups have sprung up.

As Afghan and Western governments explore reconciliation with the Taliban, women fear that the peace they long for may come at the price of rights that have improved since the Taliban government was overthrown in 2001.

“Women do not want war, but none of them want the Taliban of 1996 again; no one wants to be imprisoned in the yards of their houses,” said Rahima Zarifi, the Women’s Ministry representative from the northern Baghlan Province.

Interviews around the country with at least two dozen female members of Parliament, government officials, activists, teachers and young girls suggest a nuanced reality — fighting constricts women’s freedoms nearly as much as a Taliban government, and conservative traditions already limit women’s rights in many places.

Women, however, express a range of fears about a Taliban return, from political to domestic — that they will be shut out of negotiations about any deals with the insurgents and that the Taliban’s return would drive up bride prices, making it more profitable for a family to force girls into marriage earlier.

For many women, the prospect of a resurgence of the Taliban or other conservative groups is stark. “It will ruin our life,” said Shougoufa, 40, as she sorted through sequins and gold sparkles at the bazaar in the city of Pul-i-Khumri in Afghanistan’s north. “I am a tailor and I need to come to the bazaar to buy these things,” she said. “But if the Taliban come, I will not be able to come. Already we are hearing some girls cannot go to their work anymore.”

In teachers’ tea-break rooms, beauty shop training sessions, bazaars and the privacy of their homes, young women worry that their parents will marry them off early, so they will not be forced to marry Taliban.

In the Pashtun-dominated district of Taghob, east of Kabul, girls’ schools have been closed and any teaching is done at home, the provincial education director said.

That does not trouble some local officials.

“Look, our main priority is to feed our people, to provide rest and to protect their lives,” said Haji Farid, a local member of Parliament. “Why are people focusing on education and sending girls to school? Boys walk three, four, five kilometers to their school. How can a girl walk two, three, four kilometers? During a war you cannot send a girl beyond her door. No one can guarantee her honor. So it is hard to send your daughter to school.”

In Kandahar, Helmand and Zabul, all unstable southern provinces, there are girls’ schools open in the provincial capitals, but in outlying districts there are few, if any. In Zabul Province, there are just six schools for girls, four in the capital and two outside, but few families send their girls to school because of the fighting, said Muhammad Alam, the acting head of the provincial education department. (Photo: A student speaks during a class at the Jamal Agha Girls School in Kapisa Province.  By Adam Ferguson for The New York Times.)

In Baghlan Province, in northern Afghanistan, the situation for women has steadily worsened over the past year. Ms. Zarifi, the Women’s Ministry representative, has endured assassination attempts and demonstrations against her work. Three months ago, a female member of the provincial council was paralyzed in an attack, and a woman was stabbed to death in the daytime in the middle of the provincial capital earlier in July.

By contrast, most of Kapisa Province, which lies northeast of Kabul, is peaceful. There is a mediation program in the capital to help women and girls when they face domestic violence. In the predominantly ethnically Tajik north there are large, lively schools for girls, where families even allow those who are married to complete high school.

Women’s advocates are concerned that they are increasingly being shut out of political decisions. At an international conference in Kabul on July 20, which was meant to showcase the country’s plans for the future, President Hamid Karzai said nothing about how women’s rights might be protected in negotiations.  The very first meeting on negotiations, held by Mr. Karzai on July 22 with former leaders who had fought the Taliban, did not include a single woman, despite government pledges.

Part 2

Taliban Terrorize and Murder Women with Impunity

From The Wall Street Journal
July 14, 2010
The Taliban War on Women Continues
When 22-year-old Hossai was told to quit her job by the Taliban, she refused to be bullied. She was shot and killed.
By RACHEL REID
Kabul

Beware Taliban revisionism. You're going to hear much more of it in the coming months as policy makers from Kabul to Washington seeking to reintegrate Taliban fighters try to explain why the enemy isn't so bad after all. Bombs that slaughter civilians, acid attacks that disfigure school girls, assassinations of women in public life—all of this will be swept under the carpet.

In its place, a new narrative will be trotted out, one in which most of the fighters are "ten-dollar Talibs"—just in it for the money—or modern-day Robin Hoods fighting the injustices of their local government. While money or politics may indeed be the motivation for many low-level fighters, that doesn't change the fact that too many Afghan women are experiencing the same kind of oppression today they faced under Taliban rule.

"We as Taliban warn you to stop working . . . otherwise we will take your life away. We will kill you in such a harsh way that no woman has so far been killed in that manner. This would become a good lesson for women like you who are working." When Fatima K. received this letter she was terrified and left her job. Such messages—called night letters, since they are delivered after dark—are a common means of intimidation used by the Taliban.

When 22-year-old Hossai received similar threats by phone from a man saying he was with the Taliban in Kandahar, she refused to be bullied. She loved her job at the American development company DAI, and her salary supported her family. But one day in April Hossai was shot by an unknown gunman as she left her office. She died from her wounds.

A few days later another woman in Kandahar received a night letter. It demanded that she give up her job, or else she "will be considered an enemy of Islam and will be killed. In the same way that yesterday we have killed Hossai, whose name was on our list." This woman has since stayed home.

These stories are seldom heard, but it's not because they are rare. The victims are often too terrified to report such attacks to the authorities, or have little hope that anything will be done if they do. They can expect little or no protection from their government, which seems more willing to provide patronage to senior insurgents who switch sides than assist women at grave risk. When high-profile women are assassinated, their cases are not given the priority they deserve and their killers are rarely brought to justice. While men who run afoul of the Taliban are also attacked—particularly in Kandahar, where the murder rate in recent months has reached unprecedented heights—the situation for women is worse.

The reassurance offered by the Afghan and U.S. governments is that those Taliban who lay down arms through reintegration or reconciliation programs must accept the constitution, which enshrines equal rights for men and women. But given how often President Hamid Karzai has himself ignored the constitutional protections afforded to Afghan women—as when he approved the highly restrictive Shia family law in 2009—it is not clear why Taliban who return to the political mainstream would have any motivation to respect the rights of women.

Many women activists would prefer to see explicit guarantees put at the heart of negotiations with the Taliban. There are some rights that should be nonnegotiable: the right to work, to participate in political life, and to send their daughters to school. But when I spoke to Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, a founding member of the Taliban and its former ambassador to Pakistan, he did not inspire confidence that this would be possible.

Zaeef, who now resides in Kabul after a stint in Guantanamo, explained in our May meeting why he believes the freedoms won by Afghan women in recent years are "corrupting" them. "If you put a young adult man and woman in one room for some time, of course there will be some interactions, which is against Islam. This is like a virus here and it will spread," he said to me.

I emerged from my conversation with Zaeef uncorrupted. As for my questions about what gender segregation might mean for mixed work environments, like the Afghan parliament where women make up 25% of the members, I got no straight answer.

The Afghan government should have women's rights at the center of the reintegration programs. But the experience of the past nine years has been one of hasty deals and impunity for serious crimes. And with the need for an exit strategy weighing heavily on the minds of U.S. policy makers, there's a strong chance that justice and principle will once again be sacrificed.

American officials are often tempted to deny their own influence by claiming that this will be an Afghan process. But since the U.S. will pay for most of it, this is not a credible position. Worse still, it flies in the face of repeated U.S. commitments to help protect and promote the rights of Afghan women. The U.S. should make clear that if reintegration and reconciliation results in less freedom for Afghan women and girls, American taxpayers will not foot the bill.

Ms. Reid is the Afghanistan researcher for Human Rights Watch.

The War Against Women

How well I remember reading Marilyn French's novel The Women's Room. It had an enormous impact on my life in ways I'm still measuring, more than 30 years later. The one phrase in the book that has stayed with me all these years is "shit and string beans." Any woman who has read The Women's Room will know exactly what that means - and why it resonated then and continues to resonate today. Today girls are told that if they get the same education as men, they will earn the same money as men; that they are as good as men; that they can do anything a man can do, barring certain physical limitations. The fact remains that even with an identical four-year college degree, a woman earns 89 cents to a man's dollar. That's better than when I started college in 1975, when it was 74 cents to a dollar. But it's not equal. Why not? Ah, that's the rub. So - now I've got yet more to pile on to my list of books to read, for today I discovered that Marilyn French has written a series on the history (perhaps I should use herstory) of women. They sound absolutely fascinating. Here's the book review I came across at The New York Review of Books. Volume 56, Number 7 · April 30, 2009 The War Against Women By Hilary Mantel From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women, Volume I: Origins by Marilyn French, with a foreword by Margaret Atwood Feminist Press, 352 pp., $19.95 (paper) From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women, Volume II: The Masculine Mystique by Marilyn French, with a foreword by Margaret Atwood Feminist Press, 477 pp., $19.95 (paper) From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women, Volume III: Infernos and Paradises, the Triumph of Capitalism in the 19th Century by Marilyn French, with a foreword by Margaret Atwood Feminist Press, 385 pp., $19.95 (paper) From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women, Volume IV: Revolutions and the Struggles for Justice in the 20th Century by Marilyn French, with a foreword by Margaret Atwood Feminist Press, 608 pp., $19.95 (paper)

Indian Women Fight Back the Smart Way

From The Lede at the New York Times. February 13, 2009, 11:36 am — Updated: 12:58 pm --> Indian Women Use Facebook for Valentine’s Counterprotest By Robert Mackey (Image: Fundamentalist Hindu men burn a Valentine's Day card) Tens of thousands of Indian women have joined a protest organized on Facebook to strike back against “moral policing” by religious conservatives who are trying to stop the celebration of Valentine’s Day in India. The Facebook group, called “A Consortium of Pub-going, Loose and Forward Women,” was formed to combat plans by the conservative Hindu activists, known as Sri Ram Sena (”the Army of Lord Ram”) to intimidate Indian women on Valentine’s Day. As of Friday morning, the Facebook group had more than 34,000 35,000 members (and it still growing: the group has added 1,000 members in the hour after we first published this post). Last month in the Indian city of Mangalore, young male activists from Sri Ram Sena attacked young women for visiting a pub. The women were driven out into the street and several were knocked down as video cameras recorded the scene. A video clip of the men attacking the women was broadcast repeatedly on Indian television, in reports about what called “India’s Taliban.” Last week, the Indian channel NDTV reported that Sri Ram Sena “seems to have taken the outcry against its attack on women in Manglaore as encouragement.” and planned more attacks against Valentine’s Day. Another Indian television station, IBN Live, reported that the conservative group’s leader, Pramod Muthalik, “now out on conditional bail in the Mangalore Pub attack case, has made it clear that his outfit will disrupt Valentine’s Day celebration as it is against Indian culture.” IBN showed Mr. Muthalik claiming that Valentine’s Day is one of several “international conspiracies against our culture” by Christians. The counteroffensive, led by the group that is using Facebook to organize, began with a campaign to get young women to send pink women’s underwear to Sri Ram Sean’s leader, Mr. Muthalik. The BBC reported on Friday that thousands of pairs had been sent: A spokeswoman for the group, Nisha Susan, told the BBC it was giving chaddis (Hindi colloquial for underwear) as they alluded to a prominent Hindu right-wing group whose khaki-shorts-wearing cadres were often derisively called “chaddi wallahs” (chaddi wearers). “We chose the color pink because it is a frivolous colour,” she said. On their blog, the Consortium of Pub-going, Loose and Forward Women explained the action and what they hoped to achieve: It does not matter that many of us have not thought about Valentine’s Day since we were 13. If ever. This year, let us send the Sri Ram Sena some love. Let us send them some PINK CHADDIS. Look in your closet or buy them cheap. Dirt-cheap. Make sure they are PINK. Send them off to the Sena. [...] What happens after Valentine’s Day? After Valentine’s Day we should get some of our elected leaders to agree that beating up women is ummm… AGAINST INDIAN CULTURE. After some reports circulated that Sri Ram Sena might be backing down and calling off its protest against Valentine’s Day, the consortium’s spokeswoman, Nisha Susan, answered a question about the group’s future in a Web chat on IBN’s Web site (Hotpars is the screen name of a reader): Hotpars: What are your short-term and long-term expectations from Pink Chaddi Campaign? Nisha Susan: It seems weird to think about the long-term expectations of a campaign that is one week old. So let me talk of what we wanted to do. Many of us feel isolated in our unhappiness with right-wing groups of any religion disrupting our way of life. This campaign was aimed to protest the climate of fear being created by right wing groups in Mangalore. And to an extent we have succeeded in creating a dent — giving people a sense of hope. But what would be truly rewarding is for the 30,000 plus people in the campaign to continue to shame political leaders into getting the Mangalore women justice: those of the pub incident, the abducted school girl, the 15 year old who committed suicide two days ago — all in Mangalore. On her blog Bloody Mary, Sagarika Ghose wrote that the battle over Valentine’s Day epitomized “the dilemma of most educated Indians today” over what in Western culture is really worth defending. Ms. Ghose, who joined the consortium on Facebook, said that though the protest was right, the objections to Valentine’s Day were thought-provoking: Most of us are scandalized by the Sri Ram Sene’s actions, horrified at being told that “love” is foreign to India. We would like to remind the Sene that the love stories of Shakuntala and Dushyant or of Roopmati and Baz Bahadur show that some of the greatest love stories of all times were made in India and in our country love has always been a socially revolutionary force destroying taboos of caste, class and religion. St. Valentine is only a newly arrived upstart in our centuries-old experiments with romance. Also, where does one draw the line at the “western” influences on India? Does the Sene know that the potato and even cottage cheese from which mithai is made, were, among other foodstuffs, “foreigners” to India, being introduced here by Portuguese traders? The custodians of “hindu sanskriti” are not just absurd, they don’t know their history. Yet the dilemma is that groups like the Sri Ram Sene force the thoughtful Indian to defend things he may see as a fundamental right, but does not necessarily want to defend. However much we may hate the Sene, upholding the commercially-driven Valentine’s Day as a supreme cultural resource, or seeing the pub as the shining symbol of our social “freedom” may not be forward movement for India. If young people are choosing urban lifestyles that are desi imitations of “Sex And The City,” this is hardly a matter of celebration.

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Yes, but they should still have the right to choose without threat of violence from religious fanatics and women-hating nut cases. If you don't like the choices they make, education people to make better choices. But to deny anyone the right to make choices in the first place because you don't care for the choices is a step back to repression and facsism. Why are these men so terrified of women having the right to make their own choices in life? Maybe I'll mail a pair of pink chaddis to Mr. Muthalik.

Iranian Women Fight for Rights

Article from the New York Times. Starting at Home, Iran’s Women Fight for Rights By NAZILA FATHI Published: February 12, 2009 TEHRAN — In a year of marriage, Razieh Qassemi, 19, says she was beaten repeatedly by her husband and his father. Her husband, she says, is addicted to methamphetamine and has threatened to marry another woman to “torture” her. Rather than endure the abuse, Ms. Qassemi took a step that might never have occurred to an earlier generation of Iranian women: she filed for divorce. Women’s rights advocates say Iranian women are displaying a growing determination to achieve equal status in this conservative Muslim theocracy, where male supremacy is still enscribed in the legal code. One in five marriages now end in divorce, according to government data, a fourfold increase in the past 15 years. And it is not just women from the wealthy, Westernized elites. The family court building in Vanak Square here is filled with women, like Ms. Qassemi, who are not privileged. Women from lower classes and even the religious are among those marching up and down the stairs to fight for divorces and custody of their children. Increasing educational levels and the information revolution have contributed to creating a generation of women determined to gain more control over their lives, rights advocates say. Confronted with new cultural and legal restrictions after the Islamic Revolution in 1979, some young women turned to higher education as a way to get away from home, postpone marriage and earn social respect, advocates say. Religious women, who had refused to sit in classes with men, returned to universities after they were resegregated. Today, more than 60 percent of university students are women, compared with just over 30 percent in 1982, even though classes are no longer segregated. Even for those women for whom college is not an option, the Internet and satellite television have opened windows into the lives of women in the West. “Satellite has shown an alternative way of being,” said Syma Sayah, a feminist involved in social work in Tehran. “Women see that it is possible to be treated equally with men.” Another sign of changing attitudes is the increasing popularity of books, movies and documentaries that explore sex discrimination, rights advocates say. "Women do not have a proper status in society,” said Mahnaz Mohammadi, a filmmaker. “Films are supposed to be a mirror of reality, and we make films to change the status quo.” In a recent movie, “All Women Are Angels,” a comedy that was at the top of the box office for weeks, a judge rejects the divorce plea of a woman who walked out on her husband when she found him with another woman. Even men are taking up women’s issues and are critical of traditional marriage arrangements. Mehrdad Oskouei, another filmmaker, has won more than a dozen international awards for “The Other Side of Burka,” a documentary about women on the impoverished and traditional southern island of Qeshm who are committing suicide in increasing numbers because they have no other way out of their marriages. “How can divorce help a woman in southern parts of the country when she has to return after divorce to her father’s home who will make her even more miserable than her husband?” said Fatimeh Sadeghi, a former political science professor fired for her writing on women’s rights. Janet Afary, a professor of Middle East and women’s studies at Purdue University and the author of “Sexual Politics in Modern Iran,” says the country is moving inexorably toward a “sexual revolution.” “The laws have denied women many basic rights in marriage and divorce,” she wrote in the book. “But they have also contributed to numerous state initiatives promoting literacy, health and infrastructural improvements that benefited the urban and rural poor.” To separate the sexes, the state built schools and universities expressly for women, and improved basic transportation, enabling poor women to travel more easily to big cities, where they were exposed to more modern ideas. Ms. Afary says that mandatory premarital programs to teach about sex and birth control, instituted in 1993 to control population growth, helped women delay pregnancy and changed their views toward marriage. By the late 1990s, she says, young people were looking for psychological and social compatibility and mutual intimacy in marriage. Despite the gains they have made, women still face extraordinary obstacles. Girls can legally be forced into marriage at the age of 13. Men have the right to divorce their wives whenever they wish, and are granted custody of any children over the age of 7. Men can ban their wives from working outside the home, and can engage in polygamy. By law, women may inherit from their parents only half the shares of their brothers. Their court testimony is worth half that of a man. Although the state has taken steps to discourage stoning, it remains in the penal code as the punishment for women who commit adultery. A woman who refuses to cover her hair faces jail and up to 80 lashes. Women also face fierce resistance when they organize to change the law. The Campaign for One Million Signatures was founded in 2005, inspired by a movement in Morocco that led to a loosening of misogynist laws. The idea was to collect one million signatures for a petition calling on authorities to give women more equal footing in the laws on marriage, divorce, adultery and polygamy. But Iran’s government has come down hard on the group, charging many of its founders with trying to overthrow it; 47 members have been jailed so far, including 3 who were arrested late last month. Many still face charges, and six members are forbidden to leave the country. One member, Alieh Eghdamdoust, began a three-year jail sentence last month for participating in a women’s demonstration in 2006. The group’s Web site, http://www.we-change.org/, has been blocked by the authorities 18 times. “We feel we achieved a great deal even though we are faced with security charges,” said Sussan Tahmasebi, one of the founding members of the campaign, who is now forbidden to leave Iran. “No one is accusing us of talking against Islam. No one is afraid to talk about more rights for women anymore. This is a big achievement.” Women’s advocates say that the differences between religious and secular women have narrowed and that both now chafe at the legal discrimination against women. Zahra Eshraghi, for example, the granddaughter of the revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, signed the One Million Signatures petition. “Many of these religious women changed throughout the years,” said Ms. Sayah, the feminist in Tehran. “They became educated, they traveled abroad and attended conferences on women’s rights, and they learned.” Because of the government’s campaign of suppression, the process of collecting signatures has slowed recently, and many women do not want to be seen in the presence of a campaigner, let alone sign a petition. Most feminist groups limit their canvassing now to the Internet. But while the million signatures campaign may have stalled, women have scored some notable successes. A group that calls itself Meydaan has earned international recognition for pressing the government to stop stonings. The group’s reporting on executions by stoning in 2002 on its Web site, http://www.meydaan.net/ — including a video of the execution of a prostitute — embarrassed the government and led the head of the judiciary to issue a motion urging judges to refrain from ordering stonings. (The stonings have continued anyway, but at a lower rate, because only Parliament has the power to ban them.)

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Yeah, stone the female but not the male. It takes two to commit adultery and fornication. Guess the dudes in Iran haven't yet learned how to count. What are they so afraid of that they have to stone women to death? How pathetic they are - they're not real men, they are terrified little boys in men's bodies.

China to Single Mothers: Your Children Do Not Officially Exist

The Chinese government has long maintained that the Communist Party liberated women in 1949 along with the rest of the country. But in an era of rapid modernization, China has lacked anything like a broad current of thought about women’s rights. “When we argue that a woman owns the uterus, and it’s her right to decide whether to deliver the baby or not, people won’t buy it,” said Yuan Xin, director of psychology at the Consulting Center of Nankai University. “If you are a woman, your personal choice is monitored and supervised by a lot of others, and they expect you to do what everyone else does.” Welcome to the Collective - may as well be a Borg! From The New York Times Single Mothers in China Forge a Difficult Path By HOWARD W. FRENCH Published: April 6, 2008 BEIJING — As a young migrant worker, Lei Gailing sought her fortune in China’s fast-industrializing and freewheeling south. She found a steady factory job and a less stable boyfriend, then became pregnant. The routine course for most women would have been to marry the man or to arrange an abortion. Ms. Lei, who was by then 33 and fiercely independent, did neither. Refusing to marry the man but afraid she might never have a child, she chose to become a single mother. That decision carried implications that Ms. Lei never fully anticipated, marking her as something of a social outcast in a country that still strictly controls population growth and makes few concessions to women like her. Today, at 41, Ms. Lei says she has no regrets, even after facing a life of bitter twists and turns: pretending to be divorced at one point to avoid bringing shame on her son and ultimately marrying a much older man in an effort to obtain the basic identification her boy needed to go to school or receive other social services. For all this, Ms. Lei, who now lives with the older man in Beijing in what she describes as an abusive relationship, said she would do it all over again for her son. “I look at him today, and know it was worthwhile,” she said, tears forming in her eyes. “He is so lovely, I cannot regret it.” In a society where until quite recently premarital sex was often punished, the issue of single motherhood has been slow to enter the public arena. But now, a new awareness of the issue is raising questions about the status of women in China, as well as other rights issues like the hukou, or residency permit, a central tool of population control passed down from the Maoist era that restricts movement by linking people to the towns of their birth. . . . Official statistics on the number of single mothers are unavailable in China. But with premarital sex now commonplace and women’s earning power growing, particularly in the wealthy cities of the east, experts believe their numbers are rising fast, albeit from a small base. “This is of great significance,” said Li Ling, a professor of arts and sciences at Beijing Language and Culture University. “It’s hard for me to judge other people’s choices, good or bad, but it means a lot that women are making such decisions on their own, as a matter of choice. In Chinese tradition, women don’t have such rights. We are only the bearers of offspring for our husbands’ families.” In many ways, Xie Jing, 33, a newspaper reporter in Shanghai, is typical of an emerging generation of single mothers who are professionals and whose choices on child-rearing are eased by their financial security. Ms. Xie said that she became pregnant while she was engaged, but that her fiancé’s ambivalence over the unexpected news prompted her to set her own course. When her former fiancé asked her, “What is the point of having a child if we are no longer together?” she had a ready answer: raising the child alone. “My quality of life isn’t so bad, so I don’t want to lower myself to staying with another person just for the sake of being together,” Ms. Xie said. “If that means I have to sacrifice a lot, so be it. But I am in a good situation now with my baby, and I’m not willing to lose it.” Her son was born two years ago in a partly foreign-owned hospital, where registration of the pregnancy with a neighborhood committee — standard in most of China — was not required. Ms. Xie lives with her parents, who are retired and help take care of her boy. To all but her closest friends, she explains that the father is overseas on a three-year assignment. Her son bears Ms. Xie’s family name, and the father was told that if he did not accept legal responsibility as a parent, he would be kept at bay until the boy turned 18. Asserting herself in this way was made easier by virtue of Ms. Xie’s residence in Shanghai, a wealthy city by China’s standards with relatively liberal provisions for awarding residency permits. “I checked out Shanghai’s Public Security Bureau’s Web site, and discovered an item indicating children born outside of marriage could apply for hukou,” Ms. Xie said. “The staff was mean to me when I applied, but there were written rules guaranteeing the rights of my child, so there was nothing they could do to prevent me.” Every province and major city has some leeway in how it applies those rules. But for peasants and working-class mothers without much education, money or standing, choices can seem limited. Zhong Yu, 23, a music teacher in Chongqing, one of China’s largest cities, said she considered getting an abortion when she recently discovered that she was pregnant. Abortion is legal, widespread and freely available in China, but she could not afford the hospital fees. She hid her situation from her family, and by the time she had saved enough money, she was five months pregnant — too late, she believed, to end the pregnancy safely. Today Ms. Zhong calls the father, who has no fixed job, a “vagrant” and says she was silly to have become involved with him. “But when I saw my child, I thought no matter how hard my life will be, I will bring him up,” she added. Ms. Lei, the mother in Beijing, also had few resources and, partly because of that, a difficult path. After returning to her village to give birth, she went to Beijing to look for work and a husband, leaving her son behind with her mother. But fearing he would be taunted as a bastard in the village, she brought him with her to Beijing when he reached school age. In the capital, Ms. Lei faced new problems. Without a father she could not establish a hukou, or residency permit. In 2006, Ms. Lei described her plight on the Internet, drawing the interest of a Chinese journalist, who wrote about her. Soon afterward, men began contacting her with marriage inquiries. She agreed to meet one of them one day under a highway overpass. He had described himself as 60, but looked at least 10 years older, she said. The man, a retired and widowed engineer with a mentally disabled son, said he needed an heir to continue his family line, and she needed the help of a man to register her son so he could attend school. Out of their mutual needs came a marriage of convenience. “He needed a kid and I needed a home,” Ms. Lei said. “My kid needed to go to school, so we pooled together a family. There was no contract of any kind.” They married, but their hasty pact quickly unraveled. The man balked at registering the boy in his name out of fear he could be breaking the law. Now, Ms. Lei said, he is cold toward her child and mean to her. For now, the boy, Jirong, 7, attends a neighborhood school that has looked the other way over his lack of a residency permit. “Most people in this situation would have given away their child to others for adoption,” Ms. Lei said. “Almost no one would choose to bring up the child on her own.”