"A Voice for Rural Women of China"

Esther Mandelstamm/Jan 18/4:45pm /Gender Issues

This article addresses the very serious issues in Rural China, the inequality of women and the desire to have a male child. Males are more desired in this society and due to the one child law it is becoming an epidemic. Having a boy is more idolized than ever and women are being treated as second class citizens. Xie Lihua is the founder of the Rural Women Magazine that gives rural Chinese women a voice. She is trying to empower women and show them they deserve the same rights as men. Three out of Four Chinese women live in the countryside (more than 450 million) where social customs lead to loneliness and abuse. Domestic violence rates are very high; each year 150,000 women commit suicide in rural China, the only place in the world that women commit suicide more than men. Country women are taught to refer to their husbands as masters and want to please them by baring a son.
Xie Lihua’s is trying to start a revolution on changing these ideals to save the country women. She has sponsored programs such as literacy training, suicide prevention, and some increasing women’s political participation. Today she is focusing on China’s largest underclass, the millions of women who leave the countryside as migrant workers and on abduction and trafficking schemes that enslave women as prostitutes. Xia Luhua is jumping hurdles to head this revolution with other programs such as a battered spouse’s hotline and has pressured the government to make more specific legal protections from sexual harassment. It is said by Joan Kaufman (former Ford Fundation program director in Child, now at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government) that “Xie Lihua’s magazine was the first that gave rural women any real voice” “She and others helped put the issue of domestic violence out there for people to begin talking about.”
Rural China has come along way toward the movement of equal rights for women but there is still so far to come. Chinese law allows rural families to have a second child if the first is a girl but if the woman finds out her second is also a girl she is pressured to abort and try again for a boy since abortion is legal in China. “The rural thinking is that it’s a women’s fault if she is beaten” “She’s not trying hard enough to please her master” This thinking much be changed in order to save these women’s wellbeing.
I believe that this is a very important issue that needs attention. It took hundreds of years for women in the United States to gain equality and women still face prejudices today. I know it will be a long journey for China but the Rural Women Magazine is a great start to a women’s movement in China. These women deserve a voice and females deserve equality in their society. Maybe one day males will not be the only desired sex for families.

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fg-women2jan02,1,2391876.story?track=crosspromo&coll=la-headlines-frontpage&ctrack=2&cset=true