Grievances, front and center

A gathering of women is joyous - meeting old acquaintances, making new friends, and listening to the heartbeat of other women's lives. The rejoicing is articulate.
A gathering of women is smoldering with the injustices metered out to sisters as if they were due. The undercurrent that boils up in the 9th International Interdisciplinary Congress on Women, in Seoul, Korea, is ripe with research and verbal information. The revelation is articulate.
What progress has been made in women's lives in the decades of struggle? In government, some countries have increased members of women in decision making roles. And in those countries some areas of women's lives are improving. Those are encouraging statistics. In looking at poverty, education, prostitution, mutilation, exploitation, abuse, pregnancy, and health of women all around the world, not all statistics are encouraging.
There is more decriminalization of sexual exploitation of women. Definitely a step backward. USA congressional committee placed female genital circumcision under the sanction of religious rites to infer it an acceptable practice. CEDAW was killed in that committee and has never been brought up again. Women subjected to that practice by the hands of their mothers and grandmothers spend a lifetime of pain and humiliation because the men in those cultures are determined that "their women" will not enjoy the sexual act, unfortunately, even with them. New age revelation encourages the clitoridectomy. Oh, this is religion all right. Religion in all its glory!
Teenage pregnancies are old stories throughout the world. Education on sexuality is critical for girls and boys. Even in the USA sex education, always found in the gutter for boys, is nonexistent in the schools and churches. Cultural expectations offer no help to parents to fill the ignorance gap. Pregnant women of any age are seldom offered health education leaving them vulnerable to disease, miscarriage, and death in childbirth. Surviving mothers have few resources to help their newborns survive. Grieve for the future.
Anger and frustration over poverty encourages parents to sell their children into prostitution. Many papers discuss trafficking for tourists and armies, street sex and "comfort" workers. Education is sorely needed. I can attest to the fact that just being poor isn't the end of the world. Enfolded in the safety of a family can't fill a belly but it helps to fill the spirit. My father sweated as a hired hand for a local farmer in exchange for the cattle that would bring us some independence. My mother walked behind a cultivator to keep the blades set into the soil between rows of corn in hot, insect ridden Minnesota summers while my sister sat aboard the horse to steer and insist on its continuous participation. This hardly compares with the struggle of peasants sweating in the soil of countries where land is owned by a select uncaring few, as my father did in the Austro-Hungarian empire in the 1800s.
Nevertheless there is hope that continued gatherings will encourage changes. Natural evolution demands it.
Naomi Sherer