India is known as a land of enormous diversity. Well, in one corner of our multilingual, multi-cultural, diverse nation, there’s evidence that a matriarchal society may be the solution to a lot of the problems that the human race is now having to deal with.

Kerala, a state located in the southern tip of the Indian peninsular, has had a tradition of practicing matriarchy. Where property (and the family name) passes on from mother to daughter. And tradition, as you know in India, means that it’s been going on for 5000 years!

Of course the world’s leading religions have had their influence on the Keralite of modern times. Christians are as common as Muslims and Hindus ... there are even Jews and other religious disciplines in reasonable numbers. But while all these religions and the law of the land advocates patriarchy .... the Keralite has learnt not to give up the benefits of a matriarchal society. Because the benefits to the society are too good to give up.

The social practice of matriarchy is really quite logical. Before the advent of DNA tests, no one could dispute who the mother of a child was. So if you want to be really sure that your inheritance is passed on, the mother is in a distinctly better position to do this because of the biological nature of giving birth. With ownership of property came economic power and some surprisingly healthy side effects for women ...and for men.

Since the woman now was the key owner of property, men grew more loyal and competed strongly for the duties of a father to raise the child. Also since the woman now was responsible for her state of health, she regulated how many children she would want to raise. This resulted in a significantly lower family size in Kerala than the rest of India.

The other interesting phenomemon is that Kerala was the first state to achieve 100% literacy, while other states in India lag behind pathetically. In Kerala, the mother has an incentive to educate and improve the lot of both her daughter and her son. In the rest of India the average woman is little more than a baby producing machine, often illiterate herself, and unable to get her girl-child out of the vortex of neglect.

There are strongly patriarchal societies in the northern belt of India where the girl child is seen as a burden and every husband puts his wife under enormous social pressure to produce sons, sons and more sons. The rich farmer often has more than one wife ... so that he can produce more sons .... and can afford more wives. Capitalism at its worst.

For sons are seen as more hands to till the farms ... and an insurance in your own old age ... while a daughter is “pardhan” ....literally, “someone else’s wealth”.

Perhaps the most horrifying image I have seen is a photograph of two Rajasthani twins. The boy was rotund, well fed. The girl was a little more than bones held together by skin. The father and mother were also in this family photograph. The son on a beaming father’s lap and the daughter on the resigned mother’s lap. The mother’s eyes were full of a sadness that the most amateur photographer could not hide.

It is not uncommon for people in the North of India to use sophisticated medical technology like amniocentisis to determine the sex of the unborn child ... and then abort the female. Female foeticide is one of the horrors of India’s patriarchal societies. And “dowry deaths”. Where young brides are burnt simply because their in-laws are not happy with the money paid by the girl’s father, to get her married.

Though it is illegal, girls in the rest of India are still married of before they reach puberty. The sooner the father can pass on his responsibility, he will do so. “Pardhan” .... someone else’s wealth!

By contrast, Kerala knows nothing of these social evils that handicap of the rest of our nation. The proportion of women to men is marginally higher in Kerala. (Whereas in other states the ratio drops to as low as less than 800 women to 1000 men.) Infant mortality, child morbidity (deaths before the age of five), expected life span of men and women .... these are all indicators in which Kerala is ahead of other Indian states ... though the government infrastructure to provide health services are the same.

There’s one other sociological feature, that you, dear reader, may find interesting about Kerala. Because literacy levels and social consciousness is high, Kerala is one of two states in India that actually has a democratically elected “communist” government! For “Communist” you should really read “Socialist”, but they are followers of Karl Marx. A society that believes in spreading its wealth a little more evenly. The other state in India that has a “communist” government is West Bengal ... it closely follows Kerala on high literacy rates ... but does not have the emancipation of a matriarchal society to treat all citizens equally.

What kind of society would you like to live in, if you had an option : matriarchal or patriarchal?

Now, and Then
By Joan Knapp

In 1945, after World War Two, women felt that they had more freedom than they’d had before. They had worked in factories making aircraft, learned the basics of engineering, helped in shipyards; building much needed ships for the navy. They had manned ack-ack guns and served with all three armed forces - Army, Navy and Airforce. In fact, they had proved to be just as capable as their menfolk. But we were still classed as the weaker sex and, let’s be truthful about it, second class citizens.

Some of us were quite content to lead a quiet, domesticated life after the trauma of the war. We had out menfolk back, we got married, had families. Many of us threw ourselves into this sort of life - cooking, cleaning, doing the laundry - and loved it. But our lives were very limited, and we envied our younger sisters who were beginning to go out and take the world by the scruff of its neck, saying “Hey! Here I am!” I know I did. Things were opening up for them. When we were young the choice of careers was very small. You could become a typist or receptionist in an office, a nurse or a schoolteacher, but you could only get so far in your job and the pay was very low. Why? Because you were a woman.

I came across this in my own family. My father was a Master Builder. He had quite a big company for that time, and from an early age I spent many hours on building sites, learning all the time. When the time came for me to think about finding a job I asked my father if I could work for him. After all, I’d helped him on quotes and surveying different jobs, I also knew most of the men he employed. I told him I was willing to be trained in management skills, etc, so when it came time for him to retire I could take over some of his responsibilities. You can guess his answer - a resounding NO! “You are a girl, and a woman cannot and ne ver will be able to run a building concern.”

Well, I’ve read about many women who run very successful building companies today.

I still think the Sixties was a wonderful time. The world seemed to shake itself and women seemed to take many steps forward. In the days of the gentle flower people, the strident music of those mop-heads, the Beatles, girls seemed to open up in education and employment. Women demanded to be heard in the workplace, and this seemed to go ahead well into the seventies and eighties. The world was opening up for women.

I see that my sisters have really come into their own. They love, they have their men and their families. They hold down very good, responsible jobs as well as running homes and balance it all wonderfully.

The fashions these days sometimes make shake my head and think, “Whatever does she think she looks like?”

But there again, I can remember in the forties when my father was disgusted with me for wearing tailored slacks and sports shirts. In any age the older generation will always shudder at something or the other that the younger generation does.

I’ve found the attitude of the woman of the nineties to be caring, but they know how to fight for what they believe in. They know how to enjoy life, and they are not afraid of voicing their opinions. I’ve mixed with quite a wide spectrum of people much younger than myself - men and women, gay and straight - and they have always been open with me, treated me with respect, always including me in their conversations and discussions.

We in the forties, yes, perhaps we had a quieter lifestyle, and things did not move quite so fast. We had no television and we thrilled to Bergman and Bogart, Crosby and Como. We danced to Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey. We look back on it with warm feelings and feel comforted to have lived those memories.

And our younger sisters of the nineties will think the same in about fifty years’ time. Good luck to you, sisters of the nineties, we salute you!

Time Flies
by Christine James

It seems unbelievable that a year has passed since South Africa’s last National Women’s Day. Like the months between Christmases, the time goes too quickly. Even more unbelievable is that, while we’ve been given this holiday - supposedly a celebration of women and their rights, as entrenched in the constitution - we’ve made so little progress in the past year.

In South Africa, a woman is raped every twenty-three seconds, a fact that surely gives us the dubious status of Rape Capital of the World. This is probably the only country in the world where young virgins, children, are raped in the belief that this act will cure AIDS.

We also have horrific levels of domestic violence and abuse, affecting one in every four households. And yet we’ve been given National Women’s Day. What is there to celebrate?

Perhaps a more pertinent question would be “What is going wrong?”

As far as rape is concerned, education and harsher sentencing are really the only answers. Education of not only the potential rapists, but also of the police and legal fraternity, who often make rape victims feel guilty, as if they somehow encouraged the act. Many women refuse to even report rape for this very reason. Recently a very light sentence was imposed on two men who raped a nine year-old girl. The judge’s reasoning was that undue violence had not been used. The fact that rape, by its very nature, is a violent act, especially when committed on such a young child, was ignored.

The domestic violence, I believe, is largely brought about by the status of ‘ownership’ imposed by many South Africans on their partners. In our couples orientated society, love is often confused with the fear of being alone, which in turn creates a sense of insecurity. It is this insecurity that generates the dangerous phrase “You belong to me”, a phrase that is drummed into us every time we turn on the radio and television, or listen to a CD. Recognise these lyrics? “The boy is mine”, “the one that I belong to”, “I’m everything I am because you love me” “How am I supposed to live without you?”

The notion that one can “belong” to another person instantly makes one partner more powerful. With a few exceptions, this partner is the male. However, it would be a mistake to apportion the blame for this situation to one partner. Relationships are a two way street, one partner imposes ownership, the other accepts it. It’s from this ownership situation that domestic violence - physical, verbal or psychological - flows.

When women, and men, realise that they can live and think without being part of a couple and that no person can live for, or own, someone else, the trend of domestic violence will decrease.

It will decrease even more when people learn to love and have confidence in themselves before trying to love someone else. As Ayn Rand said - “To say ‘I love you’ one first has to learn to say the ‘I’.”

The Dangers of Being Different
By Helga-Lynn Cronje

How old are you? Or, what car do you drive? Are you married? Simple questions. Its seems only when we answer them however that things become rather more complicated. If I told you I was 32, the single, working mother of two children, these facts are no longer just interesting personal details, they become a profile, which according to market researchers has statistically packaged, labelled and pigeon-holed me as a demographical segment of the population.

According to such individuals, these mere morsels of eagerly garnered information are quite enough to predict what I eat, the places I frequent, the clothes I wear, even my most intimate desires. Well, you would say, surely there is nothing wrong with statisticians just doing their job and observing the law of averages? Somewhere in their equations however, in the number which was rounded down or up to the nearest zero, or in the “acceptable margin of error” ,we are losing something of incalculable value; individuality and personal worth.

The real crisis arises when society at large allows these profiles to act as a measure of any one person’s true worth. This form of twisted alchemy, where we believe we can distil and extract the essence of an individual is not only preposterous but also dangerous. We have all, at some time or another, unfairly labelled or pre-judged someone simply because it is instilled in our nature. Our minds express extreme discomfort when faced with the unknown. So we developed means of categorising and explaining everything within our environment, including one another. We appear “programmed” to fear or dislike those things which defy description or conformity. Examples abound. On the covers of magazines we display our definitions of beauty & fashion. On television we are force fed examples of wealth, power and success. One should ask themselves, what happens when we do not conform to these standards. Are we then meant to consider ourselves ugly? Unfashionable? Unsuccessful?

With worldwide communication closing the gaps between countries and continents every day, the global village is at hand. We must take into consideration that as we are brought closer to one another, so we are altered by this encounter. There is a potential that our standards, beliefs and practices may increasingly conform to one unified standard, with diversity and differentiation suffering as a consequence. Or even worse, we may rebel against this invasion and more jealously safeguard our own identities and associations, denouncing all others. Either end of the scale is a step backwards for tolerance and understanding in world terms.

Perhaps, even after being presented with all this, you do not fully appreciate why being different is such a big deal. It seems rather too esoterical and philosophical to be of any relevance. However, bear with me for a moment. Look at your hands, now imagine they are brown, very dark brown. In fact you are an African-American and this is 1950’s America. How would your minority status, your being “different”, affect things now? Imagine again for me, if you will, you are a woman of Arabic descent and this is modern day Iraq. What makes you different and why are you being punished for it? Now you are a homeless child, on the streets of Brazil. How much are you worth, and how does your difference count against you?

What if I were to admit to you, that in reality I am twenty-one years of age, of mixed heritage, rather outspoken and physically deformed. Perhaps your personal perceptions of me might change, perhaps not. But now imagine that this is Germany, 1941, where an Aryan trend is about to sweep the nation, and the physically and the mentally handicapped are going to be the first to suffer the terrifying consequences. In this context, I might very well pay with my life for a failure to conform.

Such are the dangers of being demographically different.