Women’s rights sure have come a long way…in this country, at least. Unfortunately, there are other parts of the world where women are still treated like second-class citizens, or worse.

As a man from a liberal American family, my marriage to a woman from a conservative Mexican family never stood a chance. If you were to ask my father in law, he might blame the eventual unraveling of my marriage on the fact that I simply wasn’t man enough to deal with a woman in the way a woman ought to be dealt with, that by seeing my wife as an equal partner upset the balance of what a good marriage is, that I was nothing more than a pussy. Never mind the fact that my wife—his daughter—was nuts.

My mother in law wasn’t allowed to work—for pay, that is (she worked herself half to death raising 10 children and keeping house). My father in law was well off, and he gave her everything she ever needed, or so he claimed. However, if she ever needed anything, she had to ask him for it; if she ever wanted to go anywhere, she had to ask his permission first. He never allowed her to drive either—maybe he was afraid that if she had the means, she would escape.

He was equally controlling with his children, especially the females. I thought it was ridiculous that they were expected to serve the men in the family, including their brothers, before they themselves were allowed to eat. It’s one thing for them to serve their spouses, a friend of their parents or an elderly relative out of respect, but from my point of view, being forced to serve their brothers’ meals and to wash their dirty dishes was nothing less than blatant sexism disguised as “tradition.” And while on the surface this sexism may hint at men’s superiority over women, it could be argued that machismo is little more than a manifestation of the inner insecurity of the Latino male.

Sexism has been around as long as history has been recorded. The idea that Eve was molded from the rib of Adam in order to keep the latter company is a perfect example, not to mention the tenet that “man” was created in God’s image, which leads one to believe that the Supreme Being has a penis. Even in polytheistic religions, the masculine gods always seemed to hold loftier positions. Uranus, the father of the Greek gods, reigned supreme in all the heavens, while Gaia, his wife, was merely Mother Earth.

Nowadays, in Western culture, it’s not uncommon to hear Christian women refer to God as “she;” I wonder what would happen if a woman dared to questions Allah’s gender in the Middle East…?

While women in the United States are fighting for the right to marry each other, women in other parts of the world are fighting for their very lives. Take Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, an Iranian woman who confessed to having “illicit relationships” with two men, even though the alleged adultery occurred after the death of the woman’s husband. She was sentenced to 99 lashes of a whip, and the punishment was carried out. But when one of the men was later implicated in the slaying of Ashtiani’s husband, she was again tried and convicted of adultery while still married, and sentenced to death by stoning.

Whether or not she is actually guilty of either offense is beside the point. The real issue is the treatment of women in non-Western culture. The latest National Family Health Survey found that 37.2 per cent of married Indian women regularly experience spousal abuse. To Saudi Arabians, women are considered property, and any rights they do have are those granted to them either by their male family members or by their spouses. In Taliban-ruled areas of Afghanistan, women who dare to seek an education are at risk of being executed. Talk about male insecurity.

And while it may seem impossible that women in other countries will ever have basic civil rights, let alone the same rights as a man, remember that less than a century ago, women weren’t allowed to vote in the United States, and it wasn’t until 1963 that The Equal Pay Act required equal wages for men and women doing equal work. And whether or not American feminists really burned their bras in protest to the 1968 Miss America pageant (historians claim that bras were merely tossed into trash cans), there is always hope that Muslim women will one day rise up and burn their burqas in protest for their less than equal treatment by Muslim men, for as the prophet Muhammad is quoted as saying, “Even as the fingers of the two hands are equal, so are human beings equal to one another. No one has any right, nor any preference to claim over another.”

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