Essay About Essay Women And Equal Rights

Women and Politics in Africa
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There was a young woman who left her home in Mycrorayan in Kabul, Afghanistan for
Peshawar after the January 1994 fighting and told Amnesty International of the
following situation. “One day when my father was walking past a building complex he
heard screams of women coming from an apartment block which had just been captured
by forces of General Dostum. He was told by the people that Dostums guards had
entered the block and were looting the property and raping the women.”
The following story comes out of Iran. “On August 10, 1994, in the city of Arak,
Iran, a woman was sentenced to death by stoning. According to the ruling of the
religious judge, her husband and two children were forced to attend the execution.
The woman urged her husband to take the children away, but to no avail. A truck
full of stones was brought in to be used during the stoning. In the middle of the
stoning, although her eyes had been gouged out, the victim was able to escape from
the ditch and started running away, but the regimes guards recaptured her and shot
her to death.”
From China comes the following observation. “Still in the streets an occasional old
crone hobbling around on her miniature bound feet was a relic of the pre-
Revolutionary, almost dead past. I also heard an echo of that past in a silk thread
factory in Wuxi, China. A woman member of its Revolutionary Committee was
introduced to me as a ‘veteran worker’. The description astonished me because she
looked so young. On inquiry I learned that she was indeed only 34 years old, but
that she had toiled in the mill for twenty-six years, having begun this job as an 8-
year old child.”
These three incidents reflect typical crimes and injustices against women in the
Third World countries. Crimes against women include abuse, slavery, false
imprisonment, murder and rape. In these countries, women are considered to be
inferior to men and are not granted equal rights or protection under the laws. The
governments, religions and cultures of these countries support the inequalities,
thus allowing vicious crimes against women to continue without any recourse by the
victims. The phrase “womens rights” refers to the basic human rights that are
withheld from women simply because they are women. Women’s rights promote
political, social and economic equality for women in a society that traditionally
confers more status and freedom to men. A basic right is for girls to grow up to be
women: today twelve percent of the females born worldwide are missing, many of them
victims of infanticide. Other women’s rights include: the right to live free of
physical abuse, the right to live free of sexual exploitation, the right to health
care and nutrition, the right to an acceptable standard of living, the right to
chose her own partner, the right to vote, the right to control property, and the
right to equal treatment before the law along with freedom of speech. Women in
Third World countries do not have the rights that American women enjoy. In most of
these countries, women do not even have rights equivalent to those of American
women in the nineteenth century. For example, the women have arranged marriages,
have very limited access to education and are abused by their arranged husbands. In
these countries, women work twice as many hours as men for one-tenth of