'Culture' is no defence for abusing women
Tomorrow is Women's Equality Day in the US; the day in 1920 when American women won the vote. This task was ticked off the to-do lists of Canadian women three years earlier, but Canadian suffragettes had an Act II to play out, 10 years later, in 'The Persons Case'.
The British North America Act referred to a person as a 'he', and rulings declared that 'women are persons in matters of pains and penalties, but not persons in matters of rights and privileges'.
Since women could vote, some aspired to public office. But only 'persons' could become senators. Five tireless women forced the question on Canada's highest court: are women persons? In 1929 it was decided: excluding women from public office was 'a relic of days more barbarous than ours'. Soon Canada had its first woman senator.
My father established the Governor General's Awards in Commemoration of The Persons Case to mark the 50th anniversary of this legal and political battle. I still remember my mother's passion while explaining the case to me, and posing that question which sounded so odd to my teenage ears: are women persons?
I knew women were persons; it was almost 1980! I saw the respect my father had for my mother. Rightly so. It was an era when political wives kept house and family - and then donned gloves and hat and, literally, poured tea. Eventually, gloves, hats and the pouring of tea went out of style, but there was always work to do.
My point is, I grew up in a time and place where women were nothing but persons, and my daughters are even more empowered. But they don't understand there are places where women are treated not like persons, but like animals.
Today, in Iran, for example, Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani awaits execution for adultery. And there's Aisha, the Afghan teenager on a recent cover of Time. There's Alaina Podmorow, a Canadian teenager whose fund-raising efforts for Afghan girls were criticised and ridiculed, in a post-modernist academic treatise. By a woman.
Let's make a new 'rule of thumb' (Google this idiom to learn the British ruling from which it is said to derive) for women's equality: the mistreatment of women cannot be defended by interpretations of so-called culture, religion, political correctness or (place your delivery-system here). Such a defence cannot override human rights.
Men don't like getting their noses cut off. They don't like being stoned to death. Well, lucky them; they don't get stoned for adultery. They aren't jailed for being raped, and they don't get their noses removed for fleeing abusive in-laws. That's because men recognise their own rights. My daughters know that it's only right to share, and girls have the same rights as boys.
Karmel Schreyer is a Hong Kong-based writer and the daughter of former governor general of Canada Edward Schreyer
