Where have all the Women Gone?

How do I start the process of trying to describe to you what the majority of Indian women face in their daily lives. I didn't have any personal conversations with an Indian woman, in fact I rarely came into contact with an Indian woman. To me an Indian woman is a colorful, mysterious human whom I see caring for small children on a packed cattle car (what could be most closely translated as a 'bus' or 'train' in English) or hard at work carrying rocks on their heads at a construction site. I did not see women work unless it was at hard labor jobs... they did not work in stores, they, largely, were not waitresses, they were not vendors, there were little to no situations for us to have any interaction with an Indian woman. Maybe because only 45% of Indian's women are literate (compared to 64% of men) so there were less who could speak English to communicate with me, maybe because there are not enough jobs for men and women so the men work and the women stay home with the children, maybe it is less common for women to talk to strangers in general... I do not know. Their stories only came alive to me in the newspapers. The newspapers say the male to female ratio is 910 women to every 100 men, and falling. India had a population of 1.027 billion people in 2001, and rising. This would mean a shortfall of almost 93,500,000 women... let me say that another way to make sure everyone realizes just how many women that is... 93 and a half million women are missing from India.

Where have all these women gone and what about a society creates such a deficit of women? In India the answer to this question is not a secret. The government doesn't seem to be hiding anything. If the numbers are skewed it is most likely because the incident is such a societal norm that the victim either didn't think to report the crime or didn't think anything would come of it if they did. Each day the newspaper told me stories of the injustices the women of India face and examples of why there are far fewer women than men.

Dowry:
The dowry in India's society was used as a means to distribute wealth between male and female children. Male children received non-moveable wealth (home, business, land, etc) while women received the move-able wealth, a.k.a. money. In India the dowry is given by a female's parents to her parents-in-law at her wedding and throughout her life. Arranged marriages are still very common (you can read want ads in their daily papers) and the main considerations parents look for in a suitable mate for their offspring is what caste they are in and how much the brides family is able to pay in dowry (the consequences of not paying enough is below). Because of this male babies are seen as assets and female babies a financial burden which leads to the abortion of female fetuses, discussed below.

Wife Burnings:
Indian police say they received more than 7,026 reports of bride-burning in 2005. It is believed that for every reported case 250 go unreported - that is 1,756,500... almost 2 million a year. Of the ones reported less than 10% of the cases are pursued through the legal system. According to the Rajasthan Police Annual Report 1999, dowry deaths between 1997 and 1999 increased by 24.43%, getting worse, not better. During our stay in India we read about multiple wife burnings. Reasons we saw given for the burnings was the failure of the wife’s family to provide what is seen as a large enough dowry, the wife's family falling behind on dowry payments, the desire of the husband to rid himself of his wife without dishonoring himself (through divorce of course... murder is much less dishonoring than divorce... right?), or the failure of the wife to produce a male child (which, if I remember my high school biology correctly, the male sperm decides the sex of a baby). The burning of brides started in the late 20th century... it is not an ancient tradition.

Bride Burning Claims Hundreds in India - http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/9608/18/bride.burn/

Abortion:
Another reason (most likely the main one) why there are fewer woman than men in India is the high abortion rates of female fetuses. Although it is illegal in India to check the sex of an unborn child there are still many cases of parents bribing doctors to abort female babies. While we were in India we read a newspaper article about an abandoned water well that was discovered containing hundreds of aborted female fetuses. One of the reasons given for aborting a child is the large dowries a family must pay for their daughter to be married, leading low income families to financial hardship. The sex ratio is so low in some regions due to the abortion of female fetuses that women are 'imported' from other regions (and Nepal) and shared amongst brothers.

Indian Child - http://www.indianchild.com/abortion_infanticide_foeticide_india.htm

What it feels like:

While in India I was treated like a possession. Jason was expected to make all of our decisions and to be the sole breadwinner and money handler. At dinner they expected Jason to order for me and if for some reason my dish was unavailable they would ask him what I would like instead. They asked him my name, with me standing next to him. They would carry on a conversation with him without saying a word to me and then ask him if they could take my picture. The men weren't trying to be disrespectful to me... they are just raised to be disrespectful of women in general. There was no point in getting mad at them (though it was terribly hard to stop myself) because they didn't understand how they had offended or wronged me.

I think the situation was magnified in our situation because we were traveling together. If you were a male traveling alone you would never notice anything was wrong and if you were a female traveling alone they would have to interact with you or not and you would never know the difference. Only traveling in a male-female pair would you be able to feel the inequality. Poor Jason couldn't win. At the end of some days I would feel so dejected and hurt... with part of the anger directed at him. "How could you let them treat me that way? How are you any different than me?" But what is it that he can do?

India started the process of teaching me how to control my anger and how to think through what I want to say to maximize its effectiveness in each situation. Though I have to admit being the recipient of such directed oppression is quite an eyeopener to what it actually feels like. We can all say we are not sexist or racist or whatever... but very few of us (including me) will actually know what it feels like to betruly oppressed (how degrading and humiliating it is) and in all the ways that it shows itself that we would not even think about. It made me feel that this type of oppression can not be present in our society, even in the slightest form.... now the only questions is what to do about it.