"Neither slut nor slave” was the “mot d’ordre” of thousands of young girls who demonstrated throughout France, at the beginning of the year, to protest against violence in low working-class neighborhoods (many young girls were beaten up or burnt alive for having lost their virginity before marriage). Women have always played prominent roles in French history in every field of activity: politics, science, and intellectual life, e.g. Catherine de Medici, Marie Curie, Simone de Beauvoir, and Simone Veil. A law in 1972 implemented wage equality. Despite their equality before the law and the fact that they generally perform better in schools (57 percent of high-school students receiving the Baccaulauréat in 2002 were female), women still have difficulties obtaining high positions in public and private companies.
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The history of women in Chile combines the leading role and the social action with the discrimination and invisibility. Active from the Colonial age in the humanitarian task, by the end of the last century women entered the university (1877), graduating like the first professionals of Latin America. More than fifty years of fight were necessary to conquer their citizenship and with it a slow access to positions of popular representation and government. The great social subjects, world-wide peace and their condition of subordination, impregnated their collective action from the start of the century, and reappeared in the recent decades - under the military dictatorship in a group of organizations who fought to get the respect to the human rights, the recovery of the democracy in all aspects, and the effective equality between women and men.
The Chilean women, for example, went out each 8 of March to confront the capitalist military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1989). When the political parties in Chile, mainly directed by men, negotiated a return to the democracy, these women raised a flag that said "Democracy in the country and the house."
In the last decades the situation of the woman in Chile has experienced a revolutionary change with the massive and progressive incorporation of women to the different areas of the national life. One of those great examples is that a woman, Michelle Bachelet, is the Minister of Defense, being the first woman having such position not only at a national level but at Latin American level as well. In spite of it, there are still levels of discrimination that don't allow the total equality of opportunities, among them, the nonexistence of a divorce law and an abortion law. The latter (therapeutic abortion) abolished by Pinochet's regime in 1989.
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When one hears women’s rights, one often thinks about third world countries (mutilation of women’s genital parts) or extreme religious countries (e.g. Afghanistan). There, inequality is often extreme and atrocities against women are part of their daily life and often justified by men as part of their culture or religion. Nevertheless there is also inequality in the so called civilized countries like Germany. I want to present you a quick review of the history of women’s rights in Germany in the last 50 years.
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Women are the 50.3% of the total of Ecuadorian population. Laws prohibit violence against women, including within marriage, abuses are widespread. The Law Against Violence Affecting Women and Children criminalized spousal abuse, including physical, sexual, and psychological abuse; created family courts; and reformed the Penal Code to give courts the power to remove an abusive spouse from the home. The law also gives legal support to the government's Women's Bureau in cases of sexual harassment in the workplace.Between June 2000 and June 2001, the Women's Bureau reported 6,868 cases of sexual, psychological, or physical mistreatment of women. In 1999 a Guayaquil NGO reported that one out of three women suffered from some form of domestic violence
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Bulgaria was one of the first countries in Europe, which admitted women's voting rights in 1944, even ahead of France and Italy. Bulgaria also stands at the prestigious second place in Europe, only behind Portugal, for enrollment of women in higher education institutions. Women represent 57 % of the student body in these institutions. The country is still in the transition period of recognizing legally some of the basic rights that women must have. Domestic violence is a wide spread phenomenon in Bulgaria but its comprehension and articulation in public are still in its embryonic stage.
Continue reading "Women's Rights in Bulgaria"
When one hears women’s rights, one often thinks about third world countries (mutilation of women’s genital parts) or extreme religious countries (e.g. Afghanistan). There, inequality is often extreme and atrocities against women are part of their daily life and often justified by men as part of their culture or religion. Nevertheless there is also inequality in the so called civilized countries like Germany.
Women are the 50.3% of the total of Ecuadorian population. Laws prohibit violence against women, including within marriage, abuses are widespread. The Law Against Violence Affecting Women and Children criminalized spousal abuse, including physical, sexual, and psychological abuse; created family courts; and reformed the Penal Code to give courts the power to remove an abusive spouse from the home.
Bulgaria was one of the first countries in Europe, which admitted women's voting rights in 1944, even ahead of France and Italy. Bulgaria also stands at the prestigious second place in Europe, only behind Portugal, for enrollment of women in higher education institutions.
