Posted on 10/10/2002 3:52:03 PM PDT by JZoback
What would it be like? Imagine living as a woman in Asia …
There is no rejoicing on the day you are born. To your parents’ and relatives’ deep disappointment, you are a girl. Boys are highly valued in your Asian culture and much more desirable than girls, because they are a sort of “insurance” for the joint family unit, working to provide for all.
If you survive the first few days of your life, you should consider yourself fortunate already. Each year thousands of baby girls are murdered by their own mothers, simply because they are female. This sort of infanticide has gone on for hundreds of years. When demographic studies were first done in 18th century India, some villages were found to have six times as many boys as girls, while others had no girl babies at all. Since 1900, the national ratio of women to men in India has continued to drop. Out of 1,250 women recently polled in the state of Tamil Nadu, more than half had killed baby daughters.
If your mother (or a close female relative) does choose to kill you, she may do so by forcing poison or a chemical fertilizer down your throat. She may smother you, or perhaps simply let you starve to death. But cruelty isn't her motive. She may actually believe that this is the wiser, more compassionate choice rather than raise you and condemn you to life as a woman. Or perhaps she believes, as many do, that sacrificing a daughter will guarantee her a son.
But with today’s modern technology, you may not even have the chance to be born. If your parents are well-off enough to afford a gender determination test through ultrasound or amniocentesis, there is a good chance you will be aborted once it is determined that you are female.
Though a 1996 law has made both gender determination and abortion illegal in India, it has been estimated that up to 50 million girls and women are missing from the nation’s population today because they were aborted. Between two and five million baby girls are aborted every year in India.
If you somehow make it past babyhood, you will still face the challenge of simply getting adequate nutrition. You will be fed less than your brothers, and at each meal you will probably have to wait to eat, along with your mother and sisters, until all the males are through. Your brothers will receive higher preference when it comes to health care. If you ever need hospitalization, you will most likely not receive it. It is no wonder that in Nepal and Bangladesh, one out of every four girls dies before age five; and that 25 percent of the girls born in India every year die by age 15.
When you reach school age as a young girl, you will probably only attend school for a short while before your parents pull you out to help at home. You are needed to help tend and feed the animals, collect their feed, clean the home and look after your younger siblings. By age 10 or 11, you may be putting in an eight-hour work-day. You may even be forced to work in a factory, just like 7.5 million other girls in India.
Your brothers, on the other hand, will continue their education for many more years, perhaps even finish high school and go on to the university. In Pakistan, 90 percent of the women over age 25 cannot read or write; in one rural state more than 98 percent of all women are illiterate.
As you grow toward womanhood, there is another threat awaiting you: prostitution. If your family is poor, they may be deceived by promises of a good-paying job or marriage proposal for you. They may unknowingly hand you over to a life of shame and ill-repute. You may be kidnapped and sold, never to see your family again. You become like 80 percent of all India’s prostitutes, who were sold, like slaves, between the ages of 14 and 16, for prices ranging from 40 cents to a thousand dollars. This degrades your status in this culture even further. You lose your dignity—and your future. Who can rescue you from a life like this?
Even if you escape the deception of the prostitution traffickers, you face another pitfall if your parents are followers of the devadasi cult. The word literally means “female slave of the god.” If your parents are dedicated to this particular deity, they will marry you to this god in a secret ceremony and dedicate you to temple service, sentencing you to life as a temple servant and prostitute. You will be one of 1,000 young girls—even infants—who become devadasis each year in India, adding to hundreds of thousands already throughout the nation.
If, by the time you reach your teenage years, you are still alive and leading a reputable life at home, your parents will begin the search for a husband for you. Once your marriage is arranged (the norm in Asia rather than the exception) and the engagement is announced, you will find yourself married off on rather short notice to a man you probably never met until your wedding day.
Whether your parents are rich or poor, this is likely one of the moments they have dreaded the most. Today, your wedding day, is one of the primary reasons you were so undesirable at birth, why you have always been viewed as a burden and drain on your family ’s wealth. Today they must pay the groom’s family your dowry. It must be a sizeable sum of money, plus jewels, land or other assets, for it is necessary to arrange a proper marriage to maintain family honor; and the larger the sum, the greater the honor. Your dowry is a terrible burden that will totally deplete your family’s life savings and probably put them into debt, perhaps even up to 10 years’ worth of income gone in a matter of a few days. A Dowry Prohibition Act exists in the laws of India, but the tradition is too strong not to follow.
Suddenly, in a matter of hours, you are the property of another man—your husband. You are expected to honor him as your personal god. You now live in a strange village with strangers who are now your family members, all of whom you must respect and obey, for you have the lowest position in this joint family unit. You are expected to take all sorts of orders, insults and abuse, particularly from your mother-in-law and any of her daughters; and you will be blamed for anything bad that happens to the family. You have no property rights. In many ways you are viewed as a slave, regarded as property that can be disposed of. Your only fulfillment will come when you can bear sons and prove your worth.
If your family paid an insufficient dowry to satisfy the greed of your husband’s family, or if you do not meet their expectations of a model wife and they want their son to marry better, it could mean great suffering on your part…even death. You are especially at risk during the first seven years of your married life. With dowry deaths increasing every year in India—one every 88 minutes—your chances of survival are growing slimmer by the hour.
If you do become another victim of dowry-related violence, most likely your husband’s family will burn you to death and then proclaim it was a “kitchen accident.” Newspapers report this sort of thing on a daily basis. However, you could also be drowned, strangled, smothered, hanged or poisoned; with the evidence often destroyed before the police can recover it. And there’s a very good chance your case won’t even make it to the authorities—for every reported case, 299 go unreported.
If you don’t die at the hands of your in-laws, you may die at your own. If you can no longer endure the harsh treatment, torture and pressure you receive from your husband and his family, you may prefer to end your life. Nearly 2,000 Indian women do so every year.
In your childbearing years, your opportunities for a healthy life will not improve. If you are like the average Indian woman, you will have up to nine pregnancies and bear five children who survive. You will spend 80 percent of your reproductive years either bearing children or nursing them. With the 14-hour days you work and the loads you carry that are heavier than you are, your body will be spent by the time you reach your late thirties.
But of all the pitfalls that await you throughout your life span as an Asian woman, there is one that you probably fear most of all: widowhood. Losing your husband is an event to be dreaded, for you face not only personal loss but a complete upheaval and restructuring of your life.
You may be blamed for your husband’s death, perhaps because of sins you committed, either in your present life or a past one, especially if he was young. You will be regarded from now on as the bringer of bad luck, a liability to your family and community. You will have to rely on your children’s generosity; and if they refuse to care for you, as often happens, you will have to resort to begging around temples if you want to survive.
Now that your husband, your “personal god” is gone, you no longer have any reason to adorn yourself. You will probably shave your head, shed your jewelry and wear only plain white or dark clothing. You lose not only the companionship of your husband, but the respect of your society.
You are now truly alone. You will be expected to seclude yourself and withdraw from society. You will never remarry, and you are excluded from all religious ceremonies and festivals. You spend your remaining years in virtual non-existence, for your culture has no use for an old single woman like you.
For some women, there is an alternative to the indignity and hardship of this solitary confinement. You may be one who chooses it.
Sati literally means “true or virtuous one” and symbolizes a woman’s ultimate rejection of widowhood. It is an ancient but illegal Hindu practice where a widow embraces death by voluntarily joining her husband’s body on his funeral pyre.
By choosing sati, you believe you will avoid the shame and humiliation of widowhood. You believe your death will bring you merit and glory, give you salvation, and raise you to the level of a deity. Your family—seven generations before and after you—will also reap these benefits. You’ve heard of others who have chosen this fiery death and how thousands now travel to their villages to pay homage and worship these deified women at shrines. You wonder, perhaps, if sati isn’t a better choice than widowhood. Perhaps death is a better choice than life.
In a society that gives her second-place status from birth to death, there doesn't seem to be much reason for a woman to even exist. She is degraded by society from the moment she is born; she is trampled and despised her whole life through.
But Jesus saw women differently. His coming into the world was announced to a young woman. And He chose that same woman as the vessel through which He would be born. Throughout His ministry, Jesus made it a point to reach out to women on the fringes of society—adulteresses, prostitutes, those who were demon-possessed, those considered “unclean” and defiled because of illness, even the “untouchable” Samaritan woman at the well. After His resurrection, the first person to whom Jesus appeared was a woman. To all, He extended the hope, dignity and peace found in salvation through His death on the cross and conquest over death and hell.
To the women of Asia today, Jesus offers the same. Their society may consider them of little value, but to Him they are precious—worth the price of His own life. He became sin for all, and in exchange they have the opportunity to receive righteousness and eternal life...beauty for ashes.
Wherever the Gospel takes root in a society, a woman’s value and dignity increase dramatically. This is happening everywhere on the mission fields of Asia.
There are too many conceptions in the world.
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