Authors: Sally Armstrong
The day I visited YWC with Alaina marked the premiere of Anita’s documentary,
My Voice, My Story
, about street harassment. Excitement permeated the meeting room where about sixty
young people, half of them men, were gathered for the screening and subsequent question period. The ones I spoke with were all between the ages of sixteen and twenty-three: bright, energetic, incredibly polite in the way they greet a stranger and enormously enthusiastic about getting their story told to the wider world.
Afterwards, a young man asked Anita if the harassment comes from uneducated men. She replied, “Part of it does, but mostly it’s a way for men to show that they don’t want women on the street. In the Taliban time, men owned the street.” Another question, also posed by a young man, followed: “Women and girls aren’t prepared to talk about this. Even in my own family women are always told they are not to complain about men. So my question is, how do you inspire the women who are still sitting in their houses thinking they have no right to complain?” You could have heard a pin drop in the room as Anita answered: “You’re right. Most women in Afghanistan think they have no right to complain about being harassed or beaten. [But] we [at YWC] have lectures about this. We go to the schools and talk to the girls. I think it’s easier to work with the generation rising up right now than to try to fix what happened in the past. If I talk to my mom, her ideas are fixed; she won’t listen. But schoolgirls, university students, young women—they’ll listen. So we focus on youth and on the media.”
Then one of the women in the audience asked the young men what they do when their friends harass women. Several spoke up at once, voices commingling: “I tell them to stop. It happens just as much in the office as it does on the street. Bosses do it as much as colleagues. It’s an unfortunate part of the culture that is so deep that men think it is their right to do it, and women think they don’t have the right to stop it.”
When Anita drew the conversation to a close, she said something that even that first screening had shown to be true: “This documentary was made to give women a voice, to let her start talking about what she goes through when 50 percent of the society tells the other 50 percent to stay in the house.”
The next morning, Alaina went to visit Sahar Gul at a secret shelter in Kabul, home to fourteen girls who had been abused. To Alaina’s surprise, another young woman, Mumtaz Bibi, who’d been horribly disfigured when the man she refused to marry threw acid all over her face, came into the visitors’ room with Sahar to meet her. Watching the three youngsters—fifteen-year-old Alaina, fifteen-year-old Sahar and sixteen-year-old Mumtaz—connect with one another was a remarkable sight. Even with the interruptions of cumbersome translations and the ubiquitous Afghan hospitality that required the serving of nuts and sweets and green tea, the girls managed to make a bond. Alaina conveyed her respect for the courage of these young women and vowed to continue fighting for the equality rights of girls in Afghanistan. The painfully shy Sahar could only glance up at Alaina from under her eyelids, wringing her hands as she spoke in a whisper, but still she flashed a smile as she thanked Alaina for the support she had promised. Mumtaz did the same. Then each of them told Alaina about their plans to get an education. But whatever the future brought, they said they would make time to volunteer at this shelter. Later Alaina told me, “I don’t think there are words to describe how raw and emotional that meeting was. They’ve seen what no child or adult should ever see, but each of them wants to give back to the shelter, to help other girls. They’re healing emotionally and physically—they are the light at the end of this tunnel.”
Confronting the realities in the lives of girls is the single best way to begin the long, sure process of change, even when that confrontation means attacking old shibboleths. For example, in Afghanistan, the subject of the best-known and best-loved poetry is invariably how wonderful women are and how heaven lies beneath their feet. “Still, 87 percent face violence at home,” Noorjahan had explained. “More than four hundred women are in jail for moral crimes such as falling in love or running away from abusive families. Most of this poetry is written by men. I know some of those men—they beat their wives. I want to marry someone who will support me, fight for me, argue with me, not someone who will write poetry about me and keep me at home.”
These three young women know the size of the change they have to make and believe that it’s the young people under thirty who will do it. The two young Afghan women offered this illustration: if a girl asks her grandfather about marching against street harassment, he’ll say, “Don’t do it, you’ll bring shame on the family.” If she asks her father, he’ll say the same and add, “Stay at home, the street is too dangerous for you.” But if she asks her sister, she’ll want to know where and when the march is taking place and join in.
Similar initiatives are happening in Senegal and Swaziland, in India and Pakistan as well as the Americas. The girls I spoke with all over the world confirm that the first step is acknowledging their plight, and the next step will take them into a better future. They believe in their hearts what experts such as Jeffrey Sachs and Farida Shaheed have recently stated: educating and empowering girls and women is the ticket to an improved economy, reduced poverty and the end of conflict.
Anita, Noorjahan and Alaina agreed that even if YWC ceased to exist, the idea would go on because the seed of change had already been planted. In fact, in late September 2012, Noorjahan left YWC to start another organization for the emancipation of women through the arts. The group’s ideas and slogans are zipping around the country from one province to another via Facebook and Twitter. In villages without high tech, news that change is on the way is passed by word of mouth. There’s a new generation at work and new hope in the air. “The elders have made all the decisions for us for a long time,” Anita said. “It’s enough. It’s not their time anymore, it’s ours.” And Noorjahan added, “Women haven’t made war; they aren’t as involved in corruption. You don’t see 80 percent of the men in this country being beaten by their wives.”
“We’re the generation of change,” Alaina said. “We have the power and a new viewpoint and we’re going to change the world—watch us.”
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
About eighteen months before I started writing this book I had an epiphany of sorts about the status of the world’s women. I’d been covering conflict in various parts of the world for twenty-five years, almost always from the point of view of what happens to women and girls. Now I sensed something was shifting. I couldn’t put my finger on it at first, but I knew whatever this shift was, it was benefiting women. Players who normally shrugged their shoulders about women’s issues were suddenly paying attention. Women who’d seen their lot in life as preordained began to say, “Not anymore.”
For the next year I posed questions I hadn’t thought to ask before, gathered data that made me certain this inkling I had was valid. But to actually come out and suggest that women are the way forward, that many of the planet’s ills, such as poverty and endemic conflict, can be improved by women, that after all the years of oppression and abuse, times were changing, that women were throwing off the shackles that bound them to second-class citizenship and owning their own voices and spaces? Well, that was a leap in thinking that I needed to test.
I decided to try my thesis out on an audience in Oakville, Ontario, when my friend Bonnie Jackson asked me to address her “Bloomsbury Group” at their monthly meeting. This collection of intellectuals would no doubt let me know if I was on track. When I finished speaking, they voiced their surprise and approval with hearty applause. Soon afterwards, I had lunch with Marion Garner, the publisher of Vintage Canada, who is always on the lookout for fresh ideas. I told her about the speech, and she said, “This is a book. Get going.”
Then Paul Kennedy, the brilliant host of CBC Radio’s
Ideas
suggested I do a version of the story—describing women as “the New Revolutionaries”—for his program. And I was at last under way.
So the first person I have to thank is Marion, for believing in this concept, and then Paul for road-testing it. Random House Canada’s publisher/vice-president and master craftswoman/editor Anne Collins took the book project to the finish line, with her usual tenacious grasp of the material and attention to detail, and kept my feet to the fire until the manuscript was what we had both imagined. The copy editor, Alison Reid, did an exceptional job, for which I am truly grateful. And the designer, Leah Springate, came up with a sensational cover. Deirdre Molina, senior managing editor, and Frances Bedford, publicist extraordinaire, are also valued members of my team at Random House.
My lifelong friend Donald A. Thompson gets credit for suggesting the title,
Ascent of Women
. He came up with it while we were beached on a sandbar recovering from a canoe-tipping (mine not his) on the rapids of the Nepiseguit River in New Brunswick.
But most of all, I owe this work to the women and girls around the world who helped me to create it. The women who gave me shelter in places from which local fundamentalists preferred to
banish me. The ones who stuffed bread into my pocket to feed me on my journey out of a country that had basically imprisoned them. The many who suffer at the hands of so-called religious men, yet were willing to share their stories despite the threat of retaliation. And those who had the courage to talk about the cultural contradictions in their lives and what they were doing to change them. Women who have been heroes of mine in Asia, Africa and the Americas shaped my thinking about the tipping point that women are reaching. What’s more, they encouraged me to write this book. And to the girls who filled my journey with laughter and inspiration, who shed such a clear honest light on the situation they are in and shared their energy and enthusiasm for change—thank you, I cherished our time together. To all the mothers and daughters who opened their worlds to me, I offer my heartfelt thanks and, I hope we meet again.
And of course I owe enormous gratitude to my family and Jonathan Chilvers, who put up with the antics of an author with a deadline, and to my agent, Hilary McMahon: I celebrate the publication of this book and the role you played in getting us all to this place.
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