MIRSKY, Judith and Marty RADLETT, eds., NO PARADISE YET; The World’s Women Face the New Century

Abstract

MIRSKY, Judith and Marty RADLETT, eds., NO PARADISE YET; The World's Women Face the New Century. London: The Panos Institute and Zed Books, 2000, 261 pp., $65.00 hardcover. This is one of the most eye-opening and disturbing books I have ever read. It looks at the reproductive health and rights of women in many nations throughout the world. These rights are examined very holistically and broadly to include economic security, equal rights within the family and the workplace, and freedoms needed to raise children. The book includes chapters on the lives of women in such diverse societies as India, Kenya, Egypt, Bangladesh, Zimbabwe, the Caribbean, Pakistan, Chile, Sri Lanka, the Philippines and Mexico. The book is an attempt to take a reading on what progress has been made in women's reproductive health and rights since the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development and the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women as well as the 1999 United Nations General Assembly Special Session. The results are not encouraging. Women worldwide are struggling to change the unequal basis of marriage, divorce and child custody; to develop legislation to prevent domestic and sexual/physical violence of all kinds; to give women access to land and financial security in their own right; to end sexual discrimination in the workplace, to put an end to sexual harassment in educational settings; and to raise the awareness of men about their roles and responsibilities in these matters. The editors make it clear that there are 5 main areas where interventions outside the healthcare sector would he of immediate and direct benefit to women: education, employment and income generation, family policy and law, gender violence, and programs for youth and youth development. This is advocacy research, meaning that it is research that impels us to be concerned and try to engage and find solutions to these problems. We find, for example, that every time there are attempts to bring sex education into the schools in India, these measures are defeated, yet 88% of rural women who seek abortions do not know that there is a link between sexual relations and pregnancy. In Kenya, sexual harassment, rape, gang rape and violence against women is so pervasive that women cannot complete their studies and graduate from school. In Egypt, a husband may divorce his wife for any reason but it must be explicitly stated in the marriage contract that he extends this same right to unilateral divorce to his wife. FGM or female genital mutilation, in all its forms, is still widely practiced in parts of Africa and the Muslim world. If it is performed under unhygienic conditions, FGM may result in agonizing pain, bleeding, anemia, shock, tetanus, fever, infections, painful menstruation, cysts, urinary leakage, prolonged obstructed labor with an increased risk that the mother and child will die, unnecessary caesarian sections and sexual and psychological difficulties. …