feminist news round-up 06.05.12
mali: women’s rights set back 50 years
Mali is a strongly patriarchal society where women need to ask permission from their husbands just to leave the house. Feminist groups have been campaigning to change the laws of Mali to enable women to get basic rights and make educating all girls an attainable goal. The hopes of women activists were pinned to a new Family Code to strengthen the legal rights of women. Its provisions included raising the minimum legal age of marriage for girls, improving women’s inheritance and property rights and removing the clause demanding a wife’s obedience to her husband. The law was adopted by the National Assembly in August 2009 but has been withdrawn following uproar from conservative groups. Feminist groups have said that the effect has been to sadly put women’s rights back 50 years.
‘tanorexic’ mother calls critics ‘ugly’
Extreme tanner or ‘tanorexic’, Patricia Krentcil has come under criticism for being a bad mother. Krentcil was charged with a felony for taking her five year old daughter into a tanning booth. She denied it by saying, ‘We go out shopping, that’s what we do. I don’t want to hear any more about this.’ She then made the following comment: ‘Any mother who makes an accusation about me is not a mother because I’m a great mother – I would never do that to my child. There’s somebody out there for my whole life that doesn’t like me because they are jealous, fat and they’re ugly.’
As bizarre as this Krentcil story is, it does bring up perennial issues such as body image pressures and criticising women for their mothering skills.
vogue bans skinny and underage models
Vogue worldwide has decided that it will only work with ‘healthy’ models no younger than 16. Anna Wintour, editor of Vogue’s flagship US edition, and Emmanuelle Alt of Paris Vogue – which caused an uproar in 2010 with a photo spread featuring a 10-year-old girl – are among those who agreed to the pact. The pact is to refuse to work with girls under 16 and girls who look like they have an eating disorder. But the question of the line between thinness and having an eating disorder is not clear. Are models who are naturally very thin unfairly disadvantaged by this move? Wouldn’t it just be better for Vogue to work with a range of models who are diverse in size, rather than rest with thin models (with the caveat that they don’t seem to have an eating disorder)?
he, she, and hen
Sweden has recently incorporated a gender-neutral pronoun, ‘hen’, in the country’s National Encyclopaedia. Interestingly, most of the world’s languages have a gender-neutral pronoun but in languages such as English (and up until recently, Swedish) you have to choose a masculine or feminine pronoun. People have suggested that English should also adopt a gender-neutral pronoun, but it’s never really caught on. What do you think?
(Image source: 1)
