People tend to think that the world they’re born into is normal, even immutable. That’s a big reason why young people in the West take women’s rights for granted. How could it be any different?
I’m just old enough to have experienced the world before women’s equality under the law was in place. I’m also a student of history. Perhaps that’s why I take nothing for granted. For all we know, feminism could be little more than a fad of the 20th century. A soap bubble in time.
For women in the U.K., the soap bubble is already bursting. With sharia court rulings now enforceable by law in the U.K., more than a century of progress has been rolled back. Wife-beating? The British outlawed it in 1861, but now if you’re a Muslim woman under the thumb of your family, the law is no longer on your side. The British established equal inheritance in 1925, but now sharia courts are following Islamic law and giving sons twice as much as daughters.
And it’s legal.
I suppose the defenders of this policy argue that it’s okay because the Muslim women have to “voluntarily” submit to the authority of the sharia courts before the rulings are handed down. But it makes no sense — absolutely no sense — to talk about women under the thumb of patriarchal domination “voluntarily” submitting to their own oppression. As a rule, women and girls in a patriarchy lack the social, financial, and psychological autonomy to buck masculine rule. Dig it: that’s how patriarchy works.
As I wrote last February when Archbishop Eyebrows burbled in public about the inevitability of sharia law:
Hey, why not sharia law in Britain? Oh, but only for family matters, says Eyebrow Man, by which he means the entire spectrum of codified patriarchal abuse that governs women’s personal lives: divorce, marriage, custody, marital rape, marital beatings, financial support, “honor,” etc. Clearly His Very Reverend Eyebrows think it’s just peachy keen for women to be second-class citizens because after all, they’re not really human, are they? They’re just women. Eight hundred years of English jurisprudence and a modern European concept of civil rights are fine and dandy, but they do only apply to human beings. Which lets women right out.
Posted by Violet in Why We Still Need Feminism
