Subject to Debate: Sense and Dissents on Women, Politics, and Culture Brochura - 2001

Clara Zetkin Avenue


Scurrying around Manhattan on a blustery morning a few weeks ago, I
happened to glance up while waiting for the light to change in front of the
public library. Beneath the green and white sign reading Fifth Avenue was
another, also green and white, and printed in exactly the same lettering:
Clara Zetkin Avenue. Gee, I thought for a split second, if Rudy Giuliani is
naming a street for the grande dame of German socialism, he can't be as bad
as I thought. But will New Yorkers really start telling taxi drivers to
make a right on Zetkin? Then I saw the bent wires fastening the sign to the
post, and realized what was going on: Some lefty prankster was reminding us
that the next day, March 8, was International Women's Day.


Well, the great day came and went with barely a ripple of attention here in
the United States?although I understand that, over at the United Nations,
Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali gave a speech about the need to do
more for women, which in the case of the United Nations shouldn't be too
difficult. Maybe the local indifference is why I find myself filled with
gloomy thoughts about the worldwide situation of women. Here we are, at the
end of the twentieth century, and not only have hundreds of millions of
women around the globe yet to obtain even the barest minimum of human
rights, but the notion that they are even entitled to such rights is
bitterly contested.


Consider, for example, the horrors documented in the State Department's
annual human rights report, which focused on women this year for the first
time: genital mutilation in Africa and the Middle East, bride burning in
India, sexual slavery in Thailand, forced abortion and sterilization in
China. Imagine the firestorm of international protest if any of these
practices were imposed by men on men through racism or colonialism or
Communism! Well, you don't need to imagine: Just compare the decades of
global outrage visited, justly, on South Africa's apartheid regime for
denying political, civil and property rights to blacks, and the
cultural-relativist defense advanced on behalf of Saudi Arabia and other
ultra-Islamic regimes for their denial of same to women. Nobody's calling
on American universities and city governments to disinvest in those
economies. In Iraq and a number of other Middle Eastern countries that are
not theocracies, a man can with impunity kill any female relative he feels
is "dishonoring" him by unchaste behavior; in Pakistan, the jails are full
of women and girls, some only nine years old, whose crime was to be the
victims of rape. I suppose Benazir Bhutto will get around to them after she
finishes persuading the world that her mother is trying to undermine her
government because of a sexist wish to see a son, rather than a daughter,
in power.

"There isn't a hotly debated sociopolitical issue that Pollitt hasn't taken on with conviction and blazing originality...She is an astonishingly gifted writer."

Katha Pollitt writes the bimonthly column, "Subject to Debate" for The Nation. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and Whiting Foundations, a grant from the NEA, a National Magazine Award in Essays and Criticism and a National Book Critics Circle Award. She lives in New York City.