The Matilda Effect

Why are n**e overweight women showing off their vaginas showing up on my Facebook??!

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INTERNATIONAL WOMAN’S DAY
The first National Woman's Day was observed in the United States on 28 February. The Socialist Party of America designated this day in honor of the 1908 garment workers' strike in New York, where women protested against working conditions.
But the first milestone in US was much earlier - in 1848. Indignant over women being barred from speaking at an anti-slavery convention, Americans Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott congregated a few hundred people at their nation’s first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York. Together they demanded civil, social, political and religious rights for women in a Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions. A movement is born.
The idea of an international day came from Clara Zetkin, leader of the “women's office” for the Social Democratic Party in Germany, while she was at a conference in Copenhagen in 1910. Significant activity is witnessed worldwide as groups come together to celebrate women's achievements or rally for women's equality. The day’s origins date back to the beginning of the 20th century. In 1908, thousands of women marched through New York City, demanding better working hours and pay. A year later, the Socialist Party of America declared a Women’s Day.

For IWD 2023, the global campaign theme is . The campaign aims to encourage important conversations on Why equal opportunities aren't enough and Why equal isn't always fair. People start from different places, so true inclusion and belonging require equitable action.
Gloria Steinem, world-renowned feminist, journalist and activist once explained "The story of women's struggle for equality belongs to no single feminist, nor to any one organization, but to the collective efforts of all who care about human rights." So make International Women's Day your day and do what you can to truly make a positive difference for women.

Whether hosting an event, running a campaign, launching an initiative, reporting on achievement, donating to a female-focused charity, or more - there are many ways groups and individuals can mark International Women's Day.
Haudenosaunee Women are also celebrating International Women’s Day. They are leading the way culturally, socially, politically, and spiritually in indigenous communities. I will be attending an event tonight beginning at 5:00, in Ithaca. Louise McDonald Herne (Bear Clan Mother, Mohawk) and Jonel Beauvais (Wolf Clan, Mohawk) are leading the discussion. I will be accompanied by my good friend Wanda Wood, Oneida Wolf Clan.

Oxfam is demanding the US take bold action on gender and climate justice. They are demanding that the US take bold action to reduce carbon emissions and prioritize solutions that focus on the gender inequalities of the climate crisis. John Kerry is the presidential envoy for the climate.
From New York to Beijing, women have been demanding their rights on 8 March since 1908. Much remains to be done, say activists, but there is reason for celebrations India, a mural painted by women is being revealed at a metro station. In Mexico, protesters will be on the streets, demanding women’s rights. Jamaica will see the first all-female sitting of parliament. And in China, men will present the women in their lives with gifts. Happy International Women’s Day.
For years, women have marked the now-annual event on 8 March in different ways, but mostly to build momentum on issues that matter to them, and to inspire change.
London saw a march in support of women’s suffrage on 8 March 1914, and thousands of women in Russia protested to demand bread and peace on 8 March 1917 (23 February in the Julian calendar in use in Russia at the time), heralding the start of the Russian revolution. Four days later, the tsar was forced to abdicate, and the provisional government granted women the right to vote.

“International Women’s Day comes out of revolutionary movements among working-class women as well as [their] supporters,” says Temma Kaplan, an activist and retired professor of history at Rutgers University in the US. “It had an intellectual and public face because mobilisation was part of early socialist women’s and suffragist movements.”
The UN adopted the day in 1975, which it had declared international women’s year, and uses it to promote a particular issue, campaign or theme. IWD is now a public holiday in countries including Nepal, Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone, Cambodia and Kyrgyzstan. In China, women get a half-day holiday.

In South Africa, which has its own National Women’s Day in August, alcohol companies use feminist messaging in their advertising campaigns to coincide with the date, says Laurine Platzky, an academic activist in Cape Town. “The alcohol industry has identified Africa as a new growth market. The annual day has drawn criticism from feminists who say it risks becoming little more than a corporate Valentine’s Day, with companies using the occasion to “pinkwash” their brands rather than promote women’s equality.

But IWD has retained its radical roots, providing a rallying point to fight attempts to roll back women’s rights and inaction over gender-based violence. Some recent demonstrations have been large and violent. On 8 March 2021 in Mexico, where at least 10 women are murdered each day, police used rubber bullets and teargas during clashes that erupted between protesters and the police.
Macarena Sáez, the executive director of the women’s rights division of Human Rights Watch, says protests across Latin America have brought issues to the fore and put pressure on authorities to change laws. “Argentina, Colombia and Mexico are great examples of [countries where there has been progress] achieved by women,” she says. “Gains in reproductive rights in Argentina have been considerable. It’s the same in Colombia. It’s because of the fight and positions women have taken that [led to] one of the most progressive decisions on reproductive rights.”

In Spain, record crowds came out on 8 March 2019 and 2020 to protest against violence against women. In April 2018, five men had been acquitted of r**e in what became known as the “wolf pack”case. The outcome galvanised the country’s feminist movement and spurred calls for an overhaul of the country’s s*xual offences legislation.

In South Korea, on IWD in 2018, hundreds rallied in central Seoul holding signs as part of the movement that saw several high-profile South Korean men resign from positions of power.

That this is able to happen at all is a sign of progress, according to Sáez. “The issue of women’s rights is now mainstream, where for many years it was marginalised,” she says. “A day to commemorate the gains of women’s rights is in itself the triggering of change.
Kaplan adds that the media’s coverage of IWD helps. “International Women’s Day became one of the leading ways movements could get attention from the press and larger society and make arguments in a public forum.”
Despite this, IWD is an annual reminder of the fight that women face as well as the achievements they have made, says Julie Gottlieb, a professor of modern history at the University of Sheffield. “What we’ve found about International Women’s Day is its fluidity and the way it adapts to present day concerns.
“It’s very adaptive. We’re not celebrating the same thing every year – we’re dealing with the existing challenges that women face.”
Here are some of 20 Ways You Can Really Make A Difference On International Women’s Day: Join a board…Speak UP…Make introductions…Read with your children…Start a book club…Create an IWD playlist…Learn something new…Honor our elders…Teach your children about International Women’s Day.
Even retailers are chipping in. NativePath (nativepath.com) is distributing for FREE their large bag of Collagen with purchase of a bag.

WOMEN BE STRONG!

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How Title IX Changed the World

“Every girl in Little League, every woman playing college sports, and every parent―including Michelle and myself―who watches their daughter on a field or in the classroom is forever grateful to the late Patsy Takemoto Mink.”
―President Barack Obama, on posthumously awarding Mink the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014.
When I was in grade school, I really liked playing softball. BUT…there were no organized teams for it. The boys got to play on the large playground. But the girls had just the narrow street to play on. Jump rope, Red Rover, and Dodge Ball don’t count as sports. In high school, the only options were cheerleading and bowling—neither one of which I could participate in as I lived out of town on a farm and had no transportation to get to these events. Before Title IX, approximately 294,015 high school girls participated in sports (1971-72). In 2018-19, 3,402,733 High school girls participated in sports.

Patsy Takemoto Mink was the first woman of color and the first Asian American woman elected to Congress. Fierce and Fearless is the first biography of this remarkable woman, who first won election to Congress in 1964 and went on to serve in the House for 24 years, her final term ending with her death in 2002. Mink was an advocate for girls and women, best known for her work shepherding and defending Title IX, the legislation that changed the face of education in America, making it possible for girls and women to participate in school sports, and in education more broadly, at the same level as boys and men. She advocated for race, gender, and class equality and promoted peace and environmental justice.
Fierce and Fearless: Patsy Takemoto Mink, First Woman of Color in Congress by Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, NWHM Scholar, and Gwendolyn Mink (NYU Press: May 3, 2022) The first biography of trailblazing legislator Patsy Takemoto Mink, best known as the legislative champion of Title IX.

When I was in grade school, I really liked playing softball. BUT…there were no organized teams for it. The boys got to play on the large playground. But the girls had just the narrow street to play on. Jump rope, Red Rover and Dodge Ball don’t count as sports. In high school, the only options were cheerleading and bowling—neither one of which I could participate in as I lived out of town on a farm and had no transportation to get to these events. Before Title IX, approximately 294,015 high school girls participated in sports (1971-72). In 2018-19, 3,402,733 High school girls participated in sports.
A few years later, when I was out of college, along came a 37-word law that expanded the rights of women on America’s athletic fields. And beyond.
"No person in the United States shall, on the basis of s*x, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any educational program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”
My two daughters heard from me often how lucky they were to be able to participate in many sports. They became champion gymnasts, soccer players, softball and more. Nikki had a scholarship for gymnastics at Bowling Green University in Ohio. My three grandchildren have excelled in lacrosse, soccer, softball, volleyball, basketball, track, and tennis. Katie, my oldest grandchild, is now at Ithaca College and is on their equestrian team.
Carol Hutchins has a wonderful story that she likes to tell. I am quoting much of the article from The Christian Science Monitor here as it is well-written by staff writers Kendra Nordin Beato and Tara Adhikari. In her office at the University of Michigan she is surrounded by awards that hint at her status as one of the most successful college coaches—male or female—in the United States. Ms. Hutchins was a freshman varsity basketball player at Michigan State University, living her dream of playing college sports at a time when few women were student-athletes. On that winter day, her team got a fortuitous break: Instead of practicing where they normally did, in the intramural building with its leaky roof and warped floor, the women were working out in Jenison Field House—the big gymnasium where the men’s basketball team played. They were getting ready for a rare double-header in which both the men’s and women’s teams were hosting major out-of-town rivals.

As the women ran plays, the visiting men’s team walked in with its famous coach—revered by anyone who followed college basketball. He called the women’s team over. Ms. Hutchins was excited. Surely, she thought, they were going to get a pep talk. Some strategic insights. A motivational anecdote. Not exactly.
“He said, ’You need to get off the court because nobody gives a damn about women’s basketball,” Ms. Hutchins recalls. Even today, nearly five decades later, the woman who has gone on to win more games as a college softball coach than anyone else in NCAA’s history winces at the memory. Her eyes flash anger. “He said it to our faces! I was lit. It definitely changed my world.”
She won’t name the basketball coach outright. She doesn’t need to “This is the thing,” says Ms. Hutchins, who has coached at Michigan since 1983. “The reason I don’t name him is because it could be a lot of them. That was the era.
The reason a comment like that sounds so archaic now, and women like Ms. Hutchins have been given the opportunity to vault to the pinnacle of the college athletic world, is largely because of a sparsely worded law passed on June 23, 1972, that didn’t even have the word “sports” in it. Title IX simply made it illegal to discriminate on the basis of s*x in educational stings that receive federal funding
Yet the law ushered in a gender revolution—and has, by many accounts, become one of the most significant pieces of federal legislation to benefit women in the past 50 years.
Today its ripple effects reach into almost every dugout and locker room in America, almost every living room, almost every classroom, and even corporate suites. It has changed the lives of countless individual women--and society itself.
The dramatic rise in the number of girls and women participating in sports is the most cited impact. But the changes extend way beyond that. The law has helped propel more women to get college degrees, provided them some protection against s*xual harassment and assault, and aided them in advancing to corner offices and boardrooms.
Ask almost any women’s rights advocate or female coach who has traced the law’s arc of progress over the past 50 years and they will say the work of Title IX is hardly complete. The use and interpretation of Title IX have in fact, been inconsistent since its passing, tossed like a political football under changing administrations. In 1984, President Ronald Reagan tried and failed to limit the laws application to specific programs. In 2005, President George W. Bush suggested colleges dole out federal money to men’s and women’s sports based on the level of interest in them.
In 2011, President Barack Obama pointedly reminded colleges of their obligations to combat s*xual harassment under the law, while the administration of President Donald Trump narrowed the definition of s*xual misconduct and required that both parties be present at investigative hearings and subject to cross-examination. The current administration is considering extending Title IX protections to transgender students.
Critics have long argued that requiring equal opportunities for women will diminish men’s opportunities. In some ways, they have.
By protecting budgets for revenue-generating programs such as football and men’s basketball, athletic directors—a majority of whom are male—can feel forced to cut smaller programs such as men’s swimming and wrestling in order to fund women’s programs.
Yet the benefits to women, even if not as much as they’d like, have been undeniable. The law has helped create a female sports culture where none existed and even relaxed rigid gender stereotypes in society. Ms. Hutchins has seen all the progress of the law, and its pitfalls, up close. At the time, women were entering the workforce in record numbers, but their participation was predominantly in traditional female occupations”: nursing, child care, primary education, secretarial work. Girls were barred from auto mechanics and boys from home economics.
In 1970, Bernice Sandler was struggling to find a job. She had a Ph.D. in education but she was not getting any full-time offers—though her younger male classmates were having no trouble advancing their careers. “You come on too strong for a woman,” one male faculty member suggested to her as an explanation. Sadler, called the “godmother of Title IX,“ helped initiate a class-action suit that led to the introduction of legislation in Congress. She took action. She joined the Women’s Equity Action League (WEAL) and began researching federal compliance for contractors. She studied the strategies that activists used in the civil rights movement and how they might apply to women in higher education. In a footnote, Ms. Sandler found a reference to an executive order amended by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967 stating that entities receiving federal funding could not discriminate based on race, color, religion, national origin, and s*x. She described this as her “eureka” moment.
Universities that received federal aid and failed to hire qualified women and pay them accordingly were in direct violation of the mandate. It was an opening through which the “godmother of Title IX” would deploy a full-court legal press. Together with WEAL, Ms. Sandler launched a historic class-action suit, filing more than 250 complaints on behalf of all women in higher education. The avalanche of compliance requests spurred a series of congressional hearings on the issue.
Eventually, Ms. Green and Rep. Patsy Mink, a Democrat from Hawaii, and Democratic Sen. Birch Bayh of Indiana introduced bills in Congress. President Richard Nixon signed into law the 37 words as Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. Things began to change quickly.
Ms. Hutchins, was a sports-obsessed 10th-grader who, by her senior year had athletic opportunities beyond cheerleading and informally arranged basketball games against girls at other schools. “We got our first varsity basketball team and we had a real schedule. We had uniforms, we had buses, and we had cheerleaders. I mean my dream came true. I was so happy.”
Title IX slowly began to spur lawsuits and complaints across the country. And they weren’t just expanding women’s participation in sports. Over the years the law has become a pry bar to open up all kinds of opportunities for women. In one sense it was a way to channel pent-up political energy that had been building since before the 19th Amendment granted women the right to vote in 1920.
She gathered together plaintiffs, with the support f legal theorist Catherine MacKinnon and attorneys at the New Haven Law Collective. They filed a lawsuit in 1977, using an untested argument: By failing to effectively address complaints of s*xual assault and harassment, Yale was violating Title IX. Only one of the plaintiffs’ claims advanced to trial. The rest were dismissed. But a single line written by U.S. Magistrate Judge Arthur Latimer in Alexander v. Yale changed history: “It is perfectly reasonable to maintain that academic advancement conditioned on submission to s*xual demands constitutes s*x discrimination in education.” It paved the way for grievance procedures in colleges across the nation. “The successful application of the law to s*xual harassment…as a form of s*x discrimination in education…kicked off a normative shift on college campuses,” says Celene Reynold, a presidential postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University who studies Title IX. But that shift is not complete by any means. Reynolds says, “We’re not living in a world where s*xual harassment doesn’t happen anymore. But we are living in a world where it’s not accepted as part of life in universities.” It is only in the past decade that schools have established robust systems for students to report s*xual harassment under Title IX.
She gathered together plaintiffs, with the support f legal theorist Catherine MacKinnon and attorneys at the New Haven Law Collective. They filed a lawsuit in 1977, using an untested argument: By failing to effectively address complaints of s*xual assault and harassment, Yale was violating Title IX. Only one of the plaintiffs’ claims advanced to trial. The rest were dismissed. But a single line written by U.S. Magistrate Judge Arthur Latimer in Alexander v. Yale changed history: “It is perfectly reasonable to maintain that academic advancement conditioned on submission to s*xual demands constitutes s*x discrimination in education.” It paved the way for grievance procedures in colleges across the nation. “The successful application of the law to s*xual harassment…as a form of s*x discrimination in education…kicked off a normative shift on college campuses,” says Celene Reynold, a ppresidential postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University who studies Title IX. But that shift is not complete by any means. Reynolds says, “We’re not living in a world where s*xual harassment doesn’t happen anymore. But we are living in a world where it’s not accepted as part of life in universities.” It is only in the past decade that schools have established robust systems for students to report s*xual harassment under Title IX.
The book Let Me Play, written by Karen Blumenthal, ostensibly for teens, is recommended reading.

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The Matilda Effect
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How Title IX Changed the World
“Every girl in Little League, every woman playing college sports, and every parent―including Michelle and myself―who watches their daughter on a field or in the classroom is forever grateful to the late Patsy Takemoto Mink.”
―President Barack Obama, on posthumously awarding Mink the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014.
When I was in grade school, I really liked playing softball. BUT…there were no organized… See more
residential postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University who studies Title IX. But that shift is not complete by any means. Reynolds says, “We’re not living in a world where s*xual harassment doesn’t happen anymore. But we are living in a world where it’s not accepted as part of life in universities.” It is only in the past decade that schools have established robust systems for students to report s*xual harassment under Title IX.

The book Let Me Play, written by Karen Blumenthal, ostensibly for teens, is recommended reading.

CELIA PAYNE-GAPOSCHKIN: ASTRONOMER AND PIONEER
Few have heard of Cecilia Payne-Gasposchkin. She was born in 1900. “Dr. Payne-Gaposchkin, a member of the Unitarian church in Lexington, Massachusetts, was named professor of astronomy at Harvard University, the first woman to attain full professorship at Harvard through regular faculty promotion.” So said The Christian Register, September, 1956.
Since her death in 1979, the woman who discovered what the universe is made of has not so much as received a memorial plaque. Her newspaper obituaries do not mention her greatest discovery.

“Payne-Gaposchkin’s most dramatic scientific contribution was the discovery that hydrogen is millions of times more abundant than any other element in the universe,” said Jeremy Knowles, dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, as Harvard celebrated her accomplishments in February 2002 by adding her portrait to the Faculty Room in University Hall, where only one other woman is depicted. He quoted an undergraduate: “Every high school student knows that Isaac Newton discovered gravity, that Charles Darwin discovered evolution, and that Albert Einstein discovered the relativity of time. But when it comes to the composition of our universe, the textbooks simply say that the most abundant atom in the universe is hydrogen. And no one ever wonders how we know.”

OH, WAIT! LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT CECILIA PAYNE. I especially want to brag about this example of Unitarian-Universalist womanhood, as I am a bit prejudicial in this case as I also am a U.U.

Cecilia Payne’s mother refused to spend money on her college education, so she won a scholarship to Cambridge. Cecilia Payne completed her studies, but Cambridge wouldn’t give her a degree because at that time there's not much exposure for woman, so she said to heck with that and moved to the United States to work at Harvard.

Cecilia Payne was the first person ever to earn a Ph.D. in astronomy from Radcliffe College, with what Otto Strauve called “the most brilliant Ph.D. thesis ever written in astronomy.”

Not only did Cecilia Payne discover what the universe is made of, she also discovered what the sun is made of. (Henry Norris Russell, a fellow astronomer, is usually given credit for discovering that the sun’s composition is different from the Earth’s, but he came to his conclusions four years later than Payne—after telling her not to publish!).
Cecilia Payne is the reason we know basically anything about variable stars (stars whose brightness as seen from earth fluctuates). Literally every other study on variable stars is based on her work.

Cecilia Payne was the first woman to be promoted to full professor from within Harvard, and is often credited with breaking the glass ceiling for women in the Harvard science department and in astronomy, as well as inspiring entire generations of women to take up science.

Cecilia Payne is awesome and everyone should know her.

Wait! There’s more! Cecilia Payne was the first woman to receive tenure and the first to chair a department in the faculty of arts and sciences at Harvard. Her dissertation was hailed as “the most brilliant Ph.D. thesis ever written in astronomy.” Yet few have heard of her, an English-American astronomer who discovered the true physical constitution of the universe.

In her 1925 dissertation Cecelia Payne showed that stars are “all essentially of the same composition.” At the time, however, she distrusted her discovery that the stars are made almost entirely of hydrogen and helium. Princeton astronomer Norris Russell wrote to her that “it is clearly impossible that hydrogen should be a million times more abundant than the metals.” But he later discovered that she was right. Yet he took credit for explaining this phenomenon. (I hope you are thinking: “Yep, another example of ‘The Matilda Effect!’”)

There is an almost complete lack of recognition that Cecilia Payne gets even today, for her revolutionary discovery!

Born and educated in England, she came to the United States to study in 1923 at the encouragement of the director of the Harvard Observatory. At the time, the chair of Harvard’s physics department would not accept a female graduate student, so the faculty committee that awarded her Ph.D. effectively created a department of astronomy. After receiving her degree, “she lectured in the astronomy department, but her lectures were not listed in the course catalogue,” Knowles said. “She directed graduate research without status; she had no research leaves; and her small salary was categorized by the department under ‘equipment.’ And yet she survived and flourished. ‘It was a case, she said, ‘not of survival of the fittest, but of the most doggedly persistent.’”

In 1933 she visited Germany and met the Russian astronomer and political exile Sergei Gaposchkin. She arranged a place for him at the Harvard Observatory. They married two years later. In 1938, Harvard officially appointed her to the faculty of astronomy and in 1956, she was the first woman promoted to a full professorship.

She and her husband were members of the First Parish in Lexington, where she taught nine-to-twelve-year-olds in the Sunday school. Her daughter Katherine Haramundanis tells a story about her mother donning heavy woolen slacks and walking more than three miles to teach Sunday school one bitterly cold winter morning when the family car would not start. The story reveals a great deal about her character. In her autobiography she described her attitude in the face of slow promotions and low pay: “I simply went on plodding, rewarded by the beauty of the scenery, towards an unexpected goal.”

Much of this blog quotes information from The Rev. Dr. Herbert F. Vetter, a minister-at-large emeritus of the First Parish and the First Church (Unitarian Universalist) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and editor of Notable American Unitarians, 1936-1961, a Website at www.harvardsuarelibrary.org. Whether He knew of the term “The Matilda Effect” or not, he certainly “nailed it” in describing the elements of it when it came to telling the story of the amazing Dr. Payne!

INTERNATIONAL WOMENS DAY

March 8th marks International Women’s Day, a global event that celebrates the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women around the world. This year, the day is a call to for a gender-equal world that is free of prejudice, stereotypes, and discrimination.
Our Women Transcending Boundaries Book Club read Call Me American: A Memoir last month. The author is Abdi Nor Iftin. He grew up in Somalia. The book was difficult to read in that there was much violence and killing in the civil wars and in areas of their Muslim lives that perpetrated beatings and cruelties to force young and old into torturous physical mistreatment to demand submission and obedience. There were long years of starvation when the crops did not grow. There were gangs and warlords and destruction. But the atrocity that I want to emphasize today is Female Ge***al Mutilation. FMG is not a “punishment,” not an assault by outsiders intending to harm. And yet, many generations of girls have experienced a painful “operation” that deprives them of s*xual pleasure and often causes infection and permanent damage…and DEATH. The Quran does not support the practice. It is NOT an Islamic tradition.
Abdi’s little sister as well as almost every other little girl in Somalia, in Ethiopia, in The Sudan, and in many other countries in Africa experience this mutilation as a passage to adulthood. The estimated prevalence of Female Ge***al Mutilation is 98%. Most young girls undergo the ordeal between the ages of 5 and 9 years of age. But in nearby Ethiopia half the females undergo the operation before they are five years old. It is legal, although the practice is prohibited under the Somali constitution. Anti-FGC law is pending adoption and there have been promising developments towards criminalization in Somaliland and Puntland in the north. Female Ge***al Mutilation/Cutting FGM/C is practiced in 28 countries of sub-Saharan Africa, a few countries in the Middle East and Asia, and among immigrant populations from these countries in Europe, North America and Australasian. As many as 100-140 million girls and women worldwide have undergone the practice, and at least two million girls are at risk of being cut each year, about 6,000 girls a day. An estimated 15% of all ge***al mutilations in Africa are infibulations, also known as pharaonic practice and it is the most severe of all1. FGC prevalence in Somalia remains the highest in the world. Rather than complete abandonment, there has been a move away from FGC Type III. It is unknown whether this shift could lead to total abandonment of the practice. Among three groups, the Kisii (96%), Maasai (94%), and Somali (97%), the prevalence is virtually universal, whereas there are other groups that hover around 50%.
Studies confirmed that “FGM/C is a deeply rooted and widely supported cultural practice that is shrouded with lots of cultural reinforcements for its continuation. Several closely related reasons are used to sustain the practice: It being a Somali tradition and the belief that it is an Islamic requirement formed the two main reasons given. The practice is also perceived to prevent immorality as it was seen as a way to reduce women’s s*xual desires. The use of infibulation was said to enforce the cultural value of s*xual purity in females by controlling female s*xual desires ensuring virginity before marriage and fidelity throughout a woman’s life. It was evident from the studies that there is the fear of women running wild and becoming promiscuous if not circumcised. This was erroneously taken as being in compliance with Islamic requirement of chastity and morality. The practice was also believed to enhance women’s cleanliness and preserve virginity.”
Abdi is an unusual Somali. He grew up preferring to dance and sing American songs and be a DJ for Somali weddings. He reported news on NPR while still in Somalia. His memoir is a powerful and compelling book. He now lives in America and continues to write and deliver speeches. I recommend Call Me American for many reasons, as this young man—who with determination—found his way to America and is now pursuing his dreams. I am sure that his gentle soul would like to fix all the despair and violence in Somalia. For now, his only outlet is to send money home to his mother, brother and little sister.
Meanwhile, the Population Council, together with UNFPA, UNICEF, and WHO, has published a research agenda that prioritizes the evidence and approaches we need to eliminate FGM in the next decade.