… hats off to the Independent, which has done an obvious but very worthwhile list of how far women still labour under enormous disadvantages around the world. A sample:

* 1% of the titled land in the world is owned by women
* 70% of the 1.2 bn people living in poverty are women and children
* 85m girls worldwide are unable to attend school, compared with 45m boys. In Chad, just 4% of girls go to school.
* 67% of all illiterate adults are women
* 1,440 women die each day during childbirth (a rate of one death every minute)
* In the EU, women comprise 3% of chief execs of major companies
12 is the number of world leaders who are women (out of 191 members of the United Nations)
* Men directed 9 out of every 10 films made in 2004

If a criticism might be made, it is that there has been progress made, which the story fails to acknowledge – the number of women in those last three categories would, 30 years ago, have been very close to zero. And in the middle ranks there has been progress.

But the message that needs to be driven home again, and again and again, is that while progress has been made – and it has been demonstrated, for those for whom it needed to be demonstrated — that women are just as capable as men at any job on the face of the earth (and beyond) we still have a long, long way to go. (And even those gains achieved are under threat …)

I was going to write a lengthy original post, but time has got away from me, so please consider this my contribution to the Blog Against Sexism Day.

It is now up on Indian Writing, and a very special carnival it is too. That’s not just because it is a great collection of posts – although it is – or because it is on International Women’s Day, but because it is taking the carnival on to a fourth continent. We’ve twirled through Europe, Australasia and North America, and now the carnival is visiting Asia.

Please help to spread the word, and of course visit it yourself!

You’ll undoubtedly find some new bloggers there (unless your blogroll is already astonishing), and some fascinating new angles on old debates. For example, I was interested in Kaleidoglide’s consideration of the abortion debate in America, Europe and India. That reveals the differences between issues for women in different countries, but then comes a similarlity. There’s a continuing debate in Britain about the caesarean rate, but Blogpourri reveals that in India the rate in private hospitals is up to 70 per cent in private hospitals!! It seems this is a universal problem (at least in places with even modest wealth).

There’s also “how women are like sea-turtles”, Rwandan widows, “panic rooms” for abused women, and a fascinating post on how education has failed to deliver th promised liberation for Indian women.

Really, it is a must read.

More generally on the carnival, I don’t yet have an African host (you can find the list of hosts on the home page, now running into July), but I would very much like to find one. Also a South American host, although I appreciate there might be a language problem there.

On that point, while I think the carnival needs to stay broadly in English – like it or not it is the most widely accessible language – there’s no reason why it can’t point to posts in other languages, if the host is able to read them and provide a brief summary. And should anyone be interested in starting a French, or Spanish, or Mandarin-language feminist carnival, I’d be happy to provide any help I could!

Once again my list of “emails to read when I’ve got time” has surpassed the 200 mark, so I’m digging in and finding some gems:

* Early Women Masters – a truly international collection, from discographies of medieval and Renaissance Western composers to gender-inclusive translations of Chinese religious texts, to American quilting.

* The Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition: which “will create a full-text, digital edition of six nineteenth-century journals, with concept maps and advanced metadata. The journals include: English Woman’s Journal (1858-1864) an early woman’s magazine; Leader (1850-1859) a reformist weekly with an interest in science as well as politics; Monthly Repository (1806-1838) a non-conformist religious journal; Northern Star (1838-1852) a Chartist newspaper; Publishers’ Circular (1880-1890) a publishing trade paper; Tomahawk (1867-1870) an illustrated satiric weekly, a radical parallel to Punch. There’s not much there yet, but sounds interesting.

* Women in Print: Essays on the Print Culture of American Women From the
Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. A university press puts the whole book online, which sounds like a public service to me. Should be more of it.

* And posted on the Women Writers’ Yahoo group, a wonderful poem from Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, who is on my list of people to find out more about …

A Woman drest by Age

A milk-white hair-lace wound up all her hairs,
And a deaf coif did cover both her ears,
A sober countenance about her face she ties,
And a dim sight doth cover half her eyes,
About her neck a kercher of coarse skin,
Which Time had crumpled, and worn creases in,
Her gown was turned to melancholy black,
Which loose did hang upon her sides and back,
Her stockings cramps had knit, red worsted gout,
And pains as garters tied her legs about.
A pair of palsy gloves her hands drew on,
With weakness stitched, and numbness trimmed upon.
Her shoes were corns, and corns the upper leather.
A mantle of diseases laps her round,
And thus she’s dressed, till Death lays her in ground.

* Finally, I haven’t tried it out, but it sounds like a potentially good idea: Titletrader aims to match up people who want to swap books. Here’s the history section.

The European Court of Human Rights has today rejected an appeal from a woman who wants her frozen embryos implanted, against the wishes of the man who provided the sperm (when they were partners).

Natallie Evans, 35, from Wiltshire, made an emotional plea to her former fiancé to change his mind and let her use the embryos, which cannot be implanted without his consent [under British law].
Ms Evans was receiving fertility treatment in October 2001 when doctors discovered pre-cancerous cells on her ovaries. She immediately underwent a course of IVF, which produced six embryos fertilised by the sperm of her fiancé, Howard Johnston, before having her ovaries removed to head off the disease.
The next year, however, the couple split and Mr Johnston wrote to the fertility clinic asking it to destroy the stored embryos.

Two judges dissented from the ruling, which makes an appeal to the absolute final court, the Grand Chamber, where it would be heard by 17 judges.

It is what you call a really tough one. A man surely has a right not to have children without consent, so I guess in the end while I have to feel for Evans, he should not be forced into parenthood.

And the suggestion of a “right to parenthood” suggested by the dissenting judge worries me. If there were such a thing, just how far would a society have to go to make it happen? How much money might have to be spent on IVF?

… particularly when you think of what that money might achieve elsewhere in the world, Indonesia for example, where it sounds like HIV is getting seriously out of control, as a combined result of a large sex industry in which education about condoms has scarcely impacted, and a large injecting drug problem.

Indonesia’s ethnic minority provinces have been hardest hit by AIDS. In Papua, Merauke has an infection rate of more than 8% and Sorong has the country’s highest level of infection at 16%. Even in the capital, transvestite and transsexual prostitutes in Jakarta have an infection rate of 22%.

The article from which that drawn is very US propaganda-ish, but I’ve no reason to doubt the figures.
***
For light relief, Nintendo is planning to introduce video games designed to ward off Alzheimer’s in the over-45s, supposedly through mental stimulation. Dare I suggest reading a book, or watching a play, or … just participating in life?

This post started out as a response to a commenter on the post below about the play The Exonerated, who questioned if the people featured were in fact innocent. As a theatre critic I reviewed the play, and wasn’t terribly impressed, but it is worth, I think, stating that I entirely agree with its politics.

I can’t debate all of the cases in detail, but I heard Sunny Jacobs in person interviewed on Radio 4 and her story certainly seemed to hang together – plus there’s the fact that the real killer confessed several times, and that when he testified against Sunny and her partner the jury were not told this was part of a plea bargain that allowed him to avoid the death penalty himself. I can’t see how any jury could make a fair determination without knowing that essential fact. (There’s a Guardian account here.)

And (responding to my commenter) a statement from a person in shock, who has just been at a scene of violence – as remember and written down later by a probably equally shocked policeman – doesn’t strike me as compelling evidence.

In some ways anyway the detailed facts of these cases doesn’t particularly matter. DNA has conclusively acquitted people on death row in the US – innocent people who could easily have been killed by the state. That, and the fact that those facing the death penalty are overwhelmingly poor and non-white, indicate this is a profoundly unfair system. I don’t believe in the death penalty under any circumstances, but when its application is this biased and arbitrary, I can’t understand how anyone could support it.

There are several ways of getting a political message across in a stage production. You can go for the worthy, straight approach, such as is seen now in The Exonerated, or you can make it an exciting, entertaining evening so delightful that the audience swallows the polemical medicine with glee and sits begging for more.

The latter is the approach taken in David Farr’s production of The Odyssey: A Trip Based on Homer’s Epic at the Lyric Hammersmith. This is a magic realist Odyssey, set in part in the present day — the gods deliver the great king Odysseus into the not-so-tender hands of a British immigration detention centre. There, to justify himself and his seeking asylum (although really all he wants is to go home), he has to tell his tale, which takes us on a cheerful romp through ancient myth and theatrical tradition, from the hippie island of the Lotus-Eaters, to the Indonesian shadow puppet-style of the seductress Circe, to the Dr Who style encounter with the lumbering giant Cyclops.

The word “trip” in the title is no accident, for this is a seductively psychedelic production. Sometimes this is direct: the intoxicating lotus flower produces in the immigration centre such gems as “the strip lights, they are wicked, man”, but often this is wrapped into the insanity of everyday life. The inhabitants of the centre sing increasingly tall tales of the disasters that brought them there, such as “a giant fish took my sister away”, before explaining the sad hyperbole, still in song, “no one believes me whatever I say…”

It is easy to keep piling on the adjectives of praise; for an evening of pure entertainment — with added thought — in London tonight, I can’t think of anything to better it. The acting, the staging, the profusion of ideas and images, the changes of mood and balance of ideas, all come together in near-perfection. READ MORE