Book learning for girls

Last week a 14-year-old Pakistani girl named Malala Yousafzai was shot in the head by the Taliban.  Her crimes, labeled “activism” by the monsters who tried to kill her and her female classmates, appears to be attending school and encouraging other girls to become educated.

This week, in my home state of Wisconsin, a man shot an entire beauty salon full of people in order to kill his estranged wife.  There was a similar salon shooting tragedy in Orlando, Florida, earlier this month, and another mass-fatality, domestic violence-related shooting last year in Seal Beach, California.

These incidents are related.  No, the Taliban didn’t shoot these American ex-wives and all their co-workers.  But the same mentality that declares schooling girls to be not only useless but a dangerous blasphemy is related to a culture where women are unsafe in their marriages and if they choose to end their marriage.  The same desire to control the minds and bodies of women and girls, coupled with the easy availability of guns all over the world, allows retaliation with high body counts when females step out of line.  It’s a slippery slope, I know, to talk about the safety and rights of women and girls, when I was the one who opted out of all but one college class in anything remotely “feminist” (a single women’s history class, which is the only reason I know the names of all the seminal texts — The Yellow Wallpaper, The Second Sex, etc — that I have yet to read).

But I did have three important learning experiences that shaped my view that education for girls and equality for women (which includes control of their own bodies and health, including access to birth control) are vital and interrelated, and can’t be taken for granted.  The first was the circumstances of my upbringing: my mother was in an abusive marriage to my father until I was six years old, and until my father’s death in 2000, even after he left the United States and moved back to Taiwan, she remained terrified of him.  I remember plenty of physical violence, but what also stands out in my memory is the steady stream of emotional and verbal abuse he hurled at her.  You can blame it on culture or family — my father was from a male-dominated, old-fashioned culture, in a patriarchal family, where other men also beat their wives.  You can blame it on the fact that my mother dropped out of college after only a year or so, at age 20, to get married, and then had a baby (me) in short order, and another one (my brother) when her marriage was falling apart, at age 25.  All of that contributed to the misery and intractable feel of our family situation and the poverty we experienced once my mother was out, sort of, from under the yoke of her abusive marriage.  Like the women who were murdered in all of the recent mass killings, my mother had a restraining order against my father.  But like the deceased women, my mother’s restraining order was a simple piece of paper against an abusive man’s rage — at worst, only as good as the paper they’re printed on.

The second experience came when I was in eighth grade.  My social studies teacher was an enthusiastic, articulate young man named Mr. Fisher.  We studied government and current events and the rest of the prescribed curriculum in 1984 in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.  One day during his lecture, Mr. Fisher told us that he didn’t understand why more girls didn’t go on to higher education.  As he recalled from his own childhood, the girls were the ones who were often “better at” school than the boys, and they had great contributions to make if only they would stick with their educations.  Of all the prosaic, throwaway bits of my adolescent school experience, this was a memorable moment — someone outside my family saying that girls should stay in school and go as far as their intellect and resources will allow.

The third experience was when I was in graduate school studying public health at UCLA.  My public health classes were all about math, biological pathways, risk factors, and assessing variables that I never before understood could be quantified.  In one class, a community health class outside my primary discipline of epidemiology, I was shocked to learn that infant mortality is related to lack of education in mothers.  In fact, the babies’ risk of dying decreased with each additional year their mothers had attended school.  It was a thunder clap, but also a moment of, ‘this is so obvious, it’s hard to break it down for anyone whose mindset prevents them from viewing women as an important half of the species rather than simply walking baby incubators.’

Knowing this makes it seem like basic species survival to send girls to school, and allow them to learn for a good, long time!  I’m not sure what to do about the problem of creating boys and men who view women as truly equal human beings.  I count myself lucky and smart to have married one; now I’m working on version 2.0 in raising my son.