Women Rise Up in India and Nepal

Protest in India

Internationally freedom for women often takes the form of simple survival. "honor killings," "bride burnings" and requiring a woman to marry a man who kidnaps and rapes her have been common practices in India. Groping and molestation has been dismissed under the benign sounding designation, "Eve teasing."

But now women in India are rising up against brutal conditions. The impetus for this uprising was the gang-rape and murder of a young medical student aboard a bus in Delhi. This incident has been a last straw for Indian women. Their nascent militance is reminiscent of seventies feminism in certain ways ie: the viewing of women and men as distinct social classes with women playing the subordinate, powerless role and completely unlike our early movement in others ie: socially sanctioned brutality up to and often including murder.

Protest in Nepal

Now, the women of Nepal are rising up as well. Their last straw is the case of a maid who says she was raped and robbed by government officials in an international airport there. The perpetrators were not charged and she was reimbursed with less money than was stolen. This one story has opened a Pandora's box of tales of horror involving women in Nepal. Often it is the travelers and tourists who have brought the problem of rape to light, click here to see a story involving an American tourist, simply because Nepalese women had become inured to these travesties.

But this former attitude of helplessness and acceptance has transformed into a militant uprising. We are sending our sisters love and support to continue their brave struggle and hope it speads throughout the world, even to the repressive reaches of the Middle East!

Pink Slips, Pills, War on Women

Walker has now begun sending out as many as 6,000 layoff notices to public sector employees in Wisconsin. Even Lisa Fitzgerald, the wife of republican and state senate majority leader Scott Fitzgerald has gotten one. This is a familiar strategy to try to scare folks into compliance. Just last year on March 5, 2010 the then mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom sent out more than 15,000 pink slips to city workers threatening us with termination.

In 1994, every employee of the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Newspaper Agency went out on strike. We were tired of working without a contract and going without cost of living raises for so long. After about one week of walking the picket lines, management sent out certified letters to all employees that said we would lose our jobs if we didn't come back to work. Luckily, when I answered my door, my porch was covered with strike/picket signs. The postman said he had a certified letter for some of this name, mine, but it was clear that she wasn't home to sign for it. "Yes," I replied, "she is gone and no-one knows when she'll return." I experienced so many acts of solidarity during that brief, 11 day, strike. BART employees gave us free rides, truckers brought us big boxes of burgers, it felt like a huge extended community.

Well, there seems to be a double dip in the housing crisis. Prices are still falling and new home sales are diving faster than a cormorant on cocaine, Obama's loan modification program has not functioned very well due to lack of cooperation from the banks, gas, food and the prices in general keep rising. Now, the media keeps telling us the recession is over, thinking if they repeat it often enough we will start to believe it.

And, if that's not enough salt rubbed in our wounds, yesterday I saw a televised ad for a new anti-depressant. The commercial begins something like...are you having money troubles, family problems?...Well, ain't that a kick in the head, sell us medication to take while you rob and rape us! This brings me to the GOP's new war on women. Their prescription for returning women to a subordinate class: make abortion illegal, change the definition of rape, and in Iowa and South Dakota there are bill being presented todecriminalize the murder of doctors in clinics that give women access to abortion. So much for all their talk about "right to life."