Subject to Debate: Sense and Dissents on Women, Politics, and Culture

Clara Zetkin AvenueScurrying around Manhattan on a blustery morning a few weeks ago, Ihappened to glance up while waiting for the light to change in front of thepublic library. Beneath the green and white sign reading Fifth Avenue wasanother, also green and white, and printed in exactly the same lettering:Clara Zetkin Avenue. Gee, I thought for a split second, if Rudy Giuliani isnaming a street for the grande dame of German socialism, he can't be as badas I thought. But will New Yorkers really start telling taxi drivers tomake a right on Zetkin? Then I saw the bent wires fastening the sign to thepost, and realized what was going on: Some lefty prankster was reminding usthat the next day, March 8, was International Women's Day.Well, the great day came and went with barely a ripple of attention here inthe United States?although I understand that, over at the United Nations,Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali gave a speech about the need to domore for women, which in the case of the United Nations shouldn't be toodifficult. Maybe the local indifference is why I find myself filled withgloomy thoughts about the worldwide situation of women. Here we are, at theend of the twentieth century, and not only have hundreds of millions ofwomen around the globe yet to obtain even the barest minimum of humanrights, but the notion that they are even entitled to such rights isbitterly contested.Consider, for example, the horrors documented in the State Department'sannual human rights report, which focused on women this year for the firsttime: genital mutilation in Africa and the Middle East, bride burning inIndia, sexual slavery in Thailand, forced abortion and sterilization inChina. Imagine the firestorm of international protest if any of thesepractices were imposed by men on men through racism or colonialism orCommunism! Well, you don't need to imagine: Just compare the decades ofglobal outrage visited, justly, on South Africa's apartheid regime fordenying political, civil and property rights to blacks, and thecultural-relativist defense advanced on behalf of Saudi Arabia and otherultra-Islamic regimes for their denial of same to women. Nobody's callingon American universities and city governments to disinvest in thoseeconomies. In Iraq and a number of other Middle Eastern countries that arenot theocracies, a man can with impunity kill any female relative he feelsis "dishonoring" him by unchaste behavior; in Pakistan, the jails are fullof women and girls, some only nine years old, whose crime was to be thevictims of rape. I suppose Benazir Bhutto will get around to them after shefinishes persuading the world that her mother is trying to undermine hergovernment because of a sexist wish to see a son, rather than a daughter,in power.