The women came from different villages, converging outside the local Rural Affairs Bureau shortly after 10 a.m. One had taken the morning off from her job selling rice rolls. Another was a tour operator. Yet another was a recent retiree.
The group, nine in all, double-checked their paperwork, then strode in. In a dimly lit office, they cornered three officials and demanded to know why they had been excluded from government payouts, worth tens of thousands of dollars, that were supposed to go to each villager.
“I had these rights at birth. Why did I suddenly lose them?” one woman asked.
That was the question uniting these women in Guangdong Province, in southern China. They were joining a growing number of rural women, all across the country, who are finding each other to confront a longstanding custom of denying them land rights — all because of whom they had married.
In much of rural China, if a woman marries someone from outside her village, she becomes a “married-out woman.” To the village, she is no longer a member, even if she continues to live there.
That means the village assembly — a decision-making body technically open to all adults, but usually dominated by men — can deny her village-sponsored benefits such as health insurance, as well as money that is awarded to residents when the government takes over their land. (A man remains eligible no matter whom he marries.)
Now, women are fighting back, in a rare bright spot for women’s rights and civil society. They are filing lawsuits and petitioning officials, energized by the conviction that they should be treated more fairly, and by the government’s increasing recognition of their rights.
In doing so, they are challenging centuries of tradition that have defined women as appendages to men: their fathers before marriage, their husbands after. That view has persisted even as the country has rapidly modernized, and women have gone to school and sometimes even become their families’ breadwinners.
They are also exposing a gap between the ruling Communist Party’s words and its actions. Many courts, which are controlled by the party, refuse to take on the women’s lawsuits.
This reminds me of the case of Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez (U.S. Supreme Court 1979). This excerpt from the case digest should explain the comparison based on a loss of rights for women who married outside their tribe:
Respondents, a female member of the Santa Clara Pueblo and her daughter, brought this action for declaratory and injunctive relief against petitioners, the Pueblo and its Governor, alleging that a Pueblo ordinance that denies tribal membership to the children of female members who marry outside the tribe, but not to similarly situated children of men of that tribe, violates Title I of the Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968 (ICRA), 25 U.S.C. §§ 1301-1303, which, in relevant part, provides that "[n]o Indian tribe in exercising powers of self-government shall . . . deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of its laws." 25 U.S.C. § 1302(8). The ICRA's only express remedial provision, 25 U.S.C. § 1303, extends the writ of habeas corpus to any person, in a federal court, "to test the legality of his detention by order of an Indian tribe." The District Court held that jurisdiction was conferred by 28 U.S.C. § 1343(4) and 25 U.S.C. § 1302(8), apparently concluding that the substantive provisions of Title I impliedly authorized civil actions for declaratory and injunctive relief, and also that the tribe was not immune from such a suit. Subsequently, the court found for petitioners on the merits. The Court of Appeals, while agreeing on the jurisdictional issue, reversed on the merits.
No comments:
Post a Comment