[Day 12] Education
One hundred and sixty one years ago, a group of women and men drafted the Declaration of Sentiments, stating that "The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman..." Their immediate goal of equal voting rights for women in the United States has long since been met, but this statement still rings with a tragic amount of truth.
Three years ago, when rageprufrock first began the project that would grow into 14 valentines, she spoke about how women are praised and worshiped, torn down and degraded. We live in a world where our bodies are revered for the ability to give life and derided for leaving behind the appearance of adolescence, where we can rise to the highest offices of power in some countries and are deprived of basic rights in others.
We are told to be strong, to stand up for ourselves, told that we can do anything, be anything - but only to a point, always to a point.
Around the world, women die from lack of basic medical attention, from infanticide, from starvation beyond their control, from starvation inflicted upon themselves in a twisted attempt to be beautiful. We are beaten, raped, murdered, told in so many horrifying ways that we are lesser that we don't matter.
Forty years ago we declared that Sisterhood is Powerful, and it still is. We must remember that, must continue moving forward.
It's 2009 and we've come so far, but there is still more work to be done. We deserve better, and we can do more. We're strong. The next fourteen days is meant to remind us of that. It's our time to take back our bodies.
V can stand for vagina, like Eve Ensler's groundbreaking monologues. V can stand for violence, under whose auspices all women continue to make a home.
V can also stand for victory.
Education
Education provides choices. That's powerful for anyone, but especially for women. When educational opportunities for women became equivalent to that of men, we gained options beyond traditional roles in society and beyond stereotypical jobs. We can earn the same degrees as men and find ways out of poverty, become self-sufficient, and make serious contributions to the world in a larger spectrum.
That doesn't mean that there aren't still challenges to be faced. There are still areas of study which lack female representation, including fields like engineering and mathematics. Even in the United States, there exists illiteracy, especially among women. And in the world as a whole, more women than men lack even basic, much less advanced, education.
Our voices are not silent, however. We work towards literacy of women in the United States with organizations like WE LEARN. More broadly there is The National Coalition for Women and Girls in Education, which is a collaborative effort targeting various aspects of education as it relates to women and girls.
Globally, we have organizations such as The Initiative to Educate Afghani Women, and The Somali Women's Scholarship Fund, which strive to bring education to populations of women who desperately need the options and the choices that education can bring.
[Today's essay is courtesy of idyll]