Asia's Drama: The Condition And Status Of Women

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Asian Drama was the title of a 1968 three-volume opus by the late Swedish Economics Nobel Laureate Gunnar Myrdal. The subtitle was: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations. In the 1960s to the extent that there were promising developing countries at all, they tended to be seen in Latin America, in de-colonizing Africa and in the Middle East, notably Iran. Asia, on the other hand, mired in poverty and wars, was hopeless: a drama, a tragedy.

These dramatic perceptions (and realities!) changed in the course of the 1980s when the World Bank and other institutions started enthusing about the “Asian miracle economies”. Fast forward a quarter of a century to today when it has become quite common to speak of the 21st century as the “Asian century”. Certainly growth and development in much of East and South Asia – conditions in Central and Western Asia remain dramatic – have been impressive. In contrast to the perceived synonym between Asian and poverty, hundreds of millions of Asians have been lifted out of poverty; there is a rapidly rising middle class; and there are lots of very rich Asian entrepreneurs with global clout.

So today Asia generally, while acknowledging remaining pockets of misery, is seen as a success rather than as a drama. That is at least true so far as Asian men are concerned. The situation for women in most Asian countries is rather different. This is illustrated by a random series of recent articles.

An article in the New York Times states that the ethos in the rising Chinese urban middle class is becoming regressive in attitudes to women in employment. In earlier decades cheap female labor was exploited in every respect in the course of China’s initial post-reform rapid industrialization, as is evocatively and movingly depicted in the novel by Sheng Keyi, Northern Girls. Much more fundamental to this drama is the widespread practice of female infanticide and the abortion of female fetuses. The result, among other things, is a huge surplus of horny Chinese men in the sexually active age, which hardly augurs well for the future.

In India, though theoretically a democracy and not having had China’s one-child policy, female fetus abortion is rampant. The plight of women can be seen from an article in the FT which reported that at least ten died and dozens more were left critically ill following operations carried out in a state-sponsored sterilization program last November. This follows the description of the hideous gang-rape of a twenty-three year old woman in Delhi in December 2012. The case made international media headlines, but is hardly one-off;ninety-three rapes are said to be reported every day in India!
Female illiteracy levels in India are high; indeed it is estimated that there are more female illiterates in India than in the rest of the world combined. In its report on modern slavery the Walk Free Foundation states that India has the highest number of slaves in the world (an estimated 14.3 million), the great majority of whom are women, partly due to the fact that among the slaves are many girls placed into forced marriages.



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