Another small advance for the women of the developing world

The kingdom did it for the first time, but the sheikhdom and the sultanate supposedly had already crossed that threshold when they sent women to the Islamic Women’s Games in Tehran. Overall it was the first time for women from all three countries to participate in the Olympics Games.

It’s a small step for the women of these three countries when their sisters around the world have already made giant leaps. They have become astronauts, stateswomen, Playboy centrefolds, “bandit queens”, scientists, authors, and day labours, infiltrating every rank that was once dominated by men. While Saudi women are still forbidden to drive cars, their cohorts elsewhere are flying planes and manning rockets.

Why are there so many dissimilar strides for women? One answer is that history is like a garden where different patches are tended at different times. History itself is discriminated within itself. History books give brief treatment to the period before the emergence of writing around 3,000 BC, although it constitutes 99.9 per cent of the 5-million-year history of the human species. In short, even evolution evolves at varying rates. What is seeded in one part of the world is a grownup plant in another, and a fruit-bearing tree in many other places.

The seven athletes from the three countries participated in five sporting categories: judo, athletics, table tennis, swimming and sprinting. But we must not forget that the first female participation in the modern Olympics was in 1900 in Paris, when women were allowed to compete only in lawn tennis and golf. The burst of female freedom in even the Western world took its time. At a slow pace they made their incursions into the male-dominated world and their struggle gradually loosened the grip that had choked them for hundreds of years.

American film historian Jeanine Basinger explains what it was like. She said that no matter whether a woman lived in a mansion, an apartment, or a yurt, it was all the same thing because what she really lived in was the body of a woman. Then she gave a punch line: That body was allowed to occupy space only according to the dictates of her society.

Last month, women from three Muslim countries were able to convince some members of their societies to give them more space. It’s a pity that so many of their predecessors went to their graves, banging their heads against the walls of prejudice, their unfulfilled yearnings collapsing like a bird that succumbed to the grilles of its cage. Not that women weren’t influential in earlier times. They were empresses, saints, dowager princesses, nurses, writers and statisticians. But they were exceptions that proved the rule. An overwhelming number of gifted and ordinary women lived under oppression, their bodies forever squeezed for space.

In pre-Islamic days, the Arabs used to bury their daughters alive. The killing of female babies and children is still a practice in many parts of the world, even in modernising countries like India and China. The United Nations estimates that around 700 unborn female babies are killed in India every day. The Russian daily Pravda reported in October 2011 that Chinese parents destroy one-seventh of their baby girls. They break the spines of the newborn, they bury them alive, strangle and poison them, or just starve them to death.

Shocking as it may be, even in this age of greater freedom and equality, there are pockets of darkness where boys are valued immensely more than girls, where the birth of a girl is deemed as economically unprofitable. In 2005, Harvard University president Larry Summers, who later became US President Bill Clinton’s Treasury secretary, proposed that women are genetically inferior to men at the high end of the ability spectrum in maths, science and engineering.

Summers’ hypothesis was taken seriously. The National Academy of Sciences, the premier scientific organisation that advises the US government, was constrained to study and prepare a report, “Beyond Bias and Barriers”. Its conclusion was that there is no evidence to date of cognitive differences between men and women that can explain the under-representation of women in maths, science and engineering faculties.

Who wants to push back the historical chain of causation? Our civilisation is only a few hundred years old compared to the millennia that have passed since the dawn of mankind. There have been conflicts, tensions, hatred and discrimination between races, religions, occupations, traditions, ideologies, and gender. Who can tell how it started? Who can tell who started it first?

But nothing is more grotesque than those depraved men who look down upon women of whom they are born. Little has changed since the Age of Reasoning, the Age of Enlightenment, the Reformation, Renaissance, scientific discoveries, revolutions and scores of social movements. Men are still trapped in their minds. And women in their bodies.