The price and privilege of being a woman - Winnie Vaughan Williams

Can you envisage a woman being beaten by a Russian man (probably her husband) in a public area until blood covered the ground and the "thrashing" being accepted as a male's "right" to discipline his wife? Can you visualise yourself as a Guatemalan woman considered unworthy of an education? Imagine that you are a Muslim woman who is gang-raped by Serbian soldiers in Kosovo and that consequently your husband and family abandons you because you have been violated through no fault of your own. Imagine being a Macedonian woman who is told that her twelve-year-old daughter's marriage has been arranged to a middle-aged man. Can you envisage living even one day in the shoes of these women? Winnie Williams has travelled to more than forty countries, observing and learning how these and many other such events control the everyday lives of women worldwide. Cultural traditions, religion, politics, social structures and the patriarchal philosophy of male domination have all forced many women to accept their inferior status as the reality, as the norm. The compelling firsthand experiences described in this book bring awareness to the, often grim, plight of women around the world.