I must be getting old. It seems like only yesterday that I wrote in The Interim about the UN women’s conference in Nairobi, and yet it was ten years ago. However, it has taken me this many years (another sign of age?) to begin to clarify a couple of statements I heard then for the first time, and have heard constantly since then, both during the population conference in Cairo and now at the women’s conference in Beijing.
The keys to promoting population, we are constantly reminded, are in promoting children’s health and in educating women. The first is easier to grasp at a certain level. Obviously, if childhood mortality rates are improved, mothers will not feel compelled to have many babies in the hopes they will see some of them live through to adults. Although I am somewhat uneasy with the idea that any woman would bear many children as a kind of insurance policy against having them all die, the studies done seem to indicate that healthy babies translate into smaller families.
But it is the claim about educating women that has bothered me most for all these years. Why, I kept asking myself, should teaching women to read and write, and giving them some rudimentary skills to contribute to family wellbeing in the shaky economics of the developing countries, suddenly turn women against having children? And yet all the analysts state that educating women lowers the birth rate.
I began to see the light at supper time the other night. Why, I asked my (brilliant) husband does education have this effect? Not content, however, to pose a simple question for my in-house Einstein, I held forth at some length on my own definition of education. Literacy, as I understand it, is just a tool to help us become educated: to develop our characters; to allow us to attempt to being to make sense of our lives and our place in the world. Why, I wanted to know, should giving women such tools turn them against children?
Einstein’s answer was simple (probably because he was nearing the end of his meal and Cito Gaston also needed to hear his advice, sent telepathically via television). He cunningly phrased it as a question because he knows if he ever gives me an answer to anything I immediately dismiss it out of hand. “Are you sure you are talking about education,” he asked, “or are we looking at propaganda?”
The dim bulb in my brain began to light up. I had imagined reading programmes of the Chinese or Indian equivalent of Shakespeare, Dickens, even Jane Austen, for beginners, and writing assignments to explain the modern significance of an Aesop-type fable. The reality is probably more along the lines of reading primers extolling the virtues of one-child families, and not-too-subtle examples of people who dare to question the party line.
In Canada, we have mothers protesting “Heather has two Mommies” on school library shelves: in China, there are probably mothers who are learning that Heather should be thrown in a bucket at birth because too many women will have too many babies.
As I write this, the Beijing conference has only just begun. Yet I have already read reports of Hillary Clinton extolling the virtues of family life as a political ploy to aid her husband’s re-election; of the Canadian delegation’s efforts to push through the true American radical feminist agenda; and of the Vatican’s female representatives seemingly rolling over and playing dead on the “gender question.”
If all of this were not so deadly serious, it would fit well into a French farce. (Imagine, Jane Fonda was prevented from hearing Mrs. Clinton’s speech by zealous Chinese security guards—even though she was brandishing her husband’s CNN umbrella!)
In the end, though, this Western-led obsession will fail. It will fail because those women who have suffered through the propaganda will realize that they have been led astray. And they will teach their children.
