Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Women's Views on News

Women's Views on News

Female candidates in Vanuatu protest lack of women in parliament

Posted: 03 Sep 2012 08:00 AM PDT

Helen Thompson
WVoN co-editor

Female leaders in the Melanesian nation of Vanuatu are encouraging voters to boycott male candidates in the general elections set for the end of October.

Their move is to protest the lack of women in the Vanuatu parliament.

Eleven women boycotted MP Ralph Regenvanu earlier in August when he was due to present at a workshop entitled: "Women in Shared Decision Making Candidacy Training."

 They argue that Regenvanu promised to advocate for female candidates in political elections but did not follow through with his support.

Candidates Wendy Himford and Jenny Ligo pointed out that Regenvanu would face competition as they are standing for the same Port Vila constituency in the election and his lack of good faith was "a slap in the face."

Ligo told Radio Australia:

“We think that is a good strategy, that on the voting days women should only vote for women.

“We think that is good and we make an appeal to other community leaders and even individuals to see the need for supporting women, not only in Port Vila but throughout the country.”

Himford and Ligo will be joined by sixteen more female candidates in the general election on October 30.

Marshall Islands nuclear fallout survivor dies

Posted: 03 Sep 2012 07:00 AM PDT

Helen Thompson
WVoN co-editor

Nuclear fallout survivor and activist Lijon Eknilang, died in a Marshall Islands hospital at the age of 66 last week, following a brief illness.

Eknilang was eight years old in 1954, when the US tested the Bravo hydrogen bomb on Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands.

The bomb spread radioactive ash to Rongelap Island where Eknilang lived, as well as islands within a 100-mile radius of Bikini Atoll.

The islanders immediately sustained radiation burns on their bodies and lost hair, but later in life suffered from more health problems including thyroid tumours, cancers, miscarriages and birth deformities in their offspring.

Eknilang was one of the catalysts for the islanders evacuating Rongelap in 1985 on the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior, because of the contamination.

Bunny Mcdiarmid of Greenpeace says:

"Lijon looked forward to a day when she could return to her home island but that return remains elusive and controversial as only 1 of the 60 islands has been 'cleaned up' by US funds and many Rongelapese continue to believe it will never be possible to 'clean' their islands."

Eknilang was a staunch advocate for the nuclear test survivors, speaking all over the world about their health problems.

Bill Graham, advocate for a Nuclear Claims Tribunal in Majuro, Marshall Islands, said of Eknilang:

"She was a powerful spokesperson for the Rongelap people and her courage in being willing to share personal health issues helped other women to come out publicly as well."

Reforms to Palestinian divorce law signal move towards gender equality

Posted: 03 Sep 2012 06:30 AM PDT

Laura Bridgestock
WVoN co-editor

There are signs of progress towards gender equality in recently announced reforms to divorce laws in Palestine, which have until now been representative of an extremely repressive and unjust patriarchal framework.

Reforms to the country's legislation, based on Islamic law, mean that women no longer have to prove ill treatment in a court in order to divorce their husband.

The reforms also ban men from demanding 'unreasonable' sums of money in divorce settlements, and state that divorces must be completed within three months.

While Palestinian men have always been able to end a marriage, women have not had this freedom.

Instead, they must either ask their husband to end the marriage (which he can refuse) or prove ill treatment in court, which is often a lengthy, traumatic – and often unsuccessful – process.

Many husbands who do grant divorces do so only on condition of receiving large sums of money and, in some cases, custody of the children.

New legislation, which should be effective from September, will mean Islamic judges will be able to grant divorces simply based on the woman's own belief that the marriage is harmful to her.

If fully implemented, this could help many Palestinian women avoid stories such as that of 31-year-old Nisreen.

Having experienced severe physical and psychological abuse at the hands of her husband, Nisreen had to fight for three years before finally being granted a divorce – landing her family with a bill equivalent to the amount the average Palestinian makes in five years and leaving her vulnerable to even more abuse while proceedings dragged on.

During the time her case was being considered, Nisreen says her husband smashed her nose, tore out her hair while using it to drag her across the floor and left her homeless shortly after giving birth.

While the reforms are a sign of progress, there remains much to be done and there are concerns that conservative judges will still be reluctant to grant divorces to women.

Sheik Yousef al-Dais, head of the Islamic courts in the Palestinian Authority and announcer of the reforms said: "We are walking step by step. We want to take a deep breath and see how the street will accept it.”

Tributes paid after death of radical feminist writer

Posted: 03 Sep 2012 05:30 AM PDT

Jackie Gregory
WVoN co-editor

Tributes have been paid to Shulamith Firestone, a founder of radical feminism, after she was found dead in her Manhattan apartment last week.

Firestone wrote her polemic, The Dialectic of Sex: The case for Feminist Revolution, when she was just 25.

Using a Marxist analysis to argue that women would not gain total equality unless they were freed from the necessity of childbearing, Firestone recommended children be produced in laboratories and raised communally, breaking what she called "the tyranny of the biological family" reports CBCNews.

The book, published in 1970, led her to be regarded as one of the foremost second-wave feminists along with Germaine Greer, Betty Friedan and Kate Millett.

The New York Times notes that while some critics regarded her work as visionary, others damned it as quixotic.

Reviewing The Dialectic of Sex in The New York Times, John Leonard wrote: "A sharp and often brilliant mind is at work here." But, he added, "Miss Firestone is preposterous in asserting that 'men can't love.' "

However, according to The Village Voice, Naomi Wolf said: "No one can understand how feminism has evolved without reading this radical, inflammatory, second-wave landmark."

After the storm of controversy the book raised, Firestone, who was a painter by nature, retreated from public life. She suffered with mental illness and by the end of her life, at 67, had virtually cut herself off from the world.

Her only other published book came nearly 30 years later in 1998. Airless Spaces was a memoir but written as fiction.

An independent film called Shulie made by Elisabeth Subrin based on her life brought her back to some prominence in 1998 but it was attention which Firestone herself did not welcome.

Firestone was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Ottowa, Canada but grew up in Kansas City and then St Louis. She was the second of six children.

She moved to New York in the 1960s and co-founded three feminist groups New York Radical Women, the Redstockings  and New York Radical Feminists to challenge some of the mainstream women’s groups.

Her landlord Bob Perl told Associated Press that people often called at his office and offered to pay her rent for her.

“Family, friends and strangers supported her because she so moved them with her work,” he said.

Her sister Laya Firestone Seghi, who said she had died of natural causes, described her in the Huffington Post as, "a brilliant mind and a totally creative person”.

Israeli salt: now without any suggestion that women exist

Posted: 03 Sep 2012 04:33 AM PDT

Laura Bridgestock
WVoN co-editor

In the latest bizarre instance of the systematic removal of images of women from all areas of advertising in the Jerusalem area, a food company has removed a graphic logo representing a female figure from its table salt packaging.

The change to the Salit table salt packet, which was noticed by Brit Harel, is just the latest absurdity in the ongoing erasure of women from all public imagery in Jerusalem – motivated, it seems, largely by fears of vandalism from ultra-Orthodox groups.

In July, hundreds of people gathered to protest in the Israeli capital, after two actresses, Yuval Scharf and Michal Gavrielov, were erased from billboard posters advertising film The Dealers.

The film distribution company said that the business in charge of the billboards had asked for the change to be made – but the latter denied this.

While the city municipality said there were no official restrictions against images of women appearing on billboards, some companies said they believed their property may be vandalised if they allowed images of women to appear there.

This sentiment was recently repeated by the Egged bus company and Canaan Media, who announced that they would no longer feature any images of people – female or male – on buses in the Jerusalem area, due to fears of vandalism.

The announcement came at the end of a lengthy debate over whether buses would feature images proposed by the Yerushalmim movement, which aims to promote pluralism, and which had planned a campaign that would include images of women and the slogan: "Because J'lem is for us all."

Yerushalmim said images of women had not appeared on advertising on Egged buses for at least eight years.

The transport ministry expressed support for the campaign, and Canaan Media initially agreed, but following some quibbling about the length of the sleeves of the pictured women, now says its advertising on buses in the Jerusalem area will not feature any human images at all.

In a more amateur approach to blanking out women, one orthopaedic products shop in Jerusalem was found to be covering up pictures of women featured on products such as elastic bandages, by placing stickers onto the packaging.

The owner of the shop said this had been done following requests from customers who practise the very conservative Haredi form of Judaism.