Other women

The change existed and did not exist: we are talking about a very complex world, a world that was so many.

On the one hand, the seizure of power by many women had been the most important revolution of those decades;

on the other, many continued to live like a century before.

So many women had become others, and others continued, unfortunately, stuck in the same way.

In those days, while the well-thought-outs of the West deluded themselves with times when everything seemed to change, in much of Africa and Asia —and even Latin America— the majority of people continued to suffer from a perfectly medieval sexual morality, ruthless repression in name of the gods and the family order.

His victims were above all, as they had almost always been until then, women.

His victimizers, so many times, men.

A Masai, with one of the traditional knives to perform ablations.Marvi Lacar (Getty Images)

The most brutal expression of this tendency was the cutting of the clitoris.

Female genital cutting was an almost desperate effort to maintain the most archaic family structures: a woman subjected to the orders of her man.

For that, the safest thing was to avoid that a sexual desire impelled her to disobey them: whence the ancient practice of amputating the clitoris.

Such mutilation is one of those events that confuses the historian, that makes her wonder if she is not lacking in data, if she is using what she should, if she did not understand everything very wrong: how a not so distant era, which claimed a certain degree of civilization , tolerated such barbaric practices, did not decide to eliminate them.

He did not decide, he tolerated them, he practiced them boldly.

In some places the cut was carried out with the instruments and guarantees of the surgery of that time;

in others, with a stone or a knife, without asepsis or anesthesia.

The scope also varied: castrators could cut off part or all of the clitoris, the labia minora or even the labia majora.

Between one form and another, it was estimated that in 2020 there were 200 million women living who had suffered from it —and that four million girls continued to suffer from it every year.

The countries where it was mutilated the most included Mali, Egypt, Sudan, Somalia, Guinea, Mauritania.

As far as we know, the international campaigns launched to end this practice had not yet achieved the necessary results.

Another widespread practice contradicted the decline of the marriage institution: the persistence of large unequal—or “polygamous”—marriage.

The list of countries where women were mutilated matched pretty well the list of countries where every man had the right to marry more than one woman.

Islam allowed her up to four, as long as she could support them: large marriage was, like so many things then, a privilege for the rich—in some countries.

In Europe, America, China and Oceania polygamy was already illegal and persecuted;

in Russia it was illegal but they tolerated it;

in much of Africa and the Middle East it was perfectly legal: in Burkina Faso, Mali or Nigeria a third of the population lived in polygamous homes.

And in several places—India, Malaysia, the Philippines—it was only legal when practiced by a Muslim:

Trial in Colarado, USA, against a sect in Colorado, USA, that practiced polygamy in 2008. George Frey (Getty Images)

The same thing happened with another religious imposition: the use, decided by Islam, of those cloths that covered the hair and faces of women, and even their bodies.

The custom was ancient and, like mutilation, it smacked of terror: men's fear of what their women could do, women's seductiveness as a tremendous weapon that they had to deactivate.

As so often happens, weakness was disguised as a supposed show of strength.

In any case, after centuries of complying with that norm, contact with more open societies caused some Muslim women to begin to rebel;

many, no

In the secular countries of Europe, where the Islamist population had grown so much, the controversy was not resolved:

some states prohibited the use of these cloths in public places and clashed with Muslim women who wanted to follow their tradition and also with liberals who claimed the right of each person to act as they wanted and accused those states of restricting individual freedom - while others supported the prohibition of such cover-ups as a way to free these women.

Once again, it was discussed whether a state should impose its convictions or tolerate each person maintaining their own, even if they contradicted its basic principles.

In most Muslim countries, on the other hand, there was little discussion: the obligation was clear and, by various means—conviction, coercion, condemnation, public ridicule—women were forced to comply with it.

The most fanatical Jews did the same, to show their affinity.

And, finally, another practice that the citizens of Western countries believed to be banished and, nevertheless, was deeply rooted were arranged marriages.

Two centuries earlier, this way of getting married was the most common throughout the world: marriage as a unit of production of children and goods used the most appropriate methods to achieve its goals (see chap.4).

In the West, this idea lost strength in the face of the illusion of love, but in certain countries the productive logic —to produce, at least, suitable offspring— was maintained and marriages continued to be determined by parents and matchmakers.

In India, in those days, more than half of the marriages followed this process: among the elements that had to coincide were religion and caste, economic power and horoscopes.

The Indian figures showed that arranged marriages were more robust than spontaneous ones and that, after a period of decline, that certainty had made them grow again.

Numerous texts of the time moved or laughed at that difficult moment —sometimes at the wedding itself or on its eve— when a person meets another person with whom he is going to spend his life.

Wedding celebration in Bangladesh between a 14-year-old girl and her 18-year-old husband. SOPA Images (SOPA Images/LightRocket via Gett)

There was also an extreme case of arranged marriages: those involving girls.

A 2018 study showed that globally, one in five women between the ages of 20 and 24 had been married before their 18th birthday — and that there were, in all, some 700 million women married as children.

The custom was declining, but it was still widespread in India, the rest of Asia, much of Africa, and certain countries in Latin America.

In them, a quarter of the women had been married before their 15th birthday.

This haste had, among other things, an economic reason: in many marriages the groom's family paid the bride's family a price, in money or cattle, to compensate them for what they had spent raising her, since they would be the family of the boyfriend who would use it to give birth, cook, wash, clean, take care of the elderly.

The price, in general, fell as the girl grew older and her payback time decreased;

nobody wanted to lose money, so they had to sell as soon as possible.

Machismo was also a class problem: for reasons of education and culture, the poorest tended to be more so than the more affluent.

It was another form of this inequality that the poorest women suffered —and also their men: the perpetrators were, at the same time, victims of their own violence.

* * *

Those pockets of extreme machismo —those places where women continued to be reduced to that subordination they had always suffered from— contradicted the advances that other women were achieving in others.

In Europe and America—and also among the new Asian middle classes—women had advanced seriously in those years.

In many of them the feminist movements were the most active and successful political organizations.

A central feature of that movement was that it brought together diverse political sensibilities.

There were sectors that did not conceive of the liberation of women without the liberation of the poor, but others separated them without difficulty, and this is how popular militants were able to share claims with bankers, businesswomen with cleaning employees, left and right, squatters and rentiers.

Feminism was, perhaps, the quintessence of the “identity” movements that proliferated in those years.

“Identity movements are —in a strict sense— the imagination of an age without imagination.

In other words: movements without the need to imagine projects to fight for because their project is themselves, it is to achieve for their own what others already have.

Identity movements, in general, do not intend to reformulate the structures of our societies: they do not question private property, surplus value, the distribution of wealth, the forms of power.

They defend, against the attacks of which they are victims, those who carry that identity.

“Thus, feminism —let's say— does not require imagination: it is the application of natural logic to the social scheme.

It is not necessary to invent the social body that raises it: we are women.

It is not necessary to create structures of hope: we have to have the same rights as men.

It is not imagination, it is pure logic, justice in construction.

“And it is necessary and it is urgent and it is indisputable: all this allows this power in a powerless age.

The women's movements are also tributaries of the humanist right idea: defenses of life against the attacks that threaten it, both due to sexist violence and clandestine abortions as well as labor, moral, and religious discrimination.

Thanks to these triggers, the lives of millions of women are changing”, wrote, in those years, an observer without much insight.

Few things improved as much in that time as the situation of women in rich countries;

in others, much less.

The feminist fight had, like others, very different goals depending on the place.

In those years, Saudi women had gained the right to drive but continued to depend on a male “guardian” — first her father, then her brother or her husband — for any important decision.

At the same time, many Indian and Chinese women fought for the right to feed themselves in times of famine, when men continued to have priority over the little food available (see chapter 8).

On the other hand, Western women discussed above all three issues: equal participation, the right to decide over their bodies, protection against violence.

Burqa-clad Afghan women await the delivery of humanitarian aid in Afghanistan, in an image dated June 2022. Scott Peterson (Getty Images)

Their presence in public and working life had greatly increased in previous decades, supported by the quotas that made it mandatory and, in many countries, they were no longer necessary: ​​the common sense of the time was enough.

Yet not so many ruled: a German chancellor resigned that year after a decade in European power, one from England resigned after a month in British power, a Finnish woman reeling from being seen dancing, and an Italian right-winger had just win your elections;

women also ruled in New Zealand, Bangladesh, Nepal, Namibia, Greece, Tunisia, Taiwan, Samoa, Denmark, Ethiopia, Honduras, Singapore and fifteen other countries: it was probably the highest number in history - and, even so, they did not reach a sixth of the nations of the planet.

Women had not yet reached half of the leading positions in companies, for example.

In the most advanced countries they used to be between 30 and 40 percent.

And in all of them their average salary was still lower —for equal work— than that of men.

The right to abortion was the most complete expression of the will of many women to manage the conception, to decide and not suffer it.

It was, of course, an emergency solution when other solutions had not worked—and increased access to contraception was succeeding in reducing the number of abortions in the world;

even so, millions strongly demanded it in many places.

Abortion had been legalized for the first time a century earlier, in Soviet Russia, 1920, but many countries continued to repress it.

It was allowed in almost all of them when there was a “force majeure” reason —danger to the health of the mother, rape, incest—;

what divided the waters was whether a woman could request it without further explanation.

It was allowed by a third of the countries —most of Europe, Russia, China, Australia, Argentina among them— and the rest prohibited it.

But even where the law allowed it, many women still had problems getting it: doctors who refused to practice it due to religious prejudice, institutions that were lazy, various disqualifications.

The right to abortion had become one of the strong controversies of the time —and in 2022 a decision of the Supreme Court of the United States,

that he made it illegal again in his country after half a century, unexpectedly heated the conflict.

Just as other claims were transversal and brought together women of different classes, parties of different policies, abortion still functioned as a watershed: it divided the parties and sectors of the "left" —which supported it— and those of the "right" that they used to demonstrate against him.

"My body, my choice" can be read on this banner during a feminist demonstration in Toulouse, France, in November 2022. NurPhoto (NurPhoto via Getty Images)

The fight for the right to abortion accompanied the development of an idea that had always been silenced: for the first time, a number of women stated that they did not want to be mothers, that they were not interested, that motherhood was not the culmination of femininity.

It was an important break: although many had felt it throughout history —and had even acted on it— very few had dared to proclaim it.

Another main theme of feminism was the fight against gender violence.

Thanks to their fight, it was learned that worldwide, every year, one in ten women was physically or sexually assaulted by a close man —and that, of course, these figures varied so much depending on the region: in no one were the attacks so numerous as in Africa.

It was estimated that there had been around 500,000 homicides in the world that year (see chapter 23).

Only one in six victims had been a woman, but femicide was particularly heinous because the killers were often men those women knew—husbands, boyfriends, exes, relatives, friends, acquaintances.

Feminism turned this silenced plague into a topic of debate that was addressed by the laws of dozens of countries.

And public opinion: the fight against the primary form of this violence, sexual harassment, was widely disseminated in those years.

It had all started in the middle of the previous decade with the so-called #MeToo, the initiative of an American actress who proposed, on the social networks of the moment, that women who had been harassed stop silencing it and tell it.

The cascade effect was immediate: thousands of cases that had been ignored for decades came to light, with various consequences.

Thus they produced a consciousness and care that caused men to abandon the presumption that they could use their various powers to get sex with impunity.

Some sectors, however, complained that the movement also produced a wave of frightened puritanism in which so many people—men, above all—refrained from any seduction for fear of overstepping limits that were not always clear to them.

In certain circles of the Rich World,

And, on the other hand, the flood of complaints caused a large amount of social condemnation of those accused.

Many deserved them;

some, however, regretted that there was no instance where they could defend themselves, argue their innocence: that the accusation was enough for them to be "cancelled".

The idea of ​​"cancellation" was central to this issue: someone suspected of some kind of harassment or outrage was forced to stop doing what they had done in their social or work life.

The movement, of course, was strongest in the United States, where it originated, but its waves reached most of the wealthy countries—and disarmed many lives.

And they created, surely unintentionally, a moralistic current that stained, a curious paradox, those times that had been imagined beyond morality.

The movement of cancellations crossed, at times, with one characteristic of the time: they called it "political correctness" and it was the prohibition, very MundoRico, of saying things that could offend those who heard them.

His will to end the attacks on certain vulnerable sectors was perfectly defensible, but he often went too far and ended up treating everyone as if they were defenseless creatures who could be seriously injured by two or three inappropriate words.

It was, in that sense, a reactionary time: it reacted against certain freedoms —of speech, of gestures— in the name of certain rights or values.

A paternalistic era: certain groups or people were protected on the assumption that they would not know or could protect themselves or that they would need that protection.

It was what the Christian religion had done for so many centuries.

That produced effects: it was difficult to say anything because you didn't know how someone else would take it;

so many chose to keep quiet just in case.

Another curious effect was the distortion of insults: if, for centuries, many of them, in many languages, referred to lineage —above all, accusing the insulted of descending from a “prostitute”— and to certain sexual characteristics, in this new weather these kinds of epithets sounded off-kilter before they sounded incomprehensible.

In any case, it was also a time of transition in terms of insults.

So far there had been only that discomfort;

the epithets of a new type that would be imposed later did not yet appear.

Along with the variation in insults, the debate on that traffic that, for centuries, was called “prostitution” intensified: the fact that a woman —more often— or a man, both flesh and blood, charged money to maintain some type of sexual exchange with a man—more often—or a woman.

The practice was ancestral —so much so that they used to call it “the oldest trade in the world”— but in those years the most progressive sectors, including various feminisms, hotly discussed it: whether the freedom to use your body included the freedom to sell it or if selling your body meant such humiliation and submission to the power of money that it was not a false freedom and should be eradicated.

We already know by what unexpected way the matter was resolved.

: 6. Long lives Thanks to medical and health advances, people lived longer than ever.

The power of large laboratories.

The invention of old age, its problems, some solutions.

the world then

A history of the present