A blind world
Limited educational opportunities available to women in third world countries.
By S M Arqum Shafi Uddin
Imagine a culture where daughters were thought to be a burden on the family’s name. Imagine a culture where sons’ education was more valued than a daughters’ education with the reason that the daughter will get married and will not have to work, hence wasting the money that could be spent on the son. Imagine living in a country where poorer parents sell their daughters to make a little money. Well, such cultures exist in a third-world countries, and I come from such a country.
From a young age, I have been surrounded by a multi-cultural society. I got to learn and understand cultures extending from all the way in China to Brazil, with all the countries in between the two. Some cultures I discarded from my likings as they failed to compliment the things I stood for. Some cultures seemed reasonable to me, so I borrowed beliefs from such cultures and added them to my beliefs. No culture seemed perfect, but most of them believed in equality in education.
Growing up, my mother told me stories about her mother; these stories were not always pleasant. My grandmother got married when she was only 14. She had her first child when she was 15. She never even got the chance to take a glimpse at a school, leading her to be illiterate. She was forced to act mature and adult-like when her brain was on the verge of development.
My grandmother never understood independency and never thought of it until my grandfather passed away when my grandmother was 35. At that time, my grandmother was a mother of 11 children. She was lost in a world trying to demoralize her, including her own siblings. She was illiterate and had no way of making any sort of income. But with a lot of disrespect, her siblings threw a couple of pennies at her so that she could survive.
Attaining any means of help that she could, she tried to educate the men in the household, holding the mentality that they would support her when they grew up and started making money. She did not invest too much on my mother or her other two daughters. Do I blame her? Maybe, and maybe not, I can’t really decide.
I don’t know if I could ever really understand what she went through, and neither can you, but what I do know is that such cultural influences still exist throughout the third-world countries and many people are blinded by these silly beliefs that they choose to hold which leads to loss of immense talent that females possess. I believe that education is important. It is needed for independence and women especially need it to stand on their own in times of unexpected hardship.
