New Men to ensure women's rights
The article 'The long road to maternal care' by Shaveena Alam was painfully good but failed to say that 'women's problems' affect everyone and so are men's business also!
Fathers need to check that men and boys do not get the lion's share of food and that their sons, in learning to treat the women of the family with respect, know they are practising treating all women with respect. It is men who need to know the dangers of under-age motherhood (taught from the local pulpit?) and thus take responsibility for the long-term health and happiness of young girls. Men's intervention is needed to stop the gossipmongers who demand girls have got to be married below legal age limits and break the power of wicked old women repeating stories about pregnancy that are terrifying and untrue……
When a woman is pregnant, it is the men who should demand medical check-ups and proper nutrition and is it not the job of the senior men to take both silly little boys and vicious older ones who misbehave with local girls to their families, warning that, next time, it will be the police? Any man seen 'groping' a woman on the bus, should be thrown off it by common consent of the men passengers! Let us dream about how much better behaviour would now be, if, for the last few decades, men around the world who think they are a cut above the rest, had behaved in such ways….!
If women join the paid workforce, it may bring appreciation for the extra cash but, on its own, does it always result in those changes of heart and mind that benefit family and community life and continue, even when the woman is unable to find employment?
In my life-time, many men world-wide have so totally changed their attitudes and behaviour to their women and children that they are called 'the New Men'. (I have met 'western' men whose first marriages have failed and, realising how selfish they had been, they have quite different family relationships in their second marriage.) Others continue to behave badly so the work goes on.
However, the men who most need to change are those who ignore and despise what any woman tells them! Do not most men need to be taught by men?
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