Women's issues at centre stage in U.S. presidential race

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U.S. Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney speaks in Washington, Wednesday, April 4, 2012. (AP / Manuel Balce Ceneta)

Updated: Sun Apr. 15 2012 12:45:51

The Canadian Press

WASHINGTON — The challenges facing American women have taken centre stage in the national political debate as President Barack Obama and Republican front-runner Mitt Romney do pitched battle for the hearts and minds of the country's all-important female voters.

Romney's attempts to stop a growing deluge of women to Obama were met with mockery on Sunday by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, who derided him for his claim last week that women accounted for a whopping 92 per cent of the jobs lost since the president took office.

"It's misleading and ridiculous," Geithner, making the rounds of the Sunday morning talk shows, said on CBS's "Face the Nation." "It's just a political moment."

Geithner conceded that the second half of the recession involved more female job losses due to teacher and education-related layoffs precipitated by state budget cutbacks.

It was mostly men, however, who found themselves out of work at the start of the recession in 2008 due to construction and manufacturing job losses, he said, meaning the pain was felt equally by men and women over the course of the economic downturn.

"The recession ... was already a year in the making before President Obama came into office," Geithner said.

"It's a meaningless way to look at the basic contours of the economy in that period of time, again because it starts artificially at a time when the president came into office and the crisis was still building momentum."

Politifact, a nonpartisan fact-checking organization, has in fact rated Romney's claim as "mostly false."

Nonetheless the so-called "war on women" has become a flashpoint in the 2012 election campaign, even before Romney was all but assured the Republican nomination last week when his only real rival for the crown, Rick Santorum, dropped out of the party's presidential race.

Polls suggest that Santorum's controversial stances on birth control and working mothers, in fact, sent women who consider themselves independent voters into Obama's camp.

A high-profile brawl earlier this year about access to birth control, resulting from Republican efforts to portray Obama's health-care policies as trouncing on the rights of Catholics, also put women's issues at the forefront of debate.

Republicans were hammered in public opinion polls on the issue, especially after conservative icon Rush Limbaugh called a Georgetown University law student a "slut" and a "prostitute" for her congressional testimony in support of Obama's policies on access to birth control.

Last week, Republicans had their revenge when a relatively obscure Democratic strategist, Hilary Rosen, said on CNN that Ann Romney had "never worked a day in her life." Even though both Obama and his chief strategist, David Axelrod, condemned Rosen for her remarks, Republicans said it revealed Democratic contempt for stay-at-home mothers.

"I made a choice to stay home and raise five boys. Believe me, it was hard work," Ann Romney tweeted shortly after Rosen's remarks.

The Romney campaign has since churned out bumper stickers reading: "Moms drive the economy."

It's all part of a full-court press undertaken by the Romney campaign to woo women away from Obama and into the Republican fold given female voters will likely represent almost 53 per cent of the electorate in November.

The former Massachusetts governor has repeatedly said during recent campaign stops that the president's policies have waged a "real war on women."

And yet a four-month-old video has surfaced that could prove damaging to Romney's efforts to portray himself as a white knight to stay-at-home mothers, in particular those who don't have the benefit of a spouse earning millions.

Shot in early January at a town hall event in New Hampshire, Romney spoke of his proposed welfare reform proposals when he was Massachusetts governor that would have required parents with young children to get jobs.

"I wanted to increase the work requirement," Romney said.

"I said, for instance, that even if you have a child two years of age, you need to go to work. And people said: 'Well that's heartless,' and I said: 'No, no, I'm willing to spend more giving daycare to allow those parents to go back to work. It'll cost the state more providing that daycare, but I want the individuals to have the dignity of work."'

Conservatives have long railed against welfare, advocating for policies that would force welfare recipients back into the workforce.

During his failed run for the U.S. Senate in 1994, Romney also acknowledged that many women have no choice but to work.

"This is a different world than it was in the 1960s when I was growing up, when you used to have Mom at home and Dad at work," he said. "Now Mom and Dad both have to work whether they want to or not, and usually one of them has two jobs."

WOMEN OF THE ARAB SPRING

Arab Spring Fails to Allay Women's Anxieties

Rana F. Sweis for The International Herald Tribune

A participant at a meeting in Sousse, Tunisia, last month on changes in the Arab world.  After recent elections, women remain underrepresented in the region's parliaments.

By RANA F. SWEIS

Published: March 7, 2012

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AMMAN — Like many Tunisians, Maroua Ben Salah, 23, never imagined that her life and her country would change so drastically in a matter of days.

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On Jan. 14, 2011, President Zine el-Abdine Ben Ali fled into exile in Saudi Arabia after weeks of increasingly violent protests against his autocratic regime.

“When I learned that Ben Ali ran away, I quickly thought: ‘Is this a happy ending’? ‘Is this a new start?’ I was confused,” said Ms. Ben Salah, a university student studying medicine.

After the regime fell, Ms. Ben Salah did not leave her home for days, fearing for her safety as a sense of lawlessness swept Sousse, Tunisia’s third largest city, where she lives and studies.

“The happiness was overshadowed by fear but I’m still optimistic about the future,” she said in an interview in Sousse.

Women interviewed across several countries in the region that witnessed revolutions or ripples of the Arab Spring described the halting and uneven changes of the past year as a transition period that their nations must go through to achieve democracy.

“Despite the rise in religious ideology and economic deterioration, we gained freedom of expression and debate,” said Ms. Ben Salah, now an active member of her university debating club who participates in several formerly banned political associations.

Television and radio shows across Tunisia are filled with voices debating equality, political parties and the drafting of the country’s future constitution.

But those debates throw the risks ahead into stark relief.

In a Feb. 28 meeting of the Constituent Assembly, which is thrashing out the constitution, the Islamist party Ennhada called for traditional Islamic law, or Shariah, to be recognized as the principal source of legislation. After winning 89 seats in the October elections, Ennahda is the dominant party in the 217-seat assembly.

Tunisia’s current constitution declares Islam to be the state religion but Ennahda wants to go further with an explicit assertion of Shariah’s primacy.

Across the region the rise of religious political ideology poses a threat to personal rights.

Many women say they feel fear: fear for their personal safety; fear of economic disintegration; and fear that their individual rights will slowly vanish.

“There is a sense of instability. Everything seems to be on hold; everything is temporary,” said Safa Zarouki, 20, a Tunisian law student, in an interview.

After the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt also erupted. After 18 days of angry protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, President Hosni Mubarak resigned on Feb. 11, 2011, ending 30 years of autocratic rule.

“Being in the midst of the protests in Cairo felt really good and suddenly I felt proud to be an Egyptian,” said Iman Bibars, a social scientist who heads the Association for Development and Enhancement of Women in Egypt, a microfinance organization that helps impoverished women.

“The revolution gave us a voice and we cannot hide that,” said Ms. Bibars: “But I think the product after the revolution is against women,” she added during an interview in Doha, where she took part last week in a debate on the Arab Spring’s impact on women.

In the debate, Ms. Bibars argued vehemently that women would be worse off after the revolutions.

“I was shocked the fundamentalists took over and I did not foresee a male gender constitution,” she said, referring to the parliamentary election victory of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the 28 percent of seats that went to the more extreme Salafi parties.

Still, 74 percent of the audience in the Doha debate voted against the idea that women would be worse off as a result of the changes sweeping the region. Despite arguments ranging from new restrictions due to the rise of political Islam to the lack of personal safety and rights, the audience who attended the Doha Debates resoundingly rejected the motion by 74 percent.

“Women made those revolutions which brought the so-called fundamentalists to power and they will be able to define and defend their rights and interests,” said Rabab El Mahdi, an assistant professor of political science at the American University in Cairo and co-founder of several opposition groups in Egypt.

“The harassment of women in the streets was a problem long before the revolution but it is now coming to light — so women are able to take their abusers to court,” she added.

In July 2011, Samira Ibrahim and Maha Mohamed filed a case before the Egyptian administrative court to end the “virginity testing” of female detainees. In its ruling the Egyptian court referenced the new constitution and Egypt’s obligation under international law to refrain from torture or ill treatment. Amnesty International declared it a victory for women in Egypt.

“During Mubarak’s regime, such a case would have been dismissed,” Ms. El Mahdi said. “Women are standing up for their rights and this has been a positive outcome of the revolutions.”

Yet, while legal rights have advanced, political representation has not kept pace. Despite such convincing arguments, female representation in leadership roles and in Parliament after the Arab Spring In Egypt and Jordan, women remain few and far between in government and in national assemblies — and in Kuwait past gains by women have been rolled back.

Under growing pressure to accelerate reform in Jordan, King Abdullah II appointed a new prime minister last year and gave a televised speech promising comprehensive reform. A committee was appointed to review election laws and make amendments to the Constitution. But women and human rights advocates have assailed the outcome, accusing the committee of reneging on a promise to include the word “gender” in Article 6 of the Constitution, guaranteeing the equality of all Jordanians.

“We were greatly disappointed the word gender was removed,” said Amena al-Zoabi, president of the Jordanian Women’s Union, a nongovernmental organization that lobbies for women’s rights. “The gaps are real and we must make sure women’s rights don’t fall by the wayside in light of the important changes in the region.”

In Kuwait last month, the victory of the Islamist-led opposition in Parliamentary elections resulted in an all-male chamber. Women, who won four seats in elections in 2009 — making the Kuwait Parliament the first in the Gulf region with elected women members — lost them all this time around.

In Egypt the constitutional committee appointed by the Supreme Council of Armed Forces included no women, and in the recent parliamentary elections women won fewer than 10 of the roughly 500 seats.

“It is true we are not afraid to speak our mind now and that is the most beautiful thing about the revolution,” said Asmaa Gamal, 20, a media student in Cairo who joined the protests in Tahrir Square that led to the fall of the Mubarak regime. “But my fear is that our political and social system will become conservative, like Saudi Arabia.”

“There is also still fear of lawlessness and crime,” she said. “When we feel there is security, education reform, less corruption and that a woman is free to walk in the streets without being harassed, then I will have hope.”

Quotes

Non-violence requires a double faith, faith in God and also faith in man.
- Gandhi
At the center of non-violence stands the principle of love.
- Martin Luther King Jr.


Both Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. are advocates for non-violece. It is evident that Gandhi has influence many non-violence leaders like Martin luther King Jr. The two quotes exemplify the importance of non-violence and how non-violence is an expression of love. 

Chapter 23

Chapter 23 is about independence and development of parts of Europe and other countries that have been colonized, especially India and Africa. My sophmore year of high school I read a book called Nectar in a Sieve, and it was about the colonization of India, the begining and the after math. When India finally gained independece families and cultures were no l onger the same, as shown through the main character in the book. The daughter had to leave home and earn money in the city, never returning even when Europe left. The coloinization was disruptive and damagining.