Kidnapped, raped, wed against their will: Kyrgyz women’s fight against a brutal tradition

From The Guardian:

Aisuluu was returning home after spending the afternoon with her aunt in the village of At-Bashy, not far from the Torugart crossing into China. “It was 5 o’clock in the afternoon on Saturday. I had a paper bag full of samsa [a dough dumpling stuffed with lamb, parsley and onion]. My aunt always prepared them on weekends,” she said.

“A car with four men inside comes in the opposite direction to mine. And all of a sudden it … turns around and, within a few seconds, comes up beside me. One of the guys in the back gets out, yanks me and pushes me inside the car. I drop all the samsa on the pavement. I scream, I squirm, I cry, but there is nothing I can do.”

image by Tatyana Zelenskaya

The man who kidnapped her would soon become her husband. At the wedding, Aisuluu discovered that she was not even the woman he had intended to kidnap for marriage. But in the haste of having to return home with a bride and after wandering the streets all afternoon, the man decided to settle for the first “cute girl” he saw.

This was 1996, and Aisuluu was a teenager. Today she has four children by her kidnapper-turned-husband, to whom she is still married.

Known as ala kachuu (“take and run”), the brutal practice of kidnapping brides has its roots in medieval times along the steppes of Central Asia, yet persists to this day. It has been banned in Kyrgyzstan for decades and the law was tightened in 2013, with sentences of up to 10 years in prison for those who kidnap a woman to force her into marriage (previously it was a fine of 2,000 soms, worth about $25).

read more here @ The Guardian

A Letter From Cromwell To Henry VIII

From the Telegraph in June 2012:

A rare letter written by Thomas Cromwell attempting to speed up Henry VIII's marriage to Anne of Cleves has emerged for sale.

Unfortunately for Cromwell the king was repulsed when he finally saw his bride because she looked nothing like her portrait - and he was beheaded.

The letter, dated November 8, 1539, was sent to the clerical diplomat, Dr Nicholas Wootton.

The diplomat was in Cleves in Germany finalising arrangements for what would turn out to be the shortest of Henry's six marriages.

Cromwell had promoted the match with the staunchly Protestant Anne as a means of tightening the Reformation in England.

Awan - The Wife of Cain

From Biblical Archaeology:

While there are many examples of strong and inspiring men and women in Genesis, the book is also packed with stories of dysfunctional families, which is evidenced from the very beginning with the first family—Adam, Eve and their two children, Cain and Abel. In no short amount of time—just 16 verses after announcing the birth of Cain and Abel in Genesis 4—Cain has murdered his younger brother and is consequently exiled from the land.

Given that the wife of Cain is only mentioned once in the Old Testament, she would not be counted among the famous women in Genesis. Nevertheless, her identity is still worth investigating. Who did Cain marry? Mary Joan Winn Leith first explores the traditional Jewish and Christian answers that contend that the wife of Cain was another daughter of Adam and Eve. According to this reasoning, Cain would have married his sister—one of Abel’s twin sisters no less, according to the Genesis Rabbah.

Wikipedia goes further and names the sister:

The Targumim, rabbinic sources, and later speculations supplemented background details for the daughters of Adam and Eve. Such exegesis of Genesis 4 introduced Cain's wife as being his sister, a concept that has been accepted for at least 1800 years. This can be seen with Jubilees 4 which narrates that Cain settled down and married his sister Awan, who bore his first son, the first Enoch, approximately 196 years after the creation of Adam. Cain then establishes the first city, naming it after his son, builds a house, and lives there until it collapses on him, killing him in the same year that Adam dies.

From The Book of Jubilees, Chapter 4 at Sacred Texts:

And Cain took ’Âwân his sister to be his wife and she bare him Enoch at the close of the fourth jubilee. And in the first year of the first week of the fifth jubilee, houses were built on the earth, and Cain built a city, and called its name after the name of his son Enoch.

An interesting love triangle theory from Diabolical Confusions:

According to some Hebrew and Islamic scholars, the reason Cain’s heart was not righteous was because of a woman: their sister, Awan. It is believed that Awan was intended for Abel, but Cain fell in love with her. This can be seen in the Book of Jubilees. Adam & Eve had nine (9) children. And this is where the story takes an interesting turn. Genesis, by the way, has no problems with incest, specifically brothers an sisters marrying. That is because there is no other option at this point. So, from this point of view, God has favored Abel in both marriage AND sacrifice.

From Folklore & Mythology Electronic Texts: various versions of the story of Cain & Abel

Love Letter to Eung-Tae

From the International Business Times:

A poetic love letter written by a mourning Korean wife that was found beside the mummified body of the woman's husband has grabbed the limelight many a time since its discovery more than a decade ago.

Archaeologists at Andong National University found a 16th century male mummy in Andong City in South Korea in 2000. Along with it was a heart-rending letter written by the dead man's pregnant wife who poured out her grief into what has become a testament of loss, lamentation and berievement.

The 5-feet-9-inches mummy was identified as that of Eung-tae, after a total of 13 letters addressed to that name were found in the tomb.

From about dot com - the Tomb of Eung Tea

Eung Tae is the name of a 16th century elite member of the Joseon Dynasty, who was buried in the traditional neoConfucian manner called LSMB by archaeologists, resulting in the excellent preservation of his corpse and his grave goods. One of approximately 100 Joseon royal tombs excavated to date, Eung Tae's tomb is rare in that it contained perfectly preserved written documents, including letters written to the 31-year-old man from his family.

Eighteen letters found within the elite tomb of the Joseon dynasty member Eung Tae provide us with an intimate glimpse of medieval life in 16th century Korea.

Eung Tae was a member of the prominent Kosung Yi clan of the Joseon Dynasty of Korea, when he died in 1586. As was traditional for elite members of society in those days, he was buried in nested pine coffins stuffed with clothing and sealed in a concrete-hard layer of lime and soil. That method led to preservation of his body and grave goods, which included 18 letters written to the deceased, detailing life and society in medieval Korea, and making fascinating reading for us today.

From Letters of Note - transcript of the letter

How could you pass away without me? Who should I and our little boy listen to and how should we live? How could you go ahead of me?

From Without Wax - another transcript of the letter

A mournful note and a pair of sandals from the 16th century have captivated South Korea. On June 1, 1586, a pregnant widow in the east wrote to her husband: "You always said you wanted to live with me until our hair turns gray. How could you pass away without me?" She left the letter in his tomb, along with shoes she'd made as a sign of love for her ailing spouse, woven from her hair and hemp bark. There they lay until the city of Andong began moving graves to make way for houses.

Helena Wright and The Sex Factor In Marriage

Helena Rosa Wright

From a rather interesting article by Paul Spicer at the Mail Online with the headline of "Desperate wives and the man known as Derek who fathered 500 children with women whose war hero husbands were too shell-shocked to make love" :

These days there are sophisticated and scientific solutions to the dismal problem of childlessness — IVF, Viagra and well-established egg and sperm donor services. We think of these as recent advantages and give thanks for the modern age.

But what only very few people are aware of is that long before sperm donation was practically or ethically possible, in the early 20th century a secret sperm donation service existed for those women most in need.

Helena Wright was a renowned doctor, best-selling author, campaigner and educator who overcame the establishment to pioneer contraceptive medicine in England and throughout the world. Kind, intelligent, funny and attractive, Helena had a way with words and a devoted set of friends. She adored men and spent her life helping women.

She had a great hit in America and Europe with a book called The Sex Factor In Marriage, which financed her innovative medical practice. She opened two London clinics: one for very privileged women in Knightsbridge, one for the poor in Notting Hill.

And it was from these offices that she undertook perhaps her greatest work: to assist hundreds of women whose husbands had returned from World War I unable to father children.

And this from the Spectator with its headline "A secret sperm donor service in post-first world war London":

Between 1914 and 1918 one million Englishmen were killed in France and Belgium. Thousands more were wounded, gassed or shellshocked in the trenches. The appalling losses of the war left many women widowed and led to a shortage of potential husbands, a gender imbalance compounded by the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918. They were known as ‘the mateless multitude’.

Among the men lucky enough to return home to wives after the war, many were un-able to perform sexually, whether because of direct injury or shellshock — what we’d call post-traumatic stress disorder. It was a tremendously delicate subject — witness D.H. Lawrence’s decision to make Clifford Chatterley ‘only half a man’, deprived of his virility by war; this aspect of the novel was considered to be the cruel breaking of a taboo.

No wonder, then, that by 1918 Helena Wright had many hundreds of women on her books who had confided to her that they needed help. These women loved their husbands and would never have left them, but they also craved children. What they needed was a sperm donor, before such a thing existed.

More on Helen Wright:

Helena Wright on wikipedia

Helena Rosa Wright on the Margaret Sanger Papers Project

Further Reading:

"Freedom to choose: the life and work of Dr. Helena Wright, pioneer of contraception" by Dr Barbara Evans

Women In Post-Taliban Afghanistan

From The Independent:

Just before she leapt from her roof into the streets of Kabul, Farima thought of the wedding that would never happen and the man she would never marry. Her fiance would be pleased to see her die, she later recalled thinking. It would offer relief to them both.

Farima, 17, had resisted her engagement to Zabiullah since it was ordained by her grandfather when she was 9. In post-Taliban Kabul, where she walked to school and dreamed of becoming a doctor, she still clawed against a fate dictated by ritual.

After 11 years of Western intervention in Afghanistan, a woman's right to study and work had long since been codified by the U.S.-backed government. Modernity had crept into Afghanistan's capital, Farima thought, but not far enough to save her from a forced marriage to a man she despised.

Farima's father, Mohammed, was eating breakfast when he heard her body hit the dirt like a tiny explosion. He ran outside. His daughter's torso was contorted. Her back was broken, but she was still alive.

In a quick burst of consciousness, Farima recognized that she had survived. It was God's providence, she thought. It was a miracle she hadn't prayed for. But it left her without an escape. Suddenly, she was a mangled version of herself, still desperate to avoid the marriage her family had ordered.

Tribal Tradition Broken In Bihar

From NDTV:

Santhal tribals in a Bihar village have added a new chapter to their ancient custom of young men and women living together - allowing an unwed mother to marry her dead partner's body to make her children legitimate and give them property rights.

Gotul - practised in the tribal regions of Bihar and Jharkhand - allows young adults to cohabit till they are sure that the partner he or she has chosen is good enough for marriage.

Polyandry In The Himalayas

From the China Post:

In ancient times, the sons of almost every family in the region of Upper Dolpa would jointly marry one woman but the practice of polyandry is dying out as the region begins to open up to modern life.

But polyandry prevents the practice of each generation of a family dividing their holdings, and food supplies just manage to cover the locals' basic needs.

Marriages are typically arranged, with a family picking a wife for their oldest son and giving the younger brothers the chance to wed her later.

In some cases the wives will even help raise their future husbands, entering into sexual relationships with them when they are considered mature enough.

Hunger Fuels Child Marriage

From PM News Nigeria:

In Hawkantaki, it is the rhythm of the land that shapes the cycle of life, including the time of marriage.  The size of the harvest determines not only if a father can feed his family, but also if he can afford to  keep his daughter under his roof.

Even at the best of times, one out of every three girls in Niger marries before her 15th birthday, a rate of  child marriage among the highest in the world, according to a UNICEF survey.

Now this custom is being layered on top of a crisis. At times of severe drought, parents pushed to the wall  by poverty and hunger are marrying their daughters at even younger ages.

A girl married off is one less mouth to feed, and the dowry money she brings in goes to feed others.

Child Marriage In India

From Gulf News:

Child marriage, known as ‘Bal Vivaha’, is believed to have begun during the medieval ages of India. Later child marriage became a widespread cultural practice with various reasons to justify it, and many marriages were performed while the girl was still an infant.

After independence, the feudalistic character of the Indian society coupled with caste system gave a major boost to incidences of child marriage, particularly in the rural areas.

“Castes, which are based on birth and heredity, do not allow two people to marry if they are from different castes. This system was threatened by young people’s emotions and desires to marry outside their caste, so out of necessity child marriage was created to ensure the caste system continued. Also parents of a child entering into a child marriage are often poor and use marriage as a way to make their daughter’s future better, especially in areas with little economic opportunities.

“During times of war, parents will often marry off their young child to protect her from the conflicts raging around her. Some families still use child marriage to build alliances, as they did during the medieval ages,” Nirmal Kaur, Delhi-based child rights activist, told Gulf News.

“Statistically, a girl in a child marriage has less of a chance to go to school, and parents think education will undermine her ability to be a traditional wife and mother. Virginity is an important part of Indian culture, and parents want to ensure their daughters do not have pre-marital sex, and child marriage is an easy way to fix this,” Kaur said.

Pakistani Women Has New Nose After 32 Years

From Gulf News:

After six years of abuse, Allah Rakhi was in the process of walking out of her marriage when her husband struck once again. Snatching a knife, he sliced off her nose. “You’re no longer beautiful!” he shouted.

He then slashed at her foot - a brutal punishment for leaving the house without his permission.

“A woman is only a woman inside the home, outside she’s a [expletive]!” he yelled at Rakhi as she lay bleeding on the dusty street just outside her home.

That was 32 years ago. All that time, Rakhi hid her disfigured face under a veil. Then in March, a surgeon took up her case. He cut flesh from her ribs and fashioned it into a new nose, and in the process, has transformed her life.

Chained Women

From the Jewish Daily Forward:

Purim is a holiday that is about women’s power, in its different forms. Thinking about the roles of Queen Vashti and her successor Queen Esther in the Purim story highlights some of the dilemmas that women have faced throughout history. I therefore think it’s particularly apt that Ta’anit Esther is International Agunah Day, the day the marks the harrowing struggle of “chained women,” or women denied divorce.

Vashti and Esther were both married to a man, the same man, for whom women were objects to be adorned and used. This was arguably the prevailing culture at the time, but there are also gradations in the exploitation of women.

Women face the insider/outsider dilemma all the time. Should we work hard and sacrifice our integrity (and money) to meet social expectations of female beauty in order to reap the significant social rewards of beauty and sexuality, or should we challenge the system, refuse to turn ourselves into seductresses, and force the world to deal with “real women,” as we are?

In Judaism the insider/outsider dilemma is faced in the most harrowing way by agunot, women who cannot get a Jewish divorce because the system relies on male volition. To stay in the Jewish legal system, agunot give up right to live independently, or to give birth to a Jew, or to be free. They can be free at any moment, but that would entail giving up their status within the Jewish legal system.

Queen Victoria's Secret Daughter

From the Mail Online:

Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897 marked the refulgent patriotic zenith of the British Empire.  Standing less than 5ft tall, but nevertheless a towering colossus throughout the world, the iconic Queen Empress gave her name to an age that produced an empire measuring some 40 million square kilometres, with 387 million subjects.

But now an astonishing article, published this month in The Oldie magazine, seeks to explode this greatest of all royal myths.

It claims that after the untimely death of her husband, Albert, the Prince Consort, Victoria sought sexual solace with her uncouth, arrogant and heavy-drinking Highland ghillie, John Brown. It further alleges that the Queen secretly married Brown in a clandestine ceremony and then bore him a child.

The 82-year-old historian, John Julius (2nd Viscount) Norwich, son of the legendary society beauty Lady Diana Cooper, is cited as a source for this story.

Lord Norwich, it appears, remembers his friend, the late historian Sir Steven Runciman, telling him that while he was researching in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle, he chanced upon the marriage certificate of Queen Victoria and John Brown.

Runciman was a pre-eminent expert on the Crusades and the Byzantine Empire. According to this very tall tale, he showed the certificate to the late Queen Mother.

Domestic Violence Disclosure Scheme

From The Guardian:

A man whose daughter was murdered by her violent boyfriend has handed in a petition at Downing Street calling for a change in the law to protect women from domestic abuse.

Michael Brown, from Batley, West Yorkshire, travelled to London as part of a campaign to introduce "Clare's Law" named after his daughter, Clare Wood, who was killed by her boyfriend in February 2009.

The law would allow women to find out if their boyfriends or husbands had a previous history of domestic violence.

Clare Wood met her boyfriend, George Appleton, on Facebook, unaware of his long history of violence against women, including repeated harrassment, threats and kidnapping one of his former girlfriends at knifepoint.

He strangled Clare Wood and set her on fire before going on the run, before taking his own life.

At an inquest into her death, which was held last year, coroner Jennifer Leeming said women in abusive relationships has a right to know about the violent past of the men they were with. A verdict of unlawfull killing by strangulation was recorded as the cause of her death.

Bangladeshi Women & Dowries

From IOL News:

Farzana Yasmin sought a divorce just hours after her wedding when her new husband's family demanded dowry payments.

Despite the stigma of divorce in Bangladesh, she is not worried about her future.

She wants other women to be brave enough to maintain their dignity in the face of dowry demands that have destroyed the happiness of millions of women in the Muslim-majority South Asian country, and led to numerous deaths.

Violence related to dowries has resulted in the deaths of more than 2 000 women in Bangladesh in the last decade.

The government outlawed the practice over 30 years ago, but it persists and is still taking a heavy toll.

In the first nine months of 2011, dowry-related violence caused the deaths of 268 women compared to 137 the previous year, according to Bangladesh Mahila Parishad women's rights organisation, based on monitoring of media reports.

Change For Japanese Royal Women

From the Examiner:

The Japanese government is reportedly considering some significant changes to Imperial House Law. Specifically, they are looking at an ancient law which stipulates that if a woman in the royal family marries a commoner she is no longer an official member of the royal family.

Currently, there are only seven men out of a 23 member royal family, and five of those men are over the age of 60. The aging of the men, and the marrying of the women, present a major hurdle in keeping up with their public duties. The remaining men in the family just simply could not complete the number of engagements they currently do, without women to assist them. The anxiety around the issue has only increased with the recent hospitalization of the Emperor. Changes look likely to happen, and the most immediate effect will be to TIH Princesses Mako and Kako, both unmarried daughters of TIH Prince Akishino and Princess Kiko. Changes would also affect HIH Princess Aiko, 9 but obviously she is a ways from marrying age. Aiko remains the only child of TIH Crown Prince Naruhito and Crown Princess Masako and is not in line to inherit the throne due to the succession laws in Japan. There is currently not push to change the law since the birth of Prince Hisahito has slotted him as third in line behind his uncle and father.

Sheng Nu - China's Leftover Women

From Care 2 dot com:

In China, the sexist term “leftover woman,” sheng nu, is widely used to describe an urban, professional female over the age of 27 who is still single. This derogatory term has been aggressively disseminated by the Chinese government, warning women that they will become spinsters if they do not marry by the time they turn 30. The irony of the media campaign is that China’s sex-ratio imbalance has resulted in a surplus of tens of millions of men who will not be able to find a bride.

In 2007, China’s Ministry of Education added the term “leftover woman” to its official lexicon, according to state media reports. In 2010, the All-China Women’s Federation and other government groups carried out a nationwide survey of more than 30,000 people in 31 provinces. Their findings on “leftover women” have been publicized repeatedly by China’s official media.

The article uses the heading “See What Category of ‘Leftover’ You Belong to.” The first category is leftover women aged 25 to 27 years, who are called “leftover fighters,” sheng dou shi, a play on the title of a popular martial arts film. It says these women “still have the courage to fight for a partner.”

The next category is 28- to 30-year-old women, or “the ones who must triumph,” bi sheng ke, a play on the Chinese name for Pizza Hut. It says these women have limited opportunities for romance because their careers leave them “no time for the hunt.”

The final category, 35 and older, is called the “master class of leftover women.” The term qi tian da sheng plays on the name of an ancient Chinese legend, the Monkey King. It says this category of woman “has a luxury apartment, private car and a company, so why did she become a leftover woman?”

Elizabeth I - Virgin Queen? She was a right royal minx!

From Mail Online:

The England that the first Queen Elizabeth reigned over so gloriously for 45 years was obsessed with sex and awash with promiscuity. This unrestrained bawdiness was surprising for a nation that worshipped its head of state as an unblemished virgin.

By the standards of later ages — and even today — society then was especially open in its use of sexual language. Shakespeare’s plays are full of nudge-nudge references to rutting, scrambling, sluicing, ravening and lock-picking.

The playwright’s work mirrored and fed the erotic obsessions of the age. This was a land where prostitutes were known as Winchester geese because the Bishop of Winchester owned much of the property that housed London’s dens of vice.

Monogamy, chastity and celibacy must have been practised by some Elizabethans, but they were hardly the norm. And yet, at the helm of this vibrant and exciting nation — growing, getting richer, reaching out to new worlds — was a woman who suppressed her own desires.

She would not marry or have children, and remained for the 45 years of her reign the unassailable Virgin Queen.

An Anglo-Indian Tale

From IBN Live:

During the earlier period of the East India Company in India, it was a common practice for British men to take Indian women as wives, for the lack of British women in the country. The children of such inter-racial marriages were known as Eurasians. But as the 19th century progressed, British women began arriving at the sub continent, and the trend of inter-cultural marriages came to an abrupt halt. As a result, such Eurasians, also known as Anglo Indians, were neglected by both Indians and British.

This was among the interesting information that contoured the lecture on Anglo Indians as part of the Madras Week Celebration, held at the GRT Grand Days. Harry Mclure and Richard O Connor from Anglos in the Wind, a national Anglo Indian magazine, read out articles published in the magazine over the last 10 years, that capture the history and essence of Anglo Indians in Madras, especially in areas of Santhome, Royapuram, Perambur, Pallavaram. The lecture was an insight as to how a new community evolved and marginalised later with unfriendly environment.

The Family, Koseki, and the Individual

From the Asia-Pacific Journal - Japan Focus:

On 14 February, Kayama Emi and Watanabe Tsuguo filed an administrative appeal to have the rejection of their marriage application by Arakawa Ward, Tokyo rescinded.1 Ms. Kayama wanted to keep her surname after marriage, as did Mr. Watanabe. The court rejected the appeal after only ten days without hearing arguments. “I’ve never had a gate closed in my face so quickly,” said Ms. Kayama.

They are now demanding damages on the basis of sexual discrimination, a case that is expected to take two years in the Tokyo High Court. Their appeal is based on Article 24 of the Constitution, which guarantees gender equality and respect of individual rights in marriage, and Article 13, which guarantees the right to pursue personal happiness. In contrast, current law requiring married couples to have a single surname, either the husband or wife’s, is based solely on an “agreement” (goi) between the parties involved.

It is not only women in the workplace who are inconvenienced by misunderstandings around names. Men wanting to adopt their wife’s name also run into barriers, whether due to confusion involving names at the workplace, to opposition from the husband’s family if he is the oldest son inheriting property and tasked with carrying on the family name, or to social prejudice and jabs about being “adopted” by the wife’s family.