half the sky

VISAYAN DAILY STAR
Bacolod City, Philippine
Tuesday, December 13, 2005

Perspective
with Rowena V. Guanzon

OPINIONS

Women hold up half the sky

BEIJING - “Women hold up half the sky,” and this could not be more true in China, where 6 billion of 13 billion people are women. Yet, women all over the world do not have equal power with men in political, economic and social life, and that includes China, where one-fourth of the population of the entire world lives. Whether in a socialist state like China or a democracy like the Philippines, women are treated in law and by institutions, society, and within the family and relationships as subordinate to men. And this has to change.

As you read this, I have just finished a seminar on gender and law in Beijing, where I, Anna Wu, former head of the Equal Employment and Opportunity Commission of Hongkong, Kieren Fritzpatrick of Asia Pacific Forum on Human Rights (Australia), American-Korean Hyeon-Ju Rho from Columbia Law School and Rangita de Silva of Spanggenberg Goup in the U.S. are resource persons. Together with Chinese women’s rights advocates, which included about five men, we discussed the challenge of public interest litigation in China and other countries, and China’s amended Law on Protection of Women’s Rights and Interest. Unlike the Philippines, which has a growing number of women’s rights and human rights organizations, China’s largest women’s organization is the Women’s Federation, which is a government entity. To bridge the lack of groups providing legal aid for women, lawyers based in universities are working in the area of women’s rights.

There are about 30,000 women lawyers in China, 4,000 of them in Beijing, but only a few are engaged in the legal aid work for women. Thanks to the NGO Legal Aid of Peking University Women’s Law Studies and Legal Aid Center which was started only a couple of years ago, poor women have help in getting access to justice. They also have a group called Women Watch in Beijing, which is also based in Peking University. Since it is impossible to provide legal aid to most poor women in China, Women Watch is doing strategic litigation, using cases which have a high impact on changing rules, law, and village governance. They are focusing on rural women, who are the most disempowered because of their low economic status, low level of education, and distance from government centers.

The experience of women’s rights advocates (and these include a few good men) all over the world is that change will not come without struggle. This is also the experience of advocates in the Philippines, who worked for nine years before the Anti-Rape Act of 1997. Politics and law-making are dominated by men so that the male perspective in writing law and government rules dominate and rule women’s lives, including in the courts.

Even the interpretation of what is correct behavior for women are men’s standards, hence the double standard in our society. Men and women who subscribe to this double standard expect women to be chaste, but they have no problem with men committing infidelity. It is the men who relegated women to the home and the private sphere, so that they can have the public sphere, the most powerful of which are politics and business. If you think this is a discourse that pits women against men, your view is somewhat correct, because men, as a group, will resist the erosion of their power in the home, in society and in politics.

But the more enlightened view is that women are at disadvantage and it is not right and it is not fair that women do not have equality with men. To eliminate this inequality, law and rules have to change, and society must change the way it views women, and that includes changing tradition and culture that place women in subordinate status with men.

In China or in the Philippines, the work is enormous for women’s rights advocates. Enlightened men should join us, if they want their daughters, sisters, nieces and granddaughters to be free from inequality and the dominance of patriarchy.*

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 13th, 2005 at 10:21 pm and is filed under Visayan Daily Star Columns, Gender and Law. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.