No Country for Women

I’ve come to believe that the independent “masculine” and the dependent “feminine” — subject and object, active and passive — are just labels for universal human qualities. They may normalise inequality based on sex in the same way that stereotypes do for race, caste, class and other invented divisions.

But the important thing to remember is that female bodies are the means of reproduction, and so are doubly likely to be restricted when other divisions are at stake — which is why sexism and racism are so intertwined in my country, sexism and caste are so intertwined in India, and why sex/race or sex/caste can only be uprooted together.

In most cases, gender inequality is what we experience first, as children in our families, so we feel that those roles are natural, even good, and the domination of one gender by another seems normal. Even if we find such inequalities deplorable, we often think they are inevitable. After all, if we accept inequality within our own home and among the people we love, we’ll accept it anywhere.

But in the years when I was writing… studies of tribal societies were already proving that polarised gender roles were the best indicator of other forms of violence within that society, and also of the likelihood that it would use violence against outsiders. The anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer had shown that rigid sex roles characterised violent cultures, and a lack of sex role rigidity characterised non-violent cultures. Sex and World Peace, a 2012 book by Valerie Hudson and three other scholars, has documented current rates of violence against females in 100 nations… The best predictor of violence within a country — and also of a country’s willingness to use violence against another country — was none of the usual suspects of poverty, natural resources, religion or democracy. It was violence against females.

As the authors explain: “Those states that foster gender equality through laws and enforce those laws are less likely to go to war. They are less likely to use force first when in conflict… States do go to war over oil and scarce resources, among other things, but they are more likely to do so if the society has norms of violence rooted in gender inequality…”

If you’re wondering where my country came out, it wasn’t so great. As one of the few modern nations with no guarantee of women’s rights in its Constitution, no national system of childcare or parental leave, no ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, and with high rates of maternal mortality, the US tends to let women fend for ourselves rather than guarantee rights… If you add up all the women who’ve been murdered by their husbands or boyfriends since 9/11 — and then add up all the Americans killed in 9/11, in Iraq and in Afghanistan combined — more women have lost their lives to domestic terrorism.

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As Hudson and her co-authors wrote as a challenge: “You were taught that the clash of civilisations is based on ethno-political differences, but did you know that the real clash of civilisations may instead be based on gender beliefs?”

Now, even more than when I wrote these essays, I understand why I wrote them… Most of all, I understand now the theme of violence against females that runs through these essays like a red thread. Perhaps for the first time in human history, women are no longer half the human race. Because of femicide in all its forms, the world sex ratio is 100 women to 101.3 men.

How did this happen? Partly because prejudice and violence have been sped up by travel and technology, also because refugees are mostly women and children, obviously because of sexualised violence in war zones; because AIDS still kills far more women than men in Africa, and because of the quiet and obscure deaths from female genital cutting; from children giving birth to children, from so-called honour killings — and so much more.

In India, I needn’t say that — despite many good educational campaigns – the bias toward sons and against daughters has created sex-selective abortion, plus withholding food and healthcare from girls. Worldwide, there is a daughter deficit and a son surplus. More girls have been killed in the last 50 years because they were girls, than men have been killed in all the battles of the 20th century combined.

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Finally, confining some women’s bodies to reproduction — and punishing female sexuality — means that the other women are confined only to sex. Prostitution is less the world’s oldest profession than the world’s oldest oppression… A minimum of four million women and girls are bought and sold into the sex trade each year… Globally, sex trafficking is an industry that has surpassed the drug trade in profitability, and is second only to the arms trade…

If the first step toward more equality and less violence is imagining it, we should study the first 95 per cent of human history on both our subcontinents. We both have remnants and some living examples of matrilineal cultures — not matriarchal, which would be simply reversing patriarchal and dominating men — but cultures of balance in which the paradigm was the circle. Before the arrival of Europeans from a continent of kings and patriarchs, women in 500 or so Native cultures on what was known as Turtle Island had equal power, controlled their lives, controlled agriculture, governed reproduction with herbs and abortifacients, were responsible for agriculture, and for deciding questions of war and peace.

In India before Europeans, colonialism and Christianity, there were matrilineal cultures from Kerala to the Himalayas, as there were in China and parts of Africa. Even now, I notice that the political demands of the Dalits… they demand land for the landless, and ask that it be registered in Dalit women’s names.

Perhaps what we want was once here in both our lands.