Culture, Civilization, and Women’s Rights 

There was a time in my life when I embraced the notion that, despite differences, all ethnic, religious, and national populations were ethically and morally equal. No one was any better or worse than any other.

This felt like a fair perspective. It made me feel good. Even virtuous.

When, for example, K and I were invited to Arosi’s house for dinner – K’s first dinner in a Chadian home – K was disturbed to discover that she was welcome to sit at the table with Arosi and me, but Arosi’s wife was not. Her job was to serve us dinner.

I told K that I felt we had no right to judge Arosi for that. We were in his home. This was his culture. It was an ancient culture, one that had survived millennia. And it would be wrong for us to presume that it was inferior to ours. We should respect Arosi’s culture, just as we would want him to respect ours.

That was my belief then. Forty-plus years later, I still believe that we have no right to impose our values on other cultures. But I no longer believe that we need to simply accept behaviors and practices that, by our standards, are uncivilized.

When confronted, directly or indirectly, by such things as burning heretics or stoning sinners to death, for example, I believe that I have not just the right, but the obligation to speak out. And I extend that to include barbaric attitudes and behaviors towards groups and individuals with respect to human rights, social status, freedom of expression, and other human liberties.

The Reality of Cultural Hierarchies 

There are many ways for a society to be more – or less – civilized. One criteria, mentioned above, is how a society administers punishment for crime. I believe drawing and quartering is a less civilized form of execution than, say, electrocution. I also believe a prison sentence for theft is more civilized than chopping off an arm.

If we wanted to measure the relative civility of different cultures, we would need a complex matrix to track dozens of practices and beliefs. But we can shortcut that by looking at how they treat their women. Because I believe there is a direct relationship between the status of and rights accorded to women in a society and that society’s general moral sophistication.

In the most barbaric cultures, women have neither social status nor human rights. They are essentially owned by their fathers and husbands. They have no say about what they will do, where they will live, and whom they will marry. They do not even have sovereignty over their own bodies.

At the same time, these women have enormous responsibilities. They are charged not only with keeping their homes, raising their children, and catering to their husbands, they are expected to do most of the income-producing work. In contrast, men in such cultures have, at best, two roles: fighting and fertilizing (i.e., defending their homes and impregnating their women).

Five thousand years ago, almost all human societies functioned in this way. But gradually, over the centuries, women acquired certain rights. First the right to life, then to liberty, and then to such things as the right to own property, to work, to get divorced, to vote, and so on.

An Inconvenient and Uncomfortable Thought 

We’re okay with calling a culture “primitive” if that culture existed in the long-ago, but not when we are talking about cultures that exist in the present.

And yet, how should we describe a contemporary culture that bans women from higher education, that dictates their clothing, that forbids them from refusing sex to their husbands, and that executes them for having extra- or pre-marital affairs?

Most of the discussions about women’s rights today are relegated to the countries where women have near or full rights and status. It’s easy, for example, to argue about whether women have more rights in Europe versus the Nordic countries or in China versus the US. But it’s hard to have a frank discussion about primitive practices in countries where they are most egregious.

I’m talking about such countries as Niger, Sudan, Mali, Congo, Chad, and the Central African Republic in Africa; Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, and Afghanistan in the Mideast; and then North Korea, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan. There are dozens of studies that rank countries according to the status and rights of their women. Take a look and you will see these at the very bottom.

But the argument I’m trying to make here is about cultures, not countries. So, it’s important to recognize that even in those countries at the ethical apex of those studies – the advanced Western countries, mostly – there are countless pockets of micro-cultures where the status and rights of women are severely restricted.

The most obvious examples are fundamentalist religions, including fundamentalist Jews, Christians, and Muslims.

The experience of women in such micro-cultures – even if they are living in the US, Canada, England, or Norway – is very much more restricted than is the experience of women in the mainstream. In some cases, it is nearly as bad as it is in the countries at the tail end of the rankings.

Still, in a bizarre twist of reason, contemporary political correctness – which purports to be at the forefront of civilized thinking – requires us to pretend that such micro-cultures are not less humane and less civilized. That they are simply, as I once tried to believe, different but equal.

(I’m sure it’s evident that I haven’t entirely figured this out.  I’ve got other ideas about how these inequities fit into the general zeitgeist of contemporary thinking that I’ll get to in future blog posts.)