The condition of women in developing and developed countries.

• Author: Cohen, Michelle Fram

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, women achieved significant progress in the economically progressive areas dominated by Western culture, including North America, Europe, and Australia. In developing areas dominated by non-Western culture, however, women remain more or less subjugated, and in some countries they are stripped of any human rights.

Exploitation and abuse of women, including outright violence, are acceptable in countries where women have an inferior social status by customary or formal law. Violence against women and girls is a direct corollary of their subordinate status in society. Primitive cultures have beliefs, norms, and social institutions that legitimize and therefore perpetuate violence against women. Abused women in developing countries tend to accept their inferior status and to adopt the traditional values of submission and servility. In a study conducted in Algeria and Morocco in 2003, two-thirds of the women surveyed said that domestic violence was justified in certain cases--for example, when a wife disobeyed her husband (UNIFEM 2003, 64). Poverty and custom in developing countries drive extended families to live together under the same roof, which means that young couples are subordinated to the traditional values of their parents and grandparents, making a normative change difficult if not impossible.

Denial of Property Rights

Outright violence is not the only form of subjugation directed against women. The United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) study Women's Land and Property Rights in Situations of Conflict and Reconstruction (2001) documents the economic subjugation that results from the absence of property rights for women (details of this report's findings are discussed later).

Access to land is crucial in many African countries where subsistence farming is the main source of livelihood. In such countries, including Kenya, Liberia, Rwanda, Ghana, Tanzania, and Zambia, women usually lose their land when they are widowed because their entitlement to the land is founded on their marriage. According to the customary law, they gain access to their husbands' land through marriage, but they do not gain property rights. When they are unmarried, they have access to their parents' land as long as their parents are alive. Women in those countries may inherit their fathers' land only in the absence of male heirs, and even then their legacy is likely to be challenged by other male relatives. In theory, women may own property according to the formal civil law. In reality, however, the customary law prevails over the civil law, and the former still gives women the same status as goods or cattle. The lack of land results in abject poverty for women and the children. The testimony of a Rwandan woman whose nephews drove her away from her family farm after her parents had died is particularly harsh: "I had twelve children on my land, seven are still alive.... When I went to court I was told I had lost even before they started my case.... When I said I would stay on my father's land, since my father has given it to me, I was put in prison.... My nephews said, 'She just has to go.' They said no woman has ever inherited land" (UNIFEM 2001, 83).

In Burundi, the customary law is somewhat more favorable to women. A widow has the right to gain access to and use her deceased husband's property as long as she does not remarry. She cannot transfer this right to a third party. The husband's heirs cannot dispose of the property without her approval--they must wait until she remarries or dies--but she does not own the property; she is allowed only to use it. A divorced woman, however, does not have any rights to gain access to or use the property she shared with her husband during their marriage.

Access to land entails access to water, which is an invaluable resource in agrarian societies. Women in these societies are responsible for bringing the water for domestic and farm use, spending eight hours on average walking to and from a water source, collecting the water and carrying it back. One thousand liters of water are required to grow one kilogram of grain. Although a woman can carry as much as fifteen liters per trip, it is of course not enough. For many women, life revolves around the chore of fetching the water, which is crucial for their families' survival. The customary law in African societies regards the fetching of water as strictly woman's work, denigrating for a man. In some places, a man is prohibited even from assisting a woman in retrieving the water. The social status of the water fetchers is on a par with that of cattle. When a woman's access to water is restricted because of distance, time constraints, or illness, she must use lower-quality water. Unfortunately, 80 percent of all illnesses in undeveloped countries are transmitted by contaminated water (UNIFEM 2004), so the resort to inferior water sources poses a serious threat to health.

Formal civil law sometimes joins the customary law in fostering the subjugation of women. The socialist regime in Ethiopia (1975-91) enshrined customary law by appointing only men to be guardians of the state-owned means of production, especially land. In Somalia and the Sudan, customary law has been reinforced by formal law founded on the Islamic law, which disavows any ownership of land and property by women (UNIFEM 2001).

Honor Killing

Islamic law stimulates honor killings in Muslim countries and occasionally among Muslim immigrants in Western countries. Women who dishonor the family include rape victims, women suspected of engaging in premarital sex, and women accused of adultery. According to the UNIFEM report Violence Against Women: Facts and Figures, more than one thousand women are killed in Pakistan every year for dishonoring their families. A 2002 study of women killed in Alexandria, Egypt, indicates that 47 percent of them were killed by a relative after they had been raped. In Jordan and Lebanon, 70 to 75 percent of the perpetrators of these so-called honor killings are the women's brothers (2005, 3).

Early in 2005, the Pakistani government rejected a pro-women bill that sought to...