Recently, here at BooTrib, we covered what the U.N. deemed the 10 most under-reported stories. Let’s unofficially feature diaries on women’s issues for the next many days. Send me an e-mail if you’d like your diary about women’s issues so categorized. (susanhu at earthlink . net). Write about anything you want!
I intend this to be as much about healing here as it is about raising awareness. I’ll start with a newsletter I received. These aren’t suggested topics, just links to stories I thought would interest you:
WELCOME TO IWPR’S WOMEN’S PERSPECTIVES No. 002, June 02, 2005
LOVE, AFGHAN STYLE Women are still being used as currency in the marriage
market. By Parwin Mohmand in Kabul
NO RIGHTS FOR SHARIA WIVES: Dagestani women who enter into polygamous
marriages risk losing everything – even their children – when their husband
tires of them. By Polina Sanayeva in Makhachkala
And, don’t miss the “Sisters Grimm” story below:
Here’s a fun story via Alternet’s PEEK:
Shakespeare-was-a-woman theorists step aside: “Once upon a time women created fantastic stories and fables while men took the credit. Unfortunately this isn’t a fairy tale (or a shocker),” writes Jessica, who quotes from a Discovery Channel feature: “
The Brothers Grimm have received credit for ‘Cinderella,’ ‘Snow White,’ ‘The Frog Prince’ and other famous fairy tales, but now some scholars believe women provided the German brothers with these stories and many others.
“The Brothers Grimm did end up giving credit to one woman, an educated middle class woman named Dorothea Viehmann. But the brothers described her as being an uneducated, kindly old ‘peasant woman,’ to reinforce a folksy charm that the brothers hoped to imbue their books with. Nice.” (Feministing)
_______________________________
IWPR’S WOMEN’S PERSPECTIVES No. 002, June 02, 2005 – Cont.:
GEORGIA: SAD PLIGHT OF UNDERAGE BRIDES Teenage Azerbaijani girls in Georgia
often have no choice but to marry young. By Ramilya Alieva in Kaspi
KAZAK WOMEN SOLD AS SEX SLAVES Women from southern Kazakstan are being
forced into prostitution both at home and abroad. By Gaziza Baituova in
Taraz, southern Kazakstan
SHUTTLE TRADERS RISK ALL Kyrgyz women travel across the region to support
their families, despite being bullied and harassed en route. By Gulnura
Toralieva in Bishkek
SECRET DIVORCES UNDERLINE WOMEN’S POWERLESSNESS Men are illegally divorcing
their wives without them knowing. By Aso Akram in Sulaimaniyah
___________________________________________
“The Women’s Reporting & Dialogue Programme will seek to strengthen the capacity of local media and individual journalists to cover gender issues through training and information provision.”
The Women’s Reporting & Dialogue Programme – currently covering non-Arab Muslim countries – will seek to strengthen the capacity of local media and individual journalists to cover gender issues through training and information provision. It also seeks to create a regional network of female journalists whose high-quality output will provide a much-needed source of comprehensive information on gender issues in the regions.
Following two productive round tables events held in Kabul and Bishkek, we held a successful regional conference in Baku, Azerbaijan. This provided a valuable opportunity for journalists participating in the project to share experiences and expertise, as well as receiving training and guidance.
I need a link to the collected under-reported stories that so many of you diaried. Someone — was it Diane? — was going to do this. Whenever … it’d be nice to show off all your hard work on those wonderful diaries.
I like the idea. I don’t know whether I was the one to gather the links for the Un stories, cannot recall, but I will do so and gather them all into one diary. If anyone has written such stories they can email me with the links to the page and I will include in one diary. If someone else is also engaged in this tell me and I will not put forth the effort.
It may be a few days as my neck, shoulder and arm are now killing me from all the blogging and I cannot do to much as yet.
Yes we should focus on women’s issues for a time and I think it may be very healing for new folks here.
There are many aspects of this that are of concern to me and I would like to do a diary on the women of Iraq. So coming soon, Women of Iraq!!!!!!!!
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!
You’ll do a great job.
Oh, for anyone who’d like to write a diary to be featured on the front page, make the first part of your diary short, and a sort of summary of what your diary is about … just like newspaper stories are done. That way, we can simply “promote” your diary to the front page. THANKS!
It might be helpful to point out that in journalism the theory is, and this is my recollection from many years ago in a class, that first you tell them what you are going to tell them(first Paragraph), you tell them(body of work) and then you tell them what you told them(ending paragraph).
I think you will find most newspaper stories are structured this way.
I’m not sure if this belongs here; I thought about a diary but I don’t feel level-headed enough at the moment to do a diary…
At any rate, while poking around for some information on newspapers circa 1900 I stumbled on this site:
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/awhhtml/index.html
and in the midst of a search there,
http://memory.loc.gov/service/pnp/ppmsca/02900/02945v.jpg
Description:
At the same time that women were campaigning for the vote, they were also lobbying for social welfare legislation, including protective laws establishing minimum wages and restricting the number of hours women could be forced to work. On April 9, 1923, the Supreme Court ruled in Adkins v. Children’s Hospital that such minimum wage laws for women were unconstitutional because they interfered with the liberty of contract guaranteed by the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. Two weeks after that decision, which according to cartoonist Rollin Kirby guaranteed women the constitutional right to starve, the National Consumers’ League (NCL) convened a meeting of groups supporting minimum wage legislation to consider next steps. The report of that meeting may be found not in the NCL records held by the Manuscript Division but in the records of an allied organization, the League of Women Voters, which had joined the NCL and other groups three years earlier to form a lobbying organization known as the Women’s Joint Congressional Committee. Locating manuscript materials for a research project often involves expanding your search beyond the most obvious sources to include the papers of individuals and organizations that may have had an association with events and activities that are the focus of your research.
I never knew about this…
OMG. What else did these women do for us that we don’t know about?!
If you don’t want to do that diary, perhaps someone else here — male or female — can do it. Should be fascinating.
From the “It Wasn’t All Bad” column in The Week magazine (no link, hand-transcribed):
Bamiyan province is about one hundred miles east of Kabul, and was the region where the beautiful and ancient statues of Buddha were demolished by the Taliban in one of the more striking, though not the bloodiest, examples of the Taliban’s extremity and cruelty. Now the female governor of that region is being feted by the tribal leaders. Good news.
And SusanHu too – this focus is very much appreciated.
In the good news column, I’d like to add this program by Ali Kazimi – Runaway Grooms which has aired recently on CBC television in Canada.
OK – truth be told, it was depressing as hell – and explored the growing problem of abandoned Indian brides, married to men with citizenship in the west, who take the dowry, engage in a little extra extortion of the brides family and then run back to their homes in the west – alone.
The good news is that it’s being explored, exposed, discussed and reported.
This year, the fourth annual Indian Society of International Law conference held in New Delhi opened with politicians and judges calling for changes in legislation to protect brides from runaway husbands.
I was thinking maybe you might post links to this diary in all the diaries discussing womens issues.
Or get some assistance like I have with the Welcome diaries and get them to go out and spread the word. I know many will love to help you, just ask. I am in recovery so I can’t at the moment.
.
SusanHu – two persons single thought.
Diary I posted just for that purpose, only to be swamped by asshole’s diary — true to his bio – info.
by Oui Wed Jun 8th, 2005
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Oui aka @dKos as creve coeur and new creve coeur
WELCOME: Make Yourself Known @BooTrib aka lost treasure of dKos