Tag Archives: feminism

International Day of the Girl Child

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Girls play multiple roles in the household, society and the economy. They go to school, help with housework, work in factories, make friends, care for elder and younger family members and prepare themselves to take on the responsibilities of adulthood. While today, in many countries, the right to basic education is ingrained in their constitutions, there are many countries where girls are denied this right and even when girls are encouraged to continue their education, they face major challenges that make it difficult for them to attend regularly, sometimes receiving an unequal share of the household tasks due to customary practices in many regions of the world. Though life for the girl child is steadily improving, many are still subjected to horrific practices, such as female genital mutilation, son preference – often resulting in female infanticide – as well as child marriage, sexual exploitation and abuse. Girls are also more likely to experience discrimination in food allocation and healthcare, and are often outpaced and outranked by boys in all spheres of life. It is under this backdrop that upholding the rights of a girl child is not just important, it is absolutely essential.

Today is the International Day of the Girl Child which is also known as the Day of Girls and the International Day of the Girl and was first observed in 2012. The day supports more opportunity for girls and increases awareness of gender inequality faced by girls worldwide based upon their gender including areas such as access to education, nutrition, legal rights, medical care, and protection from discrimination, violence against women and forced child marriage. The day increases awareness of issues faced by girls around the world which do not include or consider girls and and their issues become invisible. The Day of Girls helps raise awareness not only of the issues that girls face, but also of what is likely to happen when those problems are solved.

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Around 33,000 girls are married off every day around the world, focing their bodies and mind to changes in ways they are just not ready for. An estimated 340,000 girls and young women are infected with the HIV virus every year and currently more than 3 million girls and young women are living with the virus all over the world. Around 44% of the girls between 15 to 19 years of age think it’s okay for a husband to beat his wife. Girls between five to 14 spend more than 28 hours doing labor, which is twice the time spent by boys and do more unpaid child labour and not astonishingly 96% of human trafficked individuals for sexual exploitation are girls and women.

The theme for the 2021 edition of the International Day of the Girl Child is Digital generation. Our generation. In 2021, the Generation Equality Forum launched five-year commitments for bolder solutions to gender inequality – just as the world entered the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic. While the pandemic has accelerated digital platforms for learning, earning and connecting, some 2.2 billion people below the age of 25 still do not have internet access at home. Girls are more likely to be cut off. The gender gap for global internet users grew from 11 per cent in 2013 to 17 per cent in 2019. In the world’s least developed countries, it hovers around 43 per cent. But the gender digital divide is about more than connectivity. Girls are also less likely than boys to use and own devices, and gain access to tech-related skills and jobs. Only by addressing the inequity and exclusion that span geographies and generations can we usher in a digital revolution for all, with all.

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So why is this day important? It is important because it empowers girls and works to eliminate deep-rooted gender-based issues that have have been passed on for generations and have made gender-based discrimination and oppression threateningly common in every household, particularly in developing countries. An empowered girl grows up to be an empowered woman. The adolescence is a critical point in every person’s life and determines the trajectory of girls’ lives, which is why caring for girls in their youth benefits all. If they are empowered at a vulnerable age, they can mature into liberated, wise women of the future and when this happens, as a society, we all win. Investing in girls is the smart thing to do because when women and girls earn an income, they are likely to reinvest 90% of their income into their families. So empower girls around you, so they can grow up to be empowered women who will be an asset to society.

In My Hands Today…

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Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide – Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn

With Pulitzer Prize winners Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn as our guides, we undertake an odyssey through Africa and Asia to meet the extraordinary women struggling there, among them a Cambodian teenager sold into sex slavery and an Ethiopian woman who suffered devastating injuries in childbirth. Drawing on the breadth of their combined reporting experience, Kristof and WuDunn depict our world with anger, sadness, clarity, and, ultimately, hope.

They show how a little help can transform the lives of women and girls abroad. That Cambodian girl eventually escaped from her brothel and, with assistance from an aid group, built a thriving retail business that supports her family. The Ethiopian woman had her injuries repaired and in time became a surgeon. A Zimbabwean mother of five, counseled to return to school, earned her doctorate and became an expert on AIDS.

Through these stories, Kristof and WuDunn help us see that the key to economic progress lies in unleashing women’s potential. They make clear how so many people have helped to do just that, and how we can each do our part. Throughout much of the world, the greatest unexploited economic resource is the female half of the population. Countries such as China have prospered precisely because they emancipated women and brought them into the formal economy. Unleashing that process globally is not only the right thing to do; it’s also the best strategy for fighting poverty.

In My Hands Today…

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Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights – Helen Lewis

Well-behaved women don’t make history: difficult women do.

Feminism’s success is down to complicated, contradictory, imperfect women, who fought each other as well as fighting for equal rights. Helen Lewis argues that too many of these pioneers have been whitewashed or forgotten in our modern search for feel-good, inspirational heroines. It’s time to reclaim the history of feminism as a history of difficult women.

In this book, you’ll meet the working-class suffragettes who advocated bombings and arson; the princess who discovered why so many women were having bad sex; the pioneer of the refuge movement who became a men’s rights activist; the ‘striker in a sari’ who terrified Margaret Thatcher; the wronged Victorian wife who definitely wasn’t sleeping with the prime minister; and the lesbian politician who outraged the country. Taking the story up to the present with the twenty-first-century campaign for abortion services, Helen Lewis reveals the unvarnished – and unfinished – history of women’s rights.

Drawing on archival research and interviews, Difficult Women is a funny, fearless and sometimes shocking narrative history, which shows why the feminist movement has succeeded – and what it should do next. The battle is difficult, and we must be difficult too.

In My Hands Today…

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What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat – Aubrey Gordon

Anti-fatness is everywhere. In What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat, Aubrey Gordon unearths the cultural attitudes and social systems that have led to people being denied basic needs because they are fat and calls for social justice movements to be inclusive of plus-sized people’s experiences. Unlike the recent wave of memoirs and quasi self-help books that encourage readers to love and accept themselves, Gordon pushes the discussion further towards authentic fat activism, which includes ending legal weight discrimination, giving equal access to health care for large people, increased access to public spaces, and ending anti-fat violence. As she argues, I did not come to body positivity for self-esteem. I came to it for social justice.

By sharing her experiences as well as those of others–from smaller fat to very fat people–she concludes that to be fat in our society is to be seen as an undeniable failure, unlovable, unforgivable, and morally condemnable. Fatness is an open invitation for others to express disgust, fear, and insidious concern. To be fat is to be denied humanity and empathy. Studies show that fat survivors of sexual assault are less likely to be believed and less likely than their thin counterparts to report various crimes; 27% of very fat women and 13% of very fat men attempt suicide; over 50% of doctors describe their fat patients as awkward, unattractive, ugly and noncompliant; and in 48 states, it’s legal–even routine–to deny employment because of an applicant’s size.

In My Hands Today…

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Self Made: Inspired by the Life of Madam C.J. Walker – A’Lelia Perry Bundles

Oprah Winfrey is renowned for her media savvy, marketing sense, philanthropic efforts, and accumulated wealth (and the power that accompanies it). She’s earned her rep, of course, and her path to stardom and influence couldn’t have been easy. Imagine, then, how difficult it must have been a century ago for Madam C. J. Walker, America’s first female African-American millionaire. The daughter of slaves, married and divorced by the age of 20, Madam Walker spent nearly two decades as a lowly scrubwoman before concocting (or, as she claimed, being presented in a dream) the formula for a much needed hair care product for African-American women. After making her hair care business a resounding success, Walker devoted much of her time and resources to social causes and philanthropy.

In On Her Own Ground, A’Lelia Bundles, Walker’s great-great-grandaughter and a woman of no small accomplishment herself (she’s spent many years as a television news producer for NBC and ABC), offers an affectionate but unblinking portrait of Madam Walker. (Bundles’ mother urged her daughter from her deathbed not to worry about promoting a particular image of their famous forebear, to simply tell the truth.) Bundles also explores the complicated relationship between Madam Walker and her only slightly less renowned daughter (and the author’s namesake), A’Lelia Walker, a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, and the elder Walker’s interactions with such other seminal African-American figures as W. E. B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington.