Women Around the World: Year in Review

So, another year is done. How did 2017 shape up for women and girls around the globe? Here is a selection of news:

Council on Foreign Relations:

• Record-breaking Women's March on January 21, 2017
• Global #MeToo campaign
• Legal advances in the Middle East
• U.S. Women, Peace, and Security Act is enacted
• U.S. slashes funding for global women’s health
• Legal reform on child marriage
• Gains in women's political leadership
• Low participation in peace talks
• Global migration crisis grows
• Female fighters combat terrorism

Women Leadership in the Worldwide Community:

• Almost four in ten businesses have no women in senior management positions in G7 countries
• The proportion of senior business roles held by women globally stands at only 24%
• There is an increase in the percentage of firms that have no places for women in senior management
• In G7 countries only 22% of companies have women as part of their senior staff
• 39% of companies have no women in senior roles whatsoever in G7 countries
• In Japan, with its powerhouse economy, only 7 percent of companies have women in senior roles
• Germany, another country with a strong economy, has only a 15% rate of countries with women in senior roles

News Deeply:

• women's march
• U.S. cuts funding to UNFPA
• Canada announces international assistance policy
• Family Planning receives funding boost
• advancements in women's rights globally
• Global #metoo campaign
• widening of the Global Gender Gap

The Lilly:

• the year in Movies

Medieval Mothers Had to Marry and Murder to Get Their Way

Love this article from the Smithsonian:

In the rough-and-tumble setting of medieval England, royal mothers were expected to do far more than just ensure their children, the future monarchs, were healthy and well-educated. She had to wield all her influence and patronage to keep her son in power—and keep her husband from killing him.

Before the Norman Conquest of 1066, royal succession was not fixed. The inheritance rights of young children were often passed over to ensure that an experienced warrior was on the throne. It provided the perfect recipe for royal intrigue, and mothers with sons to defend often faced down tradition—and their own husbands—along the way. Queens were supposed to value their roles as both wives and mothers, but when forced to pick between the two, their children always came first.

By the 13th century, an orderly law of succession began to take shape in England. These days, English royals must fend off the paparazzi instead of Vikings. What remains the same for royalty is the experience of parenting in the public eye—one that’s always trained on mothers of children who will wear the crown.

read entire article here @ the Smithsonian

Matilda Joslyn Gage - Forgotten 19th Century Suffragist

It’s easy to say that great strides have been made toward racial and gender equality in the last 150 years, yet one can’t help being struck by the parallel discourse surrounding human rights between then and now. Nowhere is this more evident than in the battles between women’s rights and the religious right. And nowhere is it more clear than in reviewing the works of Matilda Joslyn Gage.

From her first public speech, at age 26, in front of the 1852 National Woman’s Rights Convention in Syracuse, to her culminating thoughts in the 1893 book Woman, Church, and State, Gage used philosophy, theology, biblical studies, and science to rewrite the place of women in socio-political life throughout history.

What Gage saw was that you can’t just “get out the vote.” You have to change the mythologies. New stories need to be told, even if they are the old stories that have been forgotten.

Read entire article by Brent Plate here @ USC Annenberg - Religious Dispatches

Women before, during and after the Russian Revolution

The history of Bolshevism from the very early days right up to the Russian revolution contains a wealth of lessons on how it is the class struggle that provides the final answer to the women’s question. In this article Marie Frederiksen looks at the approach of the Bolshevik Party to the women’s question from its early days, right through to the revolution and after taking power.

She looks at the measures taken by the party to involve women, the progressive measures introduced by the Bolsheviks once in power, but also the negative consequences for women of the later Stalinist degeneration.

Women are  involved in social struggles, and the question of women's oppression is on the agenda to a degree we have not seen in decades. Sexism and the oppression of women is an integral part of capitalism, and they can only be removed by uprooting the system. A socialist revolution is the precondition for women's liberation.

The Russian revolution and the revolutionary energy of Russian women show the powerful reserves of courage and determination which can be mobilised for a socialist revolution. The Bolsheviks in 1917 began the task of the emancipation of women. It is up to us to finish it.

Read entire article by Marie Frederiksen here @ In Defence of Marxism

Victoria Woodhull - Candidate For US President

From: The Times Leader:

Nearly a century and a half before Hillary Clinton, a fiery activist from Ohio became the first woman nominated for U.S. president.

Victoria Woodhull’s varied and colorful life makes her difficult to pigeonhole. The suffragist, medium, businesswoman, stockbroker and newspaper publisher was “Mrs. Satan” to some, a visionary champion of women’s and children’s rights to others.

She rode motorcycles, preached “free love” and followed the guidance of an ancient Greek orator she believed had presented himself to her as a spirit guide.

The Equal Rights Party nominated Woodhull to face incumbent Republican Ulysses S. Grant in 1872 and Democrat Horace Greeley, nearly 50 years before women had the right to vote. At 34, she was a few months shy of the required age, but most historians still view her nomination and run as the first.

Woodhull lost, of course, but by how much is unclear.

Read rest of article here at The Times Leader

Wanted: Adriana Rivas

Adriana Rivas with Manuel Contreras

From the Australian:

AUSTRALIA is being asked by Chile's Supreme Court to extradite a woman accused of involvement in torture and murder during Chile's 1973-1990 military dictatorship.

The court requested the extradition of Adriana Rivas overnight.

She is wanted for her role in the 1976 murder of a Communist Party leader who was held in a secret prison before he was suffocated and thrown into the ocean.

Ms Rivas was assistant to Manuel Contreras, the head of the DINA secret police during General Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship.

She moved to Australia in 1978 but was detained during a visit to Chile in 2006.

Ms Rivas was released after some months on probation and escaped to Australia.

In an interview last year with SBS, she insisted she was innocent of the charges.

From SBS: The Other 9/11

Peng Liyuan: First Lady of China

From the Washington Post:

A photo of China’s new first lady Peng Liyuan in younger days, singing to martial-law troops following the 1989 bloody military crackdown on pro-democracy protesters, flickered across Chinese cyberspace this week.

It was swiftly scrubbed from China’s Internet before it could generate discussion online. But the image — seen and shared by outside observers — revived a memory the leadership prefers to suppress and shows one of the challenges in presenting Peng on the world stage as the softer side of China.

The country has no recent precedent for the role of first lady, and also faces a tricky balance at home. The leadership wants Peng to show the human side of the new No. 1 leader, Xi Jinping, while not exposing too many perks of the elite. And it must balance popular support for the first couple with an acute wariness of personality cults that could skew the consensus rule among the Chinese Communist Party’s top leaders.

President Joyce Banda

From Malawi Today:

History-making Joyce Banda , who rose to prominence in Malawi as a champion for women's rights and empowerment, yesterday became the second female African head of state of modern times after Liberia's Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.

Banda, her maiden name being Mtila, was born on April 12, 1950, in Malawi's colonial capital of Zomba where her father, was an accomplished and popular Police brass band musician and instructor.

Prior to an active career in politics she was the founder of the Joyce Banda Foundation, founder of the National Association of Business Women (NABW), Young Women Leaders Network and the Hunger Project. She was listed in Forbes Magazine 2011 as the third most powerful woman in Africa.

Mexican Politics - Josefina Vazquez Mota

From the LA Times:

A former congresswoman and education minister, Vazquez Mota, 51, has eagerly embraced her historic position as Mexico's first female presidential candidate for a major political party. In a contest where she trails the leader by a wide margin, she does not hesitate to play the so-called gender card at chosen moments.

In a meeting with foreign journalists last year, she said she was confident that traditionally machista Mexico was ready for a female leader.

"We have won many campaigns for many men. The moment has come to win campaigns for ourselves," she said, grouping herself with Chile's Michelle Bachelet and Brazil's Dilma Rousseff.

Columbian Women & Politics

From Women's Enews:

Unlike U.S. women, Colombian women have made great strides in the political arena in a short period of time, says Barbara Frechette in the book "Sharing Power." In this excerpt, she compares this progression to the one in the United States.

In Latin America, conservative Colombia was next to last-place Paraguay in granting voting rights to women. But Colombian women made up for their late start by taking only 41 years of peaceful power sharing to field two highly qualified female candidates in their 1998 presidential election.

Colombian women's remarkable achievement in such a short time led me to question why women in the United States took more time, encountered more bumps, attained a more contentious male-female power relationship and launched only one candidate in our 2008 presidential primaries.

Remembering the Women of the ANC

From the Mail & Guardian:

As we reflect on 100 years of the ANC, we must also reflect on the years that preceded its formation and honour, acknowledge, celebrate and critique the heritage bequeathed to us.

In 1956 despite a strong ANC "recommendation" to the contrary, women led by the federation undertook their most risky operation -- the march to Pretoria to protest against the extension of pass laws to African women. The exchanges between women such as Lillian Ngoyi and the ANC's male leadership reveal a complex but mutually respectful relationship and sharp ideological contestations among equals.

In the decades between then and now much has changed in the ANC and in the country. Much too has changed in the manner in which women locate and use their political agency within the ANC.

The longest surviving liberation movement in Africa celebrates it's centenary confronted by major and fundamental contestations within its ranks and sometimes publicly displayed acrimonious differences within its leadership.

Politics & Asian Women

From Gulf News:

India's Indira Gandhi, Sri Lanka's Sirimavo Bandaranaike, Pakistan's Benazir Bhutto, Bangladesh's Shaikh Hasina, Philippines' Corazon Aquino and Indonesia's Megawati Sukarnoputri — these women leaders dominated South and South East Asia for much of the past four decades.

Each belonged to a special class of women whose husbands or fathers were their country's recognised founding father or long-standing political leader. But, while their dynastic links brought them to power, they were not the sole factor keeping them there.

When first elected, none of these women had any serious professional or political qualifications. For some, this ‘shortcoming' was seen as an advantage, enabling some of them to project an image of innocence and purity, even martyrdom, as they stood in the place of their deceased husbands or fathers. None was particularly focused on a women's agenda (at least not in their first terms in office), and studies show that rural women did not fare particularly well under their rule.

But something very different emerged in Asia in 2011. A growing number of women are reaching for the highest political echelons in their countries by dint of their political talents alone.

Kitti Green & the KGB

From Adelaide Now:

THREE women were stripped naked and an Aussie filmmaker was kidnapped as the KGB broke up a feminist protest.

Kitti Green spent more than six hours being interrogated by the local KGB security service, who freed her only after the Australian embassy in Moscow intervened.

The KGB dumped Ms Green at the Lithuanian border, but three Ukrainian women who were travelling with her - Inna Shevchenko, Oxana Shachko and Alexandra Nemchinov - were beaten after being seized at a Minsk railway station.

"They were blindfolded and driven around in a bus all night," the feminist group Femen said.

"They were taken into the woods, had oil poured on them, were forced to take their clothes off, were threatened to be set on fire.

"They threatened them with a knife, which they later used to cut off their hair. Then they threw them out into the woods naked and without documents."

The women were protesting to mark President Alexander Lukashenko's disputed re-election a year ago.

From Salon:

A group of women from a Ukrainian topless-protest group on Wednesday recounted their ordeal in neighboring Belarus, where they claimed they were kidnapped, beaten and abused by local security officials.

Oksana Shechko told the Associated Press that she and two fellow activists with Femen were interrogated on a bus for 12 hours, made to undress in the woods in freezing temperatures, punched in the head and back, threatened with death and rape, smeared with paint and had some of their hair cut of.

Shechko charged that the Belarusian authorities were punishing them for a protest in Minsk on Monday in which they bared their breasts to bring attention to President Aleksander Lukashenko’s crackdown on the opposition.

“It was a real fight for survival,” Shechko said after returning to Kiev, her voice trembling. “We ended up in the hands of the butchers who kill and terrify the Belarusian people.”

Women in Tunisia

From the Financial Times:

Suad Abd al-Rahim, a tall, elegant, 47-year-old Tunisian woman with dyed red curls, is no one’s idea of what an Islamist politician should look like.

Yet the businesswoman, who says she has no plans to don the Islamic headscarf, has just been elected to Tunisia’s new constituent assembly on the ticket of Nahda, the Islamist party that has emerged as the strongest political force in the country.

After 22 years of repression under the regime of Zein al-Abidine Ben Ali, the former president ousted by a popular uprising this year, Nahda has staged a powerful comeback, winning 90 out of 217 seats according to final results of this week’s election.

Now the largest party in the new assembly that will write the country’s democratic constitution, it is poised to lead a coalition government.

Ukraine: Yulia Tymoshenko Arrested

From Yahoo News:

France on Thursday said it had summoned the Ukrainian ambassador in Paris to express its "serious concern" over the arrest of former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko.

The envoy was told that France would continue to follow very closely the developments in the case that saw Tymoshenko's arrest on Friday for contempt of court in her abuse of power trial, a foreign ministry spokeswoman said.

He was told of "the serious concern generated by the detention of Mrs. Yulia Tymoshenko and more generally of the progress of (her) trial," spokeswoman Christine Fages told reporters.

Tymoshenko risks being jailed for up to 10 years if convicted for abuse of power over gas deals she signed with Russia in 2009.

The European Union and the United States have been sharply critical of her arrest, saying it raised concerns about the rule of law in Ukraine.

Tymoshenko on Wednesday bitterly accused her prosecutors of being agents of a "machine of repression" against opposition to President Viktor Yanukovych.

Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf - Obstacles in Liberia

From Voice of America:

Liberian voters made history five years ago by electing Africa's first female president. But as Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf runs for re-election, voters will find few female candidates on ballots for other posts.

Liberia's Elections Commission is encouraging more women to run for elected office in a country where they make up less than 15 percent of the legislature.

Elections Commission trainers have met with women across Liberia about standing as party candidates for local and national office. Elections Commission chairman James Fromayan says the first obstacle is often political parties themselves.

“We try the best we can to appeal to political parties to begin with at the regular meetings with those parties to encourage women participation in the party at the executive committee level," he said. "You can't have an executive committee of sometimes 30 persons and just about two women. That is just not proper.”

Female President for Singapore?

From the Diplomat:

The recent victory of Yingluck Shinawatra, who will become Thailand’s first female prime minister, has inspired some Singaporeans to ask whether it’s also time for the prosperous city state to elect its first female president. Singapore is set to choose its new president, a largely ceremonial position, next month.

But electing a female president isn’t that easy as choosing a female member of parliament. After reviewing the minimum qualifications that a candidate must pass, it seems there will be some difficulty in finding eligible female nominees.

According to Grace Ke of the Association of Women for Action and Research, Singapore has had only one female minister in its history, and has never had a female chief justice, speaker, attorney general, Public Service Commission chairman or auditor general.

Somali Minister For Women Abducted

From Ms. Magazine:

Asha Osman Aqiil, Somalia's new minister for women and family affairs, was abducted by Islamist rebels late Wednesday night, the day after her appointment was announced. The abduction occurred while Aqiil was on her way to her first cabinet meeting. She was travelling in an area controlled by al Shabaab militants. Aqiil is the only woman in the new 18 member government.

Al Shabaab has a history of targeting government ministers. Last month, al Shabaab was accused of killing Interior Minister Abdi Shakur Sheikh Hassan in a suicide bomb attack. Sahra Maalin, a women's rights activist described Aqiil's abduction as a "collective punishment against Somali women and all those who believe in equality."

Since the overthrow of Dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991, Somalia has not had an effective central government. Additionally, earlier in the week, the UN declared that there is famine in two of Somalia's regions under rebel control. According to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation, thousands have died in Somalia over the past months because of the severe drought and famine. The abduction of Asha Osman Aqiil has heightened famine aid groups' security fears as they plan to make food deliveries.

Indigenous Women in Presidential Race

From Latin America Press:

Two indigenous women are seeking to make history by reaching the two top jobs in politics: Nobel Peace laureate Rigoberta Menchú, presidential candidate of the left-leaning Frente Amplio coalition and lawyer Laura Reyes, vicepresidential candidate for the Compromise, Renovation and Order party, known as CREO.

Menchú is one of the most famous faces in Guatemalan politics and this is her second attempt to run for the office. But Reyes is a newcomer, running on ticket with Eduardo Suger, a mathematician of Swiss-Guatemalan origin and founder of the private Galileo University.

Reyes, a Mayan Kaqchikel woman from the municipality of Tecpán, in the department of Chimaltenango, two hours from Guatemala City, describes herself as a resiliant woman who had to fight against the odds to have a career.

Yingluck Shinawatra - Thailand's Next PM?

From the Star:

Political pundits discounted her from the get-go: she had no political experience, had never held a government post and had never seen the inside of a campaign.

But when polls close and the ballots are counted Sunday, she could become Thailand’s new prime minister — the first woman to do so in this ever-fragile, ever-fractious Asian democracy.

Yingluck Shinawatra, the 43-year-old leader of the Pheu Thai party, has proven herself to be a campaign natural.

Win or lose, she has made her mark in this hotly contested vote.

“She’s an accomplished businesswoman. She has brought new ideas and she seems very strong,” says 27-year-old mother Naron Chantacham, sitting astride a Honda 125 motorcycle in downtown Bangkok. “And I like the fact that she’s a woman. No woman has ever run for prime minister before. People think women are weak and submissive, but she’s going to show everyone that women can lead.”