Women's Rights

Ruth Bader Ginsburg was on CSpan yesterday and she has to be one of the smartest people around anywhere.  The narrator asked her a question and she talked for most of the rest of the time about the answer, with no notes and very little hesitation.  She was talking about women's rights.  

We sometimes forget that things have not always been the way we see them today.  She talked about three cases from the 60s and 70s that kind of took me back a little.  One concerned a woman who was being tried for killing her husband and could not get any women on the jury.  Women weren't on juries back then because they were seen as the center of the home and could not be taken away from those duties.  Somehow, even living through those times, I didn't know that women weren't on juries in Florida, or other places as well.  

She represented a man whoes wife had died in childbirth.  He went to the Social Security office and wanted to get spousal benefits to help raise the child and they told him "those are only for women" so he sued.  The Supreme Court eventually got the case, and hardly hesitated a step in overrulling the Social Security and lower courts.

But what got my attention the most was a question by a student who was going to go overseas to help with women's rights in the Middle East.  I think everyone there thought she would say, "Get out there and stir things up."  But, instead she said go there with the idea that you will study the local culture and understand how you can help women within the confines of that culture.  She said there have been a lot of constitutions written by people with no knowledge of the culture they are writing for and those are, inevitably, failures.  

It made me think about how we try to wage war in the Middle East against cultures who will never understand democracy and don't do well when they have it.  The Taliban are doing better at adminstering justice in Afghanistan than the courts there, and they are winning support for order and safety every day.  They will win eventually, again and we will have wasted a good bit of time and soldiers lives to prove that democracy is not a form of government that works in places like that.  The Taliban seems bent on keeping women from getting an education or being outdoors without being watched by a male relative.  In that part of the world, they are in the majority.  If Ginsburg is right, we can't change them;  we have to empower women to do it themselves, to the limits of the culture they live in.  It is worth thinking about.