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Thursday, July 11, 2019

Aabha Rosy Vatsa redux


AIN'T I A WOMAN



Ain't I a woman.
Capable of sparking a revolution
Transforming lives
Changing attitudes
Propelling a mass movement
As history is my witness



Ain't I a woman
Who protested for our rights
Right to speak up
Right to vote
Right to social acceptance
Right to equal pay
Right to equal opportunity
Right to practise religious beliefs
Right to be a parliamentarian
As history is my witness



Ain't I a woman
That nurtures a belief
That men and women were created equal
That spearheaded Feminism
Striving for liberation
Hopeful of a Utopian society
For we marched in millions
For a women friendly world
As history is my witness



Ain't I a woman
Who dared to stand up
Against the pitfalls of World War 1
And boldly proclaim in Russia
'Bread and Peace'
Driving out the Czar
Laying the seeds of Russian revolution
As history is my witness



Ain't I a woman
Who stood up against female genital mutilation
And sparked a riot in Nigeria
Sending palm leaves to sisters
Forcing the unscrupulous chiefs to resign
And exempting women from taxes
As history is my witness



Ain't I a woman
Who collectively gathered all laundresses
And sparked a revolution
Forcing the Irish lawmakers
To grant a second week of annual holiday
As history is my witness



Ain't I a woman
Belonging to the league of Eleanor Roosevelt
Who read out  an open letter at the UN
Inspiring women to become involved
In national and international affairs
As history is my witness



Ain't I a woman
The unforgettable Butterflies
Of the Dominican Republic
Openly opposing dictatorship
Assassinated in cold blood
But giving forth to November 25
As international day to end violence against women
As history is my witness



Ain't I a woman
Revolting in Iceland
To protest against economic inequality
Announcing woman's day off
Bringing the nation to a standstill
As history is my witness



Ain't I a woman
Protesting against civil war
Forcing men to practise peace
And take instant action
Ending a fourteen year civil war in Liberia
Appointing the first female head of state
As history is my witness



Ain't I a woman
A member of Gulabi Gang
Who dared to raise voice against domestic abuse
Wielding bamboo sticks
A pink revolution for injustice against women
As history is my witness



Ain't I a woman
Creating an uprising
From Morocco female land owners
To Tunisia fighting for gender equality
To Lebanon scrapping the controversial rape law
As history is my witness



Ain't I a woman
As Malala Yousafza
Shot by propagandists and extremists
Revolting against the heinous attack
Giving the message
'Education for Girls'
As history is my witness



Ain't I a woman
Capitalizing on digital activism
With hashtags
#BringBackOurGirls
#EverydaySexism
#WomanShould
#MeToo
#HeForShe
As history  is my witness



Ain't I a woman
Enlivened by environment
Forsaking patriarchy
Revolting against domestic violence
Speaking out against sexual harassment
Taking on gender inequality
For the time is now
For the time is here and now
And nothing can stop me
Nothing will stop me
Image of "Intervention of Sabine Women" painting
The Intervention of the Sabine Women -- Jacques-Louis David

14 comments:

  1. In order to populate his new city, Romulus allowed any undesirable person in central Italy to become a Roman. However, disreputable women could never become respectable wives who would confer honor and legitimacy on her husband and family. So Romulus attempted to arrange proper marriages with the Sabines and other neighboring peoples, but none of them wanted to marry their daughters to outcasts. Romulus held a festival and public games, and then kidnapped the young, unmarried women who attended. Shortly thereafter, the city of Rome experienced its first public demonstration, led by the abducted Sabine daughters. According to historian Titus Livius, Romulus promised the Sabine women that "they would live in honorable wedlock, and share all their property and rights, and – dearest of all to human nature – would be the mothers of freemen." He "begged them to lay aside their feelings of resentment and give their affections to those whom fortune had made masters of their persons. An injury had often led to reconciliation and love; they would find their husbands all the more affectionate, because each would do his utmost, so far as in him lay, to make up for the loss of parents and homeland." Meanwhile, the aggrieved Latin towns of Caenina, Crustumerium, and Antemnae took action against Roma, but were defeated and conquered by Romulus, who allowed some of their people, chiefly the families of the abducted women, to settle at Roma. The Sabines were slow to act, but Titus Tatius eventually led his army against the Romans. Before the battle, however, the Sabine wives, some in funerary attire and some carrying their newborn children, interposed themselves between their husbands and fathers and pled for peace. As a result, Tatius and Romulus formed a joint rule over the united Romans and Sabines. Tatius gave his only daughter Tatia to Romulus' youngest son Numa Pompilius, who had been born on the same day that Roma was founded. After 5 years of successful management of the kingdom, Romulus and Tatius quarreled over some misdeeds by Tatius' friends; as a result, Tatius was stoned to death by a mob. After Romulus' death, the senators took turns ruling the kingdom for 5 days each, but after a year the Roman and Sabine factions agreed to install Numa as king.

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  2. Isabella Baumfree was born into slavery in rural, New York. She spoke only Dutch until she was 9, when she was sold at auction with a flock of sheep for $100. By the time she was 13 she passed through 2 more owners. When she was 18 she fell in love with a man from a neighboring farm, but his owner, a British painter named Catton, did not want his property to have children with other people's property because he could not own them, so he brutally beat his slave, who never saw "Belle" again. Subsequently, she had a daughter by her master and a son by her own husband. In 1799 New York had decided to emancipate the slaves in that state in a gradual process that would end in 1827, but Belle's owner promised to free her a year later "if she would do well and be faithful." However, he reneged, and she fled with her daughter in 1826. She later said "I did not run off, for I thought that wicked, but I walked off, believing that to be all right." A family took her in and officially bought her freedom for #20. Meanwhile, she found out that her former owner had illegally sold her son to a planter in Alabama, and in 1828 she regained him after becoming the 1st African-American woman to win a court case against a white man. Her son disappeared on a whaling voyage in the early 1840s. She became a Methodist in 1843, changed her name to Sojourner Truth, and became an abolitionist speaker. Eventually she joined the household of William Lloyd Garrison's brother-in-law, and Garrison, the leading American abolitionist, published her autobiography in 1850. On 29 May 1851 she spoke extemporaneously to the Women's Convention in Akron, Ohio, presided over by feminist Frances Dana Barker Gage. Horace Greeley's "New York Tribune" and Garrison's "Liberator" reported on the speech, and the convention's recording secretary Marius Robinson published a transcript in the "Anti-Slavery Bugle" almost a month later, written in collaboration with Trith, but it became known as "Ain't I a Woman" in a new version published by Gage in 1863 in her "History of Woman Suffrage." She lengthened it, added a number of false biographical details, rendered it in a minstrel-like imitation of Southern slave dialect, and inserted the "ain't I a woman?" refrain. Truth, of course, was a New Yorker, not a Southerner, and she prided herself on enunciation; her but it is the 1863 version that has been standard. (Gage revised it again in 1881, with a less severe dialect.)

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  3. Robinson called the speech "one of the most unique and interesting speeches of the convention... It is impossible to transfer it to paper, or convey any adequate idea of the effect it produced upon the audience. Those only can appreciate it who saw her powerful form, her whole-souled, earnest gesture, and listened to her strong and truthful tones." According to him, she said,"I have as much muscle as any man, and can do as much work as any man. I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that? I have heard much about the sexes being equal. I can carry as much as any man, and can eat as much too, if I can get it. I am as strong as any man that is now. As for intellect, all I can say is, if a woman have a pint, and a man a quart -- why can't she have her little pint full? You need not be afraid to give us our rights for fear we will take too much, -– for we can't take more than our pint'll hold. The poor men seems to be all in confusion, and don't know what to do. Why children, if you have woman's rights, give it to her and you will feel better. You will have your own rights, and they won't be so much trouble. I can't read, but I can hear. I have heard the Bible and have learned that Eve caused man to sin. Well, if woman upset the world, do give her a chance to set it right side up again. The Lady has spoken about Jesus, how he never spurned woman from him, and she was right. When Lazarus died, Mary and Martha came to him with faith and love and besought him to raise their brother. And Jesus wept and Lazarus came forth. And how came Jesus into the world? Through God who created him and the woman who bore him. Man, where was your part? But the women are coming up blessed be God and a few of the men are coming up with them. But man is in a tight place, the poor slave is on him, woman is coming on him, he is surely between a hawk and a buzzard." Gage dramatized the event, describing Truth as "a tall, gaunt black woman in a gray dress and white turban, surmounted with an uncouth sunbonnet" who was heckled and jeered by the crowd; but "every eye was fixed on this almost Amazon form, which stood nearly six feet high, head erect, and eyes piercing the upper air like one in a dream. At her first word there was a profound hush. She spoke in deep tones, which, though not loud, reached every ear in the house, and away through the throng at the doors and windows." After presenting her spurious rendition of the speech, Gage claimed, "I have never in my life seen anything like the magical influence that subdued the mobbish spirit of the day, and turned the sneers and jeers of an excited crowd into notes of respect and admiration. Hundreds rushed up to shake hands with her, and congratulate the glorious old mother, and bid her God-speed on her mission of 'testifyin' agin concerning the wickedness of this 'ere people.'"

    Truth continued her oratorical career. In 1858 she was jeered by a man who accused her not being a woman at all, so she opened her blouse to reveal her breasts. In 1872 she tried to vote but was prevented by the election officials. She died in 1883 at 86.

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  4. Theresa Serber (who married Leon A. Malkiel in 1900) moved from Russia to the US at 17 and became active in Socialist politics. As head of the Woman's National Committee of the Socialist Party of America she organized a National Woman's Day in New York on 28 February 1909. This inspired Luise Zietz, the 1st female member of the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands executive committee, to propose at the 1910 International Women's Conference organized to precede the general meeting of the Socialist Second International in Copenhagen, Denmark, an annual International Woman's Day, which was 1st held in Austria, Denmark, Germany, and Switzerland on 19 March 1911 (the date was changed to 8 March in 1914). After 2 1/2 years of war, in 1917 “ladies from society, lots more peasant women, student girls and, compared with earlier demonstrations, not many workers” (according to the governor of Petrograd, the capital of Russia) marked the occasion by gathering on the Nevsky Prospekt with "Bread and Peace" banners; they were joined in the afternoon by female textile workers, and the demonstrations increased over the following days. By the 2nd day there were some 150,000 protestors, and revolutionary agitators began haranguing them at "the Hippopotamus," a large equestrian statue of the reactionary Aleksandr III on Znamenskaya Square. A week later Aleksandr's son Nikolai II abdicated and the new provisional government granted women's suffrage. Leon Trotsky later wrote that the Marxist revolutionaries "did not imagine that this 'Women's Day' would inaugurate the revolution. Revolutionary actions were foreseen but without date."

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  5. The Fulani, among the 6 largest ethnic groups in Nigeria (with the Yoruba, Hausa, Ibo, Ijaw, and Kanuri), is the only one that does not practice any form of female gender mutilation; the nation accounts for about 1/4 of the estimated 115–130 million circumcised women worldwide. The most severe form is "sunna," the removal of the clitoris along with partial or total excision of the labia minora. In southern Nigeria the most common practice is the less severe clitoridectomy (the removal of part or all of the clitoris), but in northern Nigeria infibulation (the removal of the clitoris, the labia minora and adjacent medial part of the labia majora plus the stitching of the vaginal orifice to an opening of the size of a pinhead to allow the passage of urine and menstrual flow) and introcision and gishiri cuts, pricking, piercing, or incision of the clitoris and/or labia, scraping and/or cutting of the vagina, stretching the clitoris and/or labia, cauterization, inserting herbs or corrosive substances in the vagina, and other forms are practiced. In some parts of Nigeria, the cut edges of the external genitalia in the belief that the snail will cause the circumcised girl to “go slow” with sexual activities. In 1994, Nigeria and other members of the 47th World Health Assembly resolved to eliminate the practice but it was not until 2015 that president Goodluck Jonathan signed a federal law banning it.

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  6. The Irish Women Workers Union noted that “Laundry work is performed standing in a heated atmosphere causing, in hot weather especially, great fatigue, excessive perspiration and blistered feet.... Laundresses often worked from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. in order to meet demand” due to World War II and on 21 July 1945 went on strike for a 2nd week of holidays for all workers. Hospital laundries were exempted from the action, but the impact was particularly felt by the Dublin hotels. Strikers sang, to the tune of "Lilli Marlene,"

    Outside the laundry we put up a fight
    For a Fortnight’s Holiday.
    They said we would have to strike,
    So we keep marching up and down,
    As we nearly did for half a crown.
    We are a fighting people,
    Who can’t be kept down.

    Then they gave us one week,
    But we wanted two,
    And we well deserved it
    For the work we had to do.
    There for a long nine hours a day.
    In heat and steam we have to stay.
    Then they gave us one week out of fifty-two.

    The employers put a statement in the “Irish Press”,
    It was all untrue. But how could people guess?
    So now that they have heard our story true,
    We leave it all to you,
    To help us in our battle,
    To gain what we are due.

    Despite opposition from the pres, the government, and the Federated Union of Employers the women prevailed on 30 October, after 14 weeks of activity. All Irish workers received 2 weeks of annual holidays from 1946.

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  7. After the death of US president Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945 his successor Harry S Truman named his widow Eleanor Roosevelt to the 1st United Nations General Assembly in London in January 1946. The other 3 delegates, all males, assigned her to Committee 3, which would deal with "soft" issues such as humanitarian, cultural, and economic concerns. Her success on winning the right of self-determination for war refugees who faced forced repatriation to their home countries gained her the chairmanship of the Human Rights Commission in April and her drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It was adopted by 48 nations on 10 December 1948 (with 8 abstentions). In March 1953, as the US representative to the UN Commission on Human Rights, she addressed the body with an impromptu speech: "Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home -- so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any map of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person: The neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works. Such are the laces where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world." She returned to the UN (1961-1962) and spent her final months before her death on 7 November 1962 as chairperson of the Presidential Commission on the State of Women, which issued its report on 11 October 1963 (her birthday).

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  8. Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina governed the República Dominicana from 1930 until his assassination in 1961. In 1949 he refused to grant a license to practice law to María Argentina Minerva Mirabal Reyes because she rejected his romantic advances. “What if I send my subjects to conquer you?” he asked her, to which Minerva responded, “And what if I conquer your subjects?” As a result of governmental harassment of her family she began to engage in anti-Trujillo political activities and was joined by her younger sister Antonia María Teresa Mirabal Reyes and finally by their oldest sister Patria Mercedes Mirabal Reyes after witnessing a massacre by Trujillo's soldiers. Minerva’s husband Manuel Aurelio "Manolo" Tavárez Justo formed Manolo Tavárez Justo a group called the Movement of the Fourteenth of June, (abbreviated 14J or 14), named after the date of the massacre Patria witnessed, and the 3 sisters called themselves "Las Mariposas" ("The Butterflies"), after Minerva's underground name. María Teresa’s husband Leandro Guzmán was the treasurer, and Patria’s husband Pedro González was also active. They distributed pamphlets about the thousands of people whom Trujillo had killed and obtained materials for guns and bombs to use when they eventually openly revolted. In 1959 a group of Dominican exiles trained in Cuba invaded their homeland but were defeated. Minerva and María Teresa were incarcerated, along with the husbands of all 3 sisters, but the women were released due to the intervention of the Organization of American States. On 25 November 1960 they visited their husbands at La Victoria Penitentiary in Santo Domingo and on the way home were stopped by Trujillo's chief henchman Victor Alicinio Peña Rivera and members of his secret police. They were strangled and clubbed to death and put back in their Jeep, which was run off the mountain road in an attempt to make their deaths look like an accident. But their deaths accelerated the resistance against the Trujillato. On 30 May 1961 the dictator was ambushed by a number of his generals and shot to death, but the Servicio de Inteligencia Militar blocked the coup, installed the dead Jefe’s son Rafael Leónidas “Ramfis” Trujillo Martínez in power, and arrested and tortured hundreds of suspects (many of whom Ramfis murdered in person); the last of the conspirators was executed on 18 November. But Ramfis was forced to flee. After 23 years of exile writer/politician Juan Emilio Bosch Gaviño returned to his homeland and in 1962 won his country’s 1st free election. In April 1963 he instituted a liberal democratic constitution but was overthrown on 25 September in a military coup. In an effort to restore the new constitution, on 28 November Tavárez Justo and 14J launched a failed insurrection, leading to Tavárez’ execution. A new military rebellion broke out on 24 April 1965, demanding 25 Bosch's restoration, and seized power 4 days later, but American troops invaded on 30 April to prevent the formation of a leftist government. The 14J directed most of the futile guerrilla resistance against the Americans
    After the murder of her sisters Bélgica Adela “Dedé” Mirabal Reyes raised their children, including Minerva’s daughter Minou Tavárez Mirabal who served as deputy foreign minister (1996–2000). After Bosch declined to run for president again in 1994, Dedé’s son Jaime David Fernández Mirabal became vice president under his protégé Leonel Antonio Fernández Reyna, who later named him secretary of state for environment and natural resources. In 2007 the Mirabels’ native province Salcedo was renamed Hermanas Mirabal province. In 1999 the UN General Assembly designated 25 November, the anniversary of their assassinations, as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.

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  9. To support International Women's Year (1975)the Redstockings of the Women's Liberation Movement, a radical feminist group in New York noted for their "speakouts," street theater, and zaps (raucous public demonstrations designed to embarrass public figures) advocated strikes, leading women in Ísland (Iceland) to organize a Kvennafrídagurinn (Women's Day Off) on 24 October 1975 to protest earning less than 60% of men's pay. 90% of the country's women refuse to go to work or do housework or child-rearing for the whole day. Employers bought sweets, pencils, and paper to entertain the children, who were taken to their fathers' workplaces on "the long Friday." A year later the Althing, the world's oldest parliament, guaranteed equal pay, and every 10 years women stop work early on 24 October to commemorate the event.

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  10. Charles McArthur "Ghankay" Taylor supporter Samuel Doe's 1980 coup in the Republic of Liberia but fled to the US after using his position in the government to embezzle a million dollars, then, in 1985, to avoid extradition, escaped from the Plymouth County Correctional Facility in Massachusetts and fled back to Africa. In Libya he helped train Muammar Gaddafi's guerrillas before forming the National Patriotic Front of Liberia in Côte d'Ivoire. In December 1989 Gaddafi funded his invasion of Liberia, launching the First Liberian civil War and occupying most of the country. But his chief training officer Prince Yormie Johnson split, formed the rival Independent National Patriotic Front of Liberia, and seized the capital Monrovia despite intervention by the Economic Community of West African States' joint military force the Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group. In September 1990 his men abducted Doe from ECOMOG headquarters and tortured and executed him while Johnson videotaped himself sipping a beer and being fanned by an assistant as his men cut off Doe's ear. As the civil war degenerated into a genocidal ethnic conflict, Taylor continued his own military operations. In November ECOWAS created a Johnson-supported interim government of national unity under Liberian People's Party founder Amos Claudius Sawyer, who held power for 4 years. Raleigh Seekie, Doe's former finance minister, formed the United Liberation Movement of Liberia for Democracy and joined the Sierra Leone army against the Revolutionary United Front, which had been created with Taylor's support to overthrow that country's government, then attacked Taylor's forces in Liberia in Sept 1991; however, it broke up into competing factions. Taylor besieged Monrovia for 2 months late in 1992 but was pushed back by ECOMOG. After numerous failed cease fires and other peace negotiations, the warring parties met in Abuja, Nigeria, in August 1996 and agreed to disarmament, demobilization, and elections by July. Under the slogan, "He killed my ma, he killed my pa, but I will vote for him," Taylor got 75% of the presidential vote and huge majorities in the legislature, while Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who had been finance minster before Doe's seizure of power, came in 2nd. As president Taylor renewed his support of the RUF in the ongoing civil war in Sierra Leone and backed insurgents against Côte d'Ivoire president Koudou Laurent Gbagbo. Remnants of the United Liberation Movement of Liberia for Democracy factions formed the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy in Guinea, with Doe's former revenue agent as chairman (chosen because his wife was the daughter of Guinean president Lansana Conté's soothsayer) and launched a new invasion of Liberia in April 1999, beginning the Second Liberian Civil War. The Force Spéciale pour la Libération du Monde Africain militia formed in September 2002 to aid Gbagbo's government, then reorganized as the Movement for Democracy in Liberia and attacked Taylor in Liberia in March 2003. Crystal Roh Gawding and social workers Leymah Gbowee and Comfort Freeman organized Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace. The organization forced Taylor to agree to attend peace talks in Ghana with representatives from Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy and Movement for Democracy in Liberia and then sent 200 women to enforce the process. Blocking all the doors and windows, they threatened to disrobe if any delegates tried to leave. Taylor fled to Nigeria on 11 August 2003, and Sirleaf won the November 2005 elections, serving until 2018.

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  11. In 2006, in response to the lack of police support for victims of domestic violence, Sampat Pal founded the Gulabi Gang in the Bundelkhand region of Uttar Pradesh in northern India
    to promote female welfare and emplowerment. The organization's 270,000 members wear pink ("gulabi") saris and arm themselves with bamboo sticks to mete out vigilante justice, but they also resort to publicly shaming offenders and engage in demonstrations, marches, and occupations. In 2008 they founded a school in Banda for 400 girls. In 2014 Pal was accused of financial impropriety and putting her personal interests ahead of the group's and removed from her leadership role.

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  12. Dera Yusufzai ("Swat") was established in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, northwest Pakistan, by the Yousufzai tribe ("the descendants of Yusuf," the Biblical patriarch), in 1849, and they continued to hold prominent positions there. As a student at Jahanzeb College there, Ziauddin Yousafzai served as general secretary of the Pakhtoon Students Federation, a student group that wanted equal rights for Pashtuns, and later founded the Khushal Public School, a chain of schools named after Khushal Khan Khattak, a famous 17th-century Pashto poet. In 1997 he named his daughter Malala ("grief-stricken") in honor of the 18-year-old girl who was killed waving her veil as a flag to rally Ghazi Mohammad Ayub Khan's Afghan troops against the British at the 1880 Battle of Maiwand. When Malala was growing up it was expected that she would have to stay home and learn how to cook for her brothers and father, but he encouraged her to continue her education instead. In late 2007 the Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi, a Talibanorganization, occupied Swat and imposed their strict brand of Islam. In September 2008, when Malala was 11, Ziauddinhe took her to Peshawar to speak at the press club, where she asked her audience, "How dare the Taliban take away my basic right to education?" Aamer Ahmed Khan of the BBC Urdu website recruited her to blog about life under the Taliban occupation. She began posting as "Gul Makai" ("cornflower"), the name of a girl in a Pashtun folktale, on 3 January 2009, and the Taliban in her town prohibited girls from attending school after 15 January, after already blown up more than 100 girls' schools, but later relented to allow them to attend until their 17 March exams. The blog ended on 12 March, and her identity was revealed by December. "New York Times" reporter Adam B. Ellick featured the Yousafzai family in his documentary, "Class Dismissed," and Malala began attracting international attention. By the summer the Pakistani army had recovered Swat, but militants continued to threaten Ziauddin and other critics. In October Desmond Tutu, the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize winner, nominated her for the International Children's Peace Prize, which the Amsterdam-based KidsRights Foundation had launched at the 2005 World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates, and in December she was awarded Pakistan's first National Youth Peace Prize. In the summer of 2012, at the instigation of mullah Fazlullah (Fazal Hayat), the emir of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, who also belonged to the Yusufzai tribe and had abducted the daughter of the movement's founder when he had been a student at his madrassa, Taliban leaders unanimously agreed to have her killed. She was shot in the head on 9 October by a graduate student in chemistry who escaped, and on the 15th was transported by the Pakistani government to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham in the UK, renowned for treatment of wounded military personnel. She recovered consciousness on 17 October and, after more procedures, she was discharged, but in February underwent a new operation to reconstruct her skull and restore her hearing with a cochlear implant.

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  13. in the wake of her shooting, 50 Muslim clerics in Pakistan issued a fatwa against those who tried to kill her, and the Taliban responded by denouncing her as "the symbol of the infidels and obscenity" and threatened to attack her again. Pakistan offered a 10 million rupee (US$105,000) reward for information leading to the arrest of the attackers, and 10 arrests were made in September 2014; they were sentenced to life in prison but 8 of them were freed. Over 2 million people petitioned for reform, which led to the ratification of the nation's 1st Right to Education Bill in Pakistan. Amjad Khan determined to direct "Gul Makai," a Bollywood movie based on Malala'a life scripted by Bhaswati Chakrabarty, that began production in 2016; the original choice to play her, a 16-year-old Bangladeshi student, withdrew due to threats from religious extremists in Dhaka. In 2013 Malala won the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, established in 1988 by the European Parliament, and the International Children's Peace Prize, and in 2014 she was the co-recipient of the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize, along with Kailash Satyarthi of India, another children's rights activist. In Birmingham she and her father founded the Malala Fund, with a goal of ensuring 12 years of free education for every girl. The 1st contribution was by actress Angelina Jolie, who gave $200,000 to fund schools in Swat. In 2014 the fund helped build an all-girls secondary school in rural Kenya and provided school supplies and continued education in Pakistan for children fleeing Muslim conflict in North Waziristan. In 2015, when the government of Sierra Leone closed schools due to tan ebola epidemic, the fund bought radios to allow 1,200 girls to continue their classes; pledged full scholarships to the Chibok schoolgirls in Nigeria who had been kidnapped by the Boko Haram;and funded of a secondary school in Lebanon for Syrian refugees. In 2016 the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation committed $4 million to help the fund launch the Gulmakai Network to support education champions in developing countries. Further grants included a project in Afghanistan to recruit and train teachers and support local activists in Nigeria to campaign to raise public education from 9 years to 12. In 2018, Apple Inc. partnered with Malala Fund to provide technology, curriculum assistance, and policy research leading to school for more than 100,000 girls, and the fund helped secure a $2.9 billion commitment for girls' education from the G7 countries and the World Bank.

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  14. Ramaa Mosley created #BringBackOurGirls to raise awareness about the 276 female students kidnapped by the Boko Haram terrorist group in Nigeria from the Government Secondary School in Chibok in 2014. By 2018 most of them had escaped or been ransomed, but it was estimated that 13 of them were presumed dead and 112 still missing.
    In 2012 British feminist writer Laura Bates founded the Everyday Sexism Project to allow people to catalogue instances of sexism “serious or minor, outrageously offensive or so niggling and normalised that you don’t even feel able to protest.” She was awarded the British Empire Medal in the 2015 Birthday Honours for her services to gender equality and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in its "40 Under 40" initiative in 2018.
    “WomanShould” is a site that allows people to add whatever they like to complete the sentence, “Woman should ….” any way they like.
    In 1997 in Alabama, Tarana Burke, a social activist and community organizer from New York, met a young girl named Heaven who told her about being sexually abused by her mother's boyfriend’ Burke didn't know what to say and never saw Heaven again, but wished she had told her "me too. After working with survivors of sexual violence, in 2003 she developed the nonprofit "Just Be,"an all-girls program for young black girls aged 12 to 18, and in 2006, she founded the Me Too movement and began using the phrase "Me Too" to raise awareness of the pervasiveness of sexual abuse and assault in society. The phrase developed into a broader movement in 2017 after actress Alyssa Milano encouraged women to use the #"MeToo" if they have ever experienced sexual harassment or assault, in the wake of producer allegations against acts by film producer Harvey Weinstein over a period of decades. Milano tweeted the phrase at noon on 15 October 15 and by the end of the day it had been used more than 200,000 times and tweeted more than 500,000 times by the next day. During the 1st 24 hours it was used on Facebook by more than 4.7 million people in 12 million posts. It led to public shamings of prominent figures in business, education, entertainment, and politics, and the dismissals or resignations of many of them.
    UN Women (the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women) was formed in 2011. Its global goodwill ambassador, actress Emma Watson, kickstarted HeForShe, the UN Women Solidarity Movement for Gender Equality, in 2014 , calling for 100,000 men to mobilize in order to act against negative stereotypes and behaviors, a goal that was reached in 3 days. At the 2015 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, UN Women launched the HeForShe IMPACT 10x10x10 initiative as a 1-year pilot effort to engage governments, corporations, and universities as instruments of change.

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