Mobile app tackles gender-based violence

News for Friday 24 August is taken from Women’s Views on News

Natalie Calkin
WVoN co-editor

A Kenyan woman, Anne Shongwe, has pioneered a mobile phone application to help address violence against women.

The app, called ‘Moraba‘, is a free game aimed at children and teenagers.

The idea is to teach them about issues related to gender-based violence including what constitutes unwanted advances and how to report and give testimony for violent and inappropriate acts.

‘Moraba’ is based on a popular South African board game called Morabaraba and incorporates quiz show style questions to enable children to become informed in a fun and practical way.

Shongwe, an international development specialist and social enterpreneur, created the app following 25 years experience of working at the United Nations Development Programme.

Keen to apply her knowledge to find solutions to social problems, Shongwe started asking young Africans about their perceptions of the opposite sex.

It was then that she realised education was key to preventing negative gender stereotypes that can manifest as violence in later years.

After conducting interviews with the young people, Shongwe told Al Jazeera in a recent interview that:

“We didn’t realise that actually at the core [of much gender violence] is really just misunderstanding and misinformation”.

This realisation informs every design aspect of the app, which has already won the App Circus 2011 competition and funding and support from UN Women.

Shongwe is now looking for sponsorship to expand the game to predominant handsets in the market as well as developing distribution.

This is just the start of an ambitious goal to reach 100 million young Africans at risk of gender-based violence and to change choices and conversations around the treatment of women and girls.

With 200 million young Africans accessing mobile phones and using them for one to eight hours a day, Shongwe has a captive audience on which ‘Moraba’ could have a significant impact.

Related articles

• African Postman: Youth, Technology and Literacy (petchary.wordpress.com)
• Angola: Angolan women say ‘no’ to discrimination and ‘yes’ to gender equality (ionglobaltrends.com)
• A new strategy against gender-based violence (devex.com)

62-year-old Diana Nyad ends Cuba-to-Florida swim bid

Diana Nyad at TEDMED2011 (Photo credit: Klick Pharma)

News for Tuesday 21 August is taken from The Independent

Diana Nyad ended her fourth attempt in nearly 35 years to swim across the Straits of Florida today, her dream of setting a record thwarted by storms, jellyfish stings, shark threats, hypothermia and swollen lips.

The swimmer was pulled from the water at 12:55 am, her crew reported, as a thunderstorm raged and winds and waves tossed support boats. Her team had previously tweeted that she came out of the water at 7:42 am, and offered no explanation for the change.

In a blog posting, crew member Candace Hogan wrote that Nyad angrily shook her head after being pulled from the water and planned to return to finish the swim after the storms subsided.

“When can I get back in?” Hogan quoted the swimmer as saying. “I want full transparency that I was out. But I have plenty left in me and I want to go on.”

Nyad, who turns 63 on Wednesday, was making her third attempt since last summer to become the first person to cross the Florida Straits without a shark cage. She also made a failed try with a cage in 1978.

She started this effort Saturday in Havana and lasted longer, and made it further, than in her previous tries, her team said. She swam this time for more than 41 hours.

“She realized that the obstacles against this swim were too great and agreed at dawn to return to Key West by boat,” Hogan said.

Another team member, Vanessa Linsley, told The Associated Press the swimmer encountered a triple threat of obstacles.

“Instead of getting hit with one doozy they got hit with three,” Linsley said, “They got hit with the weather, they got hit with the jellyfish and they got hit with the sharks all at the same time.”

Nyad was stung nine times by box jellyfish on Monday night alone, the team blog reported.

Overnight was the second straight night of storms encountered by the swimmer. Yesterday evening, the swimmer’s crew was improvising ways to prevent hypothermia and to fend off further swelling of her lips and tongue. Though she’s swimming in 85-degree Fahrenheit (29.5-Celsius) waters, because that is lower than the body’s core temperature, it will reduce her body temperature over time. Her team said she had been shivering.

“We all know her mind can handle it,” Candace Hogan, a crew member traveling with Nyad, wrote on the swimmer’s blog. “But there will always be a point where a human body can’t go any farther. What no one knows is where that line is drawn in Diana Nyad.”

Australian Susie Maroney successfully swam the Straits in 1997, but she used a shark cage. In June, another Australian, Penny Palfrey, made it 79 miles (127 kilometers) toward Florida without a cage before strong currents forced her to abandon the attempt.

Nyad has been training for three years for the feat. She is accompanied by a support team in boats, and a kayak-borne apparatus shadowing Nyad helps keep sharks at bay by generating a faint electric field that is not noticeable to humans. A team of handlers is always on alert to dive in and distract any sharks that make it through.

She takes periodic short breaks to rest, hydrate and eat high-energy foods such as peanut butter.

Related articles

• Diana Nyad, 62, Once Again Attempting Swim from Cuba to Florida (hispanicallyspeakingnews.com)
• Diana Nyad ends Cuba-to-Florida swim bid (metronews.ca)
• Diana Nyad pulled from water in Cuba to Florida swim (king5.com)

Female artist Abrams finally awarded own retrospective

News for Wednesday 15 August is from Women’s Views on News

Emma Caddow
WVoN co-editor

Jewish female artist Ruth Abrams is being honoured with her own retrospective at the Yeshiva University in New York.

The late artist was regarded as a contemporary to some of recent history’s most acclaimed painters – such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.

Her contemporaries in Abstract Expressionism were widely recognised for the misogyny expressed in their paintings.

Although described by the New York Times as a “woman unfairly neglected in a macho era” back in 1986, the Brooklyn born artist has still never had an exhibition of her own – until now.

The retrospective aims to restore her place in history alongside her contemporaries in the Abstract Expressionist movement.

Abrams was famous for her “Microcosms” series, painted during the 1950s to 1970s, which explored the immensity and limitless of outer space.

In a time when the possibility of space travel was opening up, many male Abstract Expressionists conveyed the magnitude of the topic by using large-scale canvasses.

But Abram created paradoxically tiny pieces, as small as two by three inches, to convey the impression of infinite space.

Curator Reba Wulkan said: “These tiny paintings brought her work to a new level.”

The university will display more than 70 of these small-scale works – many for the first time.

The exhibition will also showcase large-scale color landscapes, still lifes, abstract portraits, collages and other work from Abrams’ 40-year career.

Yeshiva University Museum holds the largest institutional repository of Abrams’ work, together with a significant archive of her letters, press clippings and personal papers.

The director, Dr. Jacob Wisse, said:

“It’s a privilege for us to bring this fascinating and overlooked artist to the attention of the public.

“We think Abrams’ studies of light, color and scale will be revelatory to people already familiar with the Ab-Ex movement; her intense and sensitive evocations of nature and the human form, and her ambitious studies of the cosmic sphere provide a distinct face of the movement.”

The Huffington Post wrote:

“Between her knowledge of art’s past and courage to thrust her work into its future, Abrams deserves to take her rightful place amongst female artists like Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning and Joan Mitchell.”

Microcosms: Ruth Abrams, Abstract Expressionist will be shown at Yeshiva University Museum from August 12, 2012 to January 6, 2013.

Spare Parts exhibition turns prosthetic limbs into works of art

English: South African Paralympic runner Oscar Pistorius (born 22 November 1986), taking part in the Landsmót ungmennafélags Íslands in Kópavogur, Iceland, the largest sporting event in Iceland which is held every three years. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

News for Monday 13 August is taken from BBC News

Spare Parts, an exhibition of prosthetic limbs transformed into pieces of art, is being staged in London later this month to coincide with the Paralympic Games.

Priscilla Sutton came up with the idea for Spare Parts when she was cleaning out her house in Australia.

“I pulled a couple of old legs out of the cupboard, and realised I couldn’t keep hoarding limbs for sentimental reasons,” she explains.

“They are a part of your body, so you don’t really like to chuck them away. And there are rules about disposing of old limbs – you can’t just put them in the bin.”

So the Queensland-born curator, an amputee since 2005, asked her creative friends to turn them into artworks she could hang on the wall.

“I realised how many other limbs must be in cupboards and sheds across the country and around the world. So I started asking around and the idea grew and grew and became this exhibition.”

Spare Parts had its first outing in Brisbane in 2010. It brought together dozens of artists who were given pre-loved prosthetic limbs as a blank canvas.

Ms Sutton was amazed at the success of the show. Among the thousands of visitors were art lovers, amputees and school groups. “For once,” she notes, “kids weren’t told ‘don’t touch, don’t stare, don’t ask!’”

Now a new batch of prosthetics has been donated for the second Spare Parts exhibition on London’s Brick Lane. Of the 43 artworks, only five were part of the original Brisbane show.

Ms Sutton is now in London putting together the exhibits while on a break from her hospital job in Australia. She sourced most of the limbs via the NHS, and put out a call for artists via the Arts Council.

“I do tend to get lots of people contacting me saying ‘hey – I hear you want a leg!’” she laughs when we meet in London’s West End with less than three weeks before launch.

All this begs the question of how well does a prosthetic limb lend itself to an artwork? “It’s not a square canvas, and it can be soft and squidgy or as hard as titanium,” she says.

“Some of the artists have had real challenges to find new ways of creating their ideas. Now and again one of them will give back a limb and say ‘I never want to see it again!’”

In November 2005, Ms Sutton had elective surgery below the knee to remove a worsening bone condition. She was 26 years old.

Earlier this year, she wrote an engaging and honest piece for Australia’s ABC website about the most common (and personal) questions she gets asked about being an amputee.

In it she describes what happened to her leg after it was removed. “Some people seem to think that when you get out of hospital you get to take your leg home, in a jar. You don’t. But in my case, I did have my leg cremated.

“When I called a funeral home to get a quote it was pretty funny. They thought it was a crank call! For the record, it was the same price as a cat, and it provided great closure for me. My leg and I had a big life together, so it was important for me to know where she ended up.”

Ms Sutton notes that some of the artists for the London show have used a prosthetic arm or hand to draw or paint their contributions.

“We often take things for granted in life. When I was learning to walk on crutches a simple process like getting clean washing from the drier to my bedroom became really difficult. It was interesting to see artists go down that path as well.”

The list of artists taking part includes Andrew Logan, Beastman, Dan Hillier, Elisa Jane Carmichael and tattooists Henry Hate and Louis Molloy, known for their work with Amy Winehouse and David Beckham respectively.

Priscilla Sutton uses two prosthetic legs: one for sports, decorated with brightly-coloured Japanese fabric, and one she describes as her “going out leg” – featuring printed artwork by US pop surrealist Mark Ryden.

“We get dressed up together – she’s quite fabulous,” she says of her limb. “It gets a lot of attention here in London. It’s wearable art, and so when that leg’s superseded I can hang it on my wall along with my other Mark Rydens.”

The Spare Parts exhibition, she hopes, is helping to create an open and positive conversation about prosthetics. “I don’t think it should be taboo.”

Ms Sutton says that high-profile people like South African athlete Oscar Pistorius – known as the Blade Runner – are also sending out positive messages about people with prosthetic limbs.

Last week Pistorius became the first amputee athlete to compete at the Olympics, running on carbon fibre blades in the men’s 400 metres race.

“I was screaming at the television!” Sutton admits. “He is an inspiration. As an amputee I’m so proud of Oscar Pistorius, of his achievements and attitude. He isn’t about being different, he is about being fit and healthy and achieving goals.

“It was history in the making, no-one cared what country he came from, they were cheering for him.”

A “cheetah leg” of the type used by Pistorius has been donated to Spare Parts by manufacturer Ossur, also a sponsor of the exhibition.

While Spare Parts is not an official Paralympic event, Ms Sutton says now is the right time to bring the exhibition to the UK.

“There was no doubt in my mind that Oscar Pistorius would be running in the Olympics and the Paralympics, so it just seemed natural to bring the exhibition here to London in 2012.”

Spare Parts will be at The Rag Factory, Brick Lane, in London from 25 August to 9 September 2012.

Related articles

• Professor aspires toward the perfect prosthetic design (japantimes.co.jp)
• Superhuman, exploring human enhancement (techandle.com)
• You: Japan’s Paralympians overcome adversity by leaps, bounds and innovative design (japantimes.co.jp)

Women’s boxing: Adams’ gold of the ring packs a punch for equality

News for Friday 10 August is taken from The Guardian

When Nicola Adams first put on boxing gloves at her local gym as a tiny schoolgirl of 12, bouts between two women were banned by the British Boxing Board of Control. They were too unstable, went the reasoning, on account of their menstrual cycles, and besides no one wanted to see a pretty girl get hit.

On Thursday, 17 years later but not a great deal taller, Adams finally gave her response in the ring, emphatically defeating the Chinese world champion flyweight Ren Cancan to become the first woman ever to claim an Olympic gold medal in boxing.

She had only gone to the gym that day because her mother had an aerobics class and could not find any childcare.

Britain may be getting accustomed to gorging on medals, but the country’s 24th gold, courtesy of Adams, is more significant than most.

When the IOC ruled in 2009 that women’s boxing would be in the London Games, 11 years after the BBBC was obliged to lift its unequal ban, the former world champion Amir Khan said he was against the move, saying: “When you get hit it can be very painful.”

On Thursday he was ringside, paying lavish tributes, with everyone else, to the skill and dexterity of the female fighters.

Once London’s festival of sport has come to its conclusion, there is little question women’s boxing will be reckoned one of its great successes. It is not merely the ferociously supportive crowds the sport has drawn – even if the most vocal bellows have been reserved for Ireland’s Katie Taylor, who took lightweight gold shortly after Adams’s bout – but the respect the competitors have commanded, among boxing ingenues and experienced sports devotees alike.

As recently as March this year, the International Amateur Boxing Association (AIBA) was threatening to force women boxers at the Games to compete while wearing skirts “to help distinguish them from the men”.

Immediately before Adams’s bout, Ching-Kuo Wu, the AIBA president, said the Rio Games would almost certainly see the number of divisions at which women could compete at the Games double from three to six. London’s women fighters, he said, were “heroes in boxing history”.

As Adams stood on the podium to claim her gold, four days into women’s Olympic boxing history, the exclusion before now of women from the sport already seemed as ridiculous as the bar, until 1984, on their running the marathon. Did she think she had answered the sceptics, she was asked later?

“It’s not me that’s answered them, it’s the crowds. They have been cheering as much for us as they have for the lads.”

If she could inspire young girls to think boxing was also open to them, she said, “that’s amazing”. She added: “That’s what I want to see. More girls getting into boxing and participating.”

The martial metaphors, already tiring 13 days into these Games, are inevitably over-exercised when it comes to women’s boxing, but in Adams’s case, talk of punching through glass ceilings and battling her way out of adversity seem particularly apt.

After her first bout at 13, she did not compete again outside her Leeds gym for four years thanks to a lack of opponents. There were no women’s clubs when she started, and when two teenage girls tried to compete in a bout in 1997, Lennox Lewis called it a freak show; the Daily Mail, inevitably, a “bout of madness”.

She was first introduced to the sport by her boxing-mad father, Samuel, watching the Rumble in the Jungle and other legendary bouts on VCR and becoming entranced by Ali.

She didn’t really stop to think that girls didn’t box. “I was so young I wasn’t really into the politics,” she said after her bout. “All I saw was Mohammed Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard, and I just wanted to do what they did.”

She turned pro at 18, became the first woman boxer to represent England, and went on to win two world championship silver medals and become European champion in 2011.

It was the more impressive given a catastrophic injury three years ago, when she fell down stairs while walking to the ring before a bout, and cracked her vertebra. She went ahead with the bout, and won, but was so badly injured she was confined to bed for three months and unable to fight for a year.

“When I had my injury it was really hard to think I was ever going to get up to boxing speed, to be able to go as quickly as I did before. But I have improved on how I did before, and come back stronger.” How did she account for that? A shrug. “I was always determined that I would succeed.”

Described by her mother, Dee, as gentle and a “mummy’s girl”, Adams is just 5ft 5in, and, to fight in the 51kg category, weighs less than eight stone. She is also an irrepressible smiler, beaming as she entered the arena to huge cheers from the crowd.

At their most recent encounter, in the world championships in May, she was defeated by Ren, but her victoryon Thursday was emphatic, at one point knocking her to the floor, though her Chinese opponent was quickly back on her feet.

The Brits, waving union flags, chanted her name, and in perhaps the greatest mark of respect, the Irish crowd, expectant for Taylor’s bout immediately after hers, even lent her a chorus of “Ole! Ole! Ole! Ole!” in the second round. As the final bell sounded she was still throwing punches, a tiny ball of energy.

Adams’s hopes that more women will go into boxing will almost certainly be helped by her success at the Games – and the visibility of Britain’s other competitors at these Olympics, Natasha Jonas and Savannah Marshall. British women received £1m of funding in 2009 and Adams had a generous living allowance and the full support of the boxing set-up at the English Institute of Sport in Sheffield. Her success is likely to mean that funding is increased.

She said: “There’s an option of going professional, but I’m happy with the amateur game. Rio is definitely an option for me. It would be nice to see their opening ceremony.” Besides, she said with a smile, “We haven’t yet had a double Olympic champion in boxing for the females. There’s definitely some motivation there.”

Related articles

• Historic first ever Olympic gold for British boxer (itv.com)
• Nicola ‘Babyface’ Adams makes history with boxing gold medal (standard.co.uk)
• GB’s Adams secures historic gold (bbc.co.uk)

Swim that broke Cold War ice curtain

Diomede Islands: Little Diomede Island or Kruzenstern Island (left) and Big Diomede Island or Ratmanov Island in the Bering Sea. Photo is from the north. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

News for Wednesday 8 August is taken from BBC News

In the summer of 1987, the American swimmer Lynne Cox braved the frigid waters of the Bering Strait to swim from the United States to the Soviet Union. Twenty-five years on, now aged 55, she recalls how her actions in the waning days of the Cold War eased international tensions.

“I wanted to open the border so we could become friends,” says Cox. “The difficulty was that nobody believed it could happen.”

Her route between Little Diomede Island, in the US state of Alaska, and Big Diomede Island, in the Soviet Union, was just 4.3km (2.7 miles) but it crossed the maritime border of two countries still locked in Cold War opposition, and the water was cold, very cold.

“There was this instant loss of breath,” Cox recalls. “The cold was like a huge vampire pulling the heat from my body. I looked down at my fingers and they were totally grey, like the hands of a cadaver.”

With the water temperature at 3.3C, the only way for Cox, then 30 years old, to survive was to keep moving.

“I put my face in the water and started swimming as fast as I could. I was also looking at my shoulders to see if they were turning blue because that would be really dangerous.”

Cox first had the idea of the Bering Strait swim in 1976 and spent years lobbying Soviet officials for permission to enter their waters.

After being ignored at every turn, Cox finally decided to use “every last penny” of her savings to do her swim.

On the eve of the swim, there was still no word from Moscow, and the military on both sides of the Cold War were jittery.

“We knew something was happening because the Soviets moved two ships the size of football fields up into the Bering Strait,” Cox recalls.

“The (indigenous) Inuits freaked out so they called the (US) National Guard and they sent up jet fighters. Then the Soviets sent up MiGs to check out why the Americans were up there. And I was thinking that this was supposed to be about world peace.”

With 24 hours to go, permission came through from Moscow. President Gorbachev himself had seen a TV report about Cox’s swim and – with the world’s media watching – the Soviet leadership decided it would be too embarrassing to turn her back.

On the morning of 7 August, Cox woke up to find the Bering Strait completely calm. But there was no sign of the Inuit, who would guide her in their traditional kayaks.

“I’m all set to go and my crews are all set to go, but they’re not up and I’m freaking out,” says Cox.

It turned out that the Inuit had been up all night celebrating the prospect of seeing their relatives on Big Diomede for the first time in nearly 50 years. As they slept in, fog closed in and visibility dropped to 400m.

“We couldn’t see anything, we didn’t have radar, we had traditional canoes. Great Diomede is only 6.4km (4 miles) wide so everyone was really concerned that I might just miss the island.”

As Cox started swimming, she was worried to see her support boats making constant changes of course. None of the Inuit was old enough to remember the route to Great Diomede and their only navigational device was a rusty compass.

In the end, one of the American journalists accompanying Cox intervened to put the expedition on the right bearing.

Cox then heard the sound of a motor. And slowly, a Soviet launch appeared.

“I was elated when I saw the skiff emerge from the fog – finally the Russians are here,” she says.

On board was Vladimir McMillan, a half-American journalist for the Soviet news agency TASS, who was jumping up and down, shouting: “Lynne, don’t stop now!”

Cox was heading for a cliff about 50m ahead, but with the fog clearing slightly, she could make out a Soviet delegation waiting further away on a beach.

McMillan wanted Cox to swim to the welcoming committee, but the American medical team urged her to take the easy option and swim to the cliff.

“I kept thinking ‘I’m cold, I would like to finish this swim, but if I don’t touch somebody’s hand what have I done?’” she says. So she headed towards the Russians.

The last 800m (0.5 mile) was the hardest part of the swim because of strong off-shore currents.

“I really did wonder how far I could go. I really did see my fingers go grey. Inside I was evaluating ‘Am I OK? Can I keep going? Can I do it?’

“I had experts around me, but there’s always the risk that you could go into cardiac arrest from hypothermia and it can happen really fast, so I was on edge that whole time.”

The Soviet delegation came into view. Cox reached the shore, but it was so rocky she couldn’t get out on her own.

“I extended my arm and two Russians in military uniform grabbed me,” says Cox. “I instantly felt this heat from their warm hands. One guy was putting his arm underneath me to steady me. People were throwing blankets and coats on top of me. I didn’t understand anything at all, except they were saying ‘welcome’.”

At the last minute, the Soviets had sent a top-level delegation, including KGB officials and sports stars. They had even prepared a small beach party.

“They had set up tables on the beach for a picnic with samovars full of tea and little biscuits. They were ready to celebrate all afternoon, but I was standing there on the ice thinking, ‘Oh boy, this is getting cold.’”

Eventually, the Soviets let Cox go inside a tent to recover. A Soviet doctor, Rita Zakarova, covered Cox with hot-water bottles, put her in a sleeping bag, and then embraced her. For the American, the moment symbolised the entire trip.

“The whole idea was to have this human contact after so many years growing up afraid of the Soviets, and here was this person basically warming me up to get me back to life again,” she says.

The swim turned Cox into a Cold War celebrity in the United States and the Soviet Union.

When President Gorbachev travelled to Washington to sign a nuclear weapons treaty later that year, he and President Reagan raised a glass to toast the swimmer.

“She proved by her courage how close to each other our peoples live,” Gorbachev said.

Related articles

• Unraveling her father’s Cold War secrets (stripes.com)
• Olympics: Cold War rivalry could heat up in hoops finals (dawn.com)
• America Still Lags Behind the Soviet Union by Number of Planets Visited (theatlantic.com)

Summer reading list with a difference

Isabel Allende (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

News for Tuesday 7 August is taken from Women’s Views on News

Meg Kissack
WVoN co-editor 

Like many, I enjoy reading, but sometimes find it hard to track down a good book.

After a while, the book charts and the summer reading lists all start to look the same – murder mysteries, family dramas, sagas, chick lit and historical fiction, but not much else.

Unless you count the latest 50 Shades of Grey frenzy, but that rant is for another day!

So I’ve compiled a reading list of books that I think WVoN readers will enjoy. There is a mix of memoirs, autobiography and fiction, but with one thing in common – they are all about women who defy convention and have the boldness and audacity not to be afraid to stand out.

The Kabul Beauty School: The Art of Friendship and Freedom – Debbie Rodriguez

This book follows the journey of American Debbie Rodriguez as she travels to Kabul and sets up a beauty training school for Afghan women. Detailing the stories of the women she meets in Kabul, Rodriguez takes the reader into the lives of Afghan women post-Taliban. Hair dressing and beauty salons were banned under the regime. Today they are two of the few professions which give women independence and a real sense of freedom. In the most dangerous country in the world, Rodriguez’s account is inspirational and hopeful, and will leave part of your heart in Afghanistan.

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox – Maggie O’Farrell

O’Farrell examines what it is to be an unconventional young woman in 1930s Edinburgh and the 21st century in this thought provoking read. Esme Lennox was sent to an asylum at the age of sixteen for being unruly; refuseing to participate in etiquette and behaviour which was expected of a young woman and daring to declare that she would like to stay on at school, and not get married. Sixty years after she was incarcerated, a young woman, Iris Lockheart, receives a letter stating that her great-aunt Esme (whom she had never heard of) was about to be released. In the midst of her busy life running a vintage clothes shop and having various affairs, the two women’s lives collide . O’Farrell’s novel is well-researched and paints a thought provoking picture of what it is to be a woman challenging the boundaries of her gender in 1930s Britain.

The Help –  Kathryn Stockett

Superbly written, Stockett’s novel The Help is set during the civil rights era in the southern states of the US, when racism was rife. It is told from the point of view of the three main characters – Skeeter, a white aspiring journalist; Abileen, a black maid who has spent  her life raising white children and who recently lost her only son; and Minny, a sassy- mouthed maid with a reputation. The novel is about female friendship, empowerment, and the importance of women telling their stories, in the face of discrimination and in the risk of losing it all. The book has been made into a movie which I strongly recommend, you can watch the trailer here (it does however give away a few spoilers).

The House of the Spirits – Isabel Allende

Allende’s novel follows the lives of three generations of headstrong Chilean women leading up to and during the Chilean revolution. Named as one of the most prolific female writers of the Latin American literary boom, Allende is an astounding storyteller and weaves magic into the various elements of this novel, from the way domestic space is transformed into a magical female space, and how women are treated in a period of political turmoil and violence. A great novel that will leave you wanting to read much more of Allende’s work.

If you have anything to add to our summer reads, we’d love to hear your suggestions so please comment and we will add them to this page.

Related articles

• Book Review: Island Beneath The Sea by Isabel Allende (chalkthesun.wordpress.com)
• Heartwarming and Controversial, Even Now (middayinspiration.wordpress.com)
• Book Review: The Help by Kathryn Stockett (eatchocolate.wordpress.com)

Bolivian women are breaking down barriers to seek political power

Copacabana, Bolivia (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

News for Monday 6 August is taken from The Guardian

A growing number of Bolivia’s indigenous women are participating in politics. Though spread across great distances and representing a wide range of experiences, many of these women share a similar history. Most started out leading civil society organisations and then went on to run for local public office, often overcoming resistance within their own families.

“The major obstacles [to accessing a government position] are domestic duties and economic issues,” says Lucinda Villca, a council woman from Santiago de Andamarca, a municipality in the western district of Oruro. Villca is an Aymara mother of nine who used to be one of the native leaders of her quinoa and llama farming ayllu [community]. She is one of four council women who shared their experiences with IPS during a national meeting of women leaders from rural local governments held recently in the central Bolivian city of Cochabamba.

“We go out on the fields early in the morning to help our husbands, tending the crops or taking the cattle out to pasture. We come home at night and we have to fix supper and make some time to weave so we can earn extra money for the house,” Villca says. “With these obligations, there’s no time for anything else. I now have a greater responsibility. As a member of the indigenous council my mission was to work for my community. In this new post I have to work for the future of my municipality.” .

Marina Cuñaendi, a 55-year-old council woman from Urubichá, says: “I used to be a housewife. I’m a Guarani, and like many women in the countryside, I have no regular job. I was working for a women’s organisation when I was asked to run for office.”

Urubichá is one of Bolivia’s poorest areas, despite being located in Santa Cruz, the country’s most prosperous district. According to the last census, 85.5% of its 6,000 inhabitants – mostly Guarani people – live in extreme poverty.

Before being nominated in 2010, Cuñaendi had never thought of holding public office. She planted rice and corn and, in her “free time”, weaved to support her seven children, along with her husband. In Urubichá, she says, women have no time to organise and are marginalised from political life. She admitted that she had to consult her husband and children, who encouraged her.

In San Julián, another municipality of Santa Cruz, Yolanda Cuellar, a Guarani, was deemed to be “too young” to hold a municipal position. She turned 21 a month after being elected council woman in April 2010, on the ticket of the Without Fear Movement, opposing the Movement to Socialism party, which governs the municipality and the country.

“They didn’t trust me because I was young, and a woman to boot. In our municipality, sexism is very strong. Now there are four of us women in the council,” the accountant and mother of two says. Cuellar has her husband’s support. “He understands me and tells me not to quit because people voted for me; he tells me to fight for what I want and not give up just because somebody doesn’t want me there,” she says.

But the women’s lack of political experience and the discrimination by male peers have not made their work on the council easy. Also, being a council woman is very different from being an indigenous leader. “There’s a lot of bureaucracy, which slows down any project, but the worst is the lack of support. Our ideas are ignored and we feel alone. It’s like nobody is interested in doing anything for young people and women,” Cuellar says.

San Julián’s economy is primarily agricultural, but benefits from the commercial and services activities linked to the busy highway that runs through it. However, 57.9% of its more than 70,000 inhabitants live in extreme poverty.

Under the 2009 constitution and other laws, women must occupy at least 50% of all elected government positions. To ensure that percentage, candidate lists must be drawn up by alternating between women and men. At present, 43% of the mayors and council persons in Bolivia’s 327 local governments are women, and 96% of them are holding public office for the first time.

Lidia Alejandro, a 50-year-old Aymara council woman from Llallagua, a municipality in the mining district of Potosí, in western Bolivia, also identified inexperience as a factor that puts them at a disadvantage compared with their male counterparts.

“I became a council woman without knowing a thing about how municipal affairs are run. I’m a teacher, but holding office is very different. I couldn’t even speak up at a meeting or give statements to the press,” Alejandro says. “I had to learn as I went along.”  Training workshops helped her, but training takes time, she says, and that causes problems with husbands as they reproach women leaders for neglecting their homes.

Alejandro is troubled by the failure to achieve the goal of lifting the women of her municipality out of poverty due to a lack of specialists who can design projects to meet their needs. Bolivian legislation requires that part of the annual budget at all government levels be allocated to spending on projects that target the needs of women and other vulnerable groups. But most of the allocations are not spent, and the funds are either returned or transferred to other areas. “Women have come to us to complain. ‘How is it that we have four council women and they’re not doing anything for us?’ they say. We’ve tried to join forces, but the truth is that we all have our political loyalties,” Cuellar says.

Natasha Loayza, a specialist with the UN women’s office in Bolivia, says there has been great progress in terms of women’s participation in politics, furthered by the constitution and various laws. “The challenge is to translate this legislation into action, into real and concrete participation,” she says.

The UN women’s office’s Semilla (seed) programme, a three-year pilot initiative that is in its final year, helps women in rural districts exercise their economic and political rights. Loayza says one of the programme’s goals is to motivate more women to participate in politics by showing them the meaningful involvement of those who are already participating.

“Women can now access [public office], but it’s very hard. It’s a colossal task. The women who have achieved positions of responsibility in public bodies can bear witness to the problems they face every day to make their presence felt, and not just occupy decision-making positions on paper,” Loayza says. “We’re still at a point where women have to work hard to really participate.”

The programme is being implemented by the ministry of equal opportunities in 18 rural districts with $9m (£5.7m) in financing from the UN and, so far, has benefited 4,000 women.

Related articles

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• ‘End of Capitalism’: Bolivia to Expel Coca-Cola (thetruthseeker.co.uk)
• Introducing Alejandro Fernández: Afro-Bolivian Activist (losafrolatinos.com)

Nigerian writer Chika Unigwe writes about marginalized women’s lives

Lettera27 at Festivaletteratura 2009 (Photo credit: lettera27)

News for Wednesday 1 August is taken from Women’s Views on News

Helen Thompson
WVoN co-editor

On an unseasonably cool July evening at the Purcell Room in the Southbank Centre in London, Nigerian fiction writer Chika Unigwe read from her latest novel to a diverse audience as part of an event entitled Nigeria Now.

Noo Saro-Wiwa, travel writer and daughter of activist and author Ken Saro-Wiwa, accompanied Unigwe onstage, and journalist Onyekachi Wambu moderated the panel as the two women read from their works and discussed topics such as writing, food, and Nigeria’s past and present.

I prepared for the event by reading Unigwe’s two novels in English, On Black Sisters’ Street and Night Dancer. By the time I’d finished them, I was very excited about hearing her talk about her work.

Both of  Unigwe’s novels focus on the lives of Nigerian women, the limited choices they have in terms of making a decent living and developing the ability to live life on their own terms.

They also focus on the sex trade and the costs of prostitution for her female characters.

In On Black Sisters’ Street, Unigwe examines a group of six mostly Nigerian prostitutes in Antwerp, indentured to Dele, a male compatriot who offers them a way out of poverty through sex work, but who keeps them from flourishing through insurmountable debt and threats of violence that he carries out in the case of Sisi.

A reviewer in the LA Times said it was not an uplifting book, but I see Unigwe’s work transcend the horrors of the lives of these trafficked women in a couple of ways.

Firstly, as the same reviewer says, the women do not see themselves as victims.

With Sisi’s death comes a chance for them to tell their stories and bond with each other in ways that offer a degree of hope for them because they are no longer alone.

Secondly, the beauty of Unigwe’s language, a testament to her skill as a poet as well as a fiction writer, encapsulates these women in words that not only give voice to their marginalized stories but also memorializes their strength and resilience.

Unigwe’s latest novel, Night Dancer, provides a different trajectory for examining Nigerian women’s marginal identities.

In a plot revolving around a mother and daughter, we witness Mme’s estrangement from her recently-dead mother, Ezi, due to the latter’s ‘shameful’ status as a single mother who supports herself and her adult daughter through prostitution.

An adept storyteller, Unigwe firstly unfolds Mme’s emotional journey to discover her father before she reveals the story of how Ezi ends up in such a marginal state.

As with On Black Sisters’ Street, Night Dancer takes the reader into the painful territory of women’s limited choices, but in the character of Ezi we witness a woman who relinquishes her reputation in order to avoid living with a husband who has morally compromised his family.

Mme’s journey is one that many of us will recognize.

In trying to distance ourselves from our mothers, we discover that we are more like them than we were willing to admit. But with knowledge and maturity, we hopefully embrace the similarities.

During the Nigeria Now event, Unigwe talked about Nigerian women’s empowerment in cultures that are decidedly patriarchal.

She described the term “negofeminism,” a liberal feminism that is more appropriately suited to African women’s experience, given the prominence it gives to negotiation and ‘no-ego.’

In an email interview, Unigwe expounded further by saying:

“It recognizes that African women come out of cultures which encourage negotiation, complementarity, give-and-take, and collaboration. Negofeminism is also not individualistic in the way western feminism is.

“It understands that for a majority of these women, a radical break with their culture, even if it’s patriarchal, is not possible for so many different reasons.”

In Night Dancer, Ezi represents the consequences for a woman breaking with her culture—isolation, marginalization, and expulsion from community.

Unigwe was born in Enugu, Nigeria, and has lived in Belgium and the Netherlands, where she completed a Ph.D. thesis on Igbo women’s writing.

She is a vehement supporter of Nigerian women and an outspoken critic of the Nigerian government in both her fiction and articles written for The Guardian and the Nigerian Daily Times.

From critiques of marriage, an institution that that she believes facilitates the patriarchal attitudes that shelter abusive husbands, the high incidence of Nigerian women dying in childbirth, to the government’s failure to stem Boko Haram’s terrorism in the North, Unigwe writes to effect change in her home country.

She told me that she supports legalizing prostitution “because it protects women [and] also makes good economic sense as the women then pay taxes on their revenue.”

However, she qualifies this statement by pointing out that in Nigeria “our government should be doing a lot more to give young women alternative choices so that those who choose prostitution do so out of multiple alternatives, and not because there is nothing else for them to do.”

In all of her writing, Unigwe’s engagement in social justice is evident.

She says of her work: “I write from a place of anger, of frustration. Perhaps being a woman, I write to foreground our experiences. Having said that, I also write from a place of passion.”

Unigwe has received multiple accolades for her work.

She won the 2003 BBC Short Story Competition, a Commonwealth Short Story Award and a Flemish literary prize.

In 2007 she received a Unesco-Aschberg fellowship and in 2009 a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship.

In 2011 the committee for the 2011 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award longlisted On Black Sisters’ Street.

This same novel is currently on the longlist for the 2012 Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa.

Unigwe’s next project is a novel about the life of Olaudah Equiano, an 18th century Nigerian man who, as an ex-slave, wrote about his life and became involved in the British abolitionist movement.

Chika Unigwe is participating in the Edinburgh International Book Festival in an event entitled Upbringings Against the Odds with Kim Thúy on Friday August 17 at the RBS Corner Theatre from 8:30 – 9:30 p.m.

Related articles

• Meet the Author: Chika Unigwe talks to Anita Sethi: “The process of writing has changed me completely” (litandspoken.southbankcentre.co.uk)
• Ogoke Vows To Spill Blood (igbokwenuradio.wordpress.com)
• Nigerian Parents Mark Children’s Faces for Safety (voanews.com)