Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (Owlet Book) by Steinem Gloria

Author:Steinem, Gloria [Steinem, Gloria]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781453250181
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2012-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

The Politics of Food

FOR MUCH OF THE female half of the world, food is the first signal of our inferiority. It lets us know that our own families may consider female bodies to be less deserving, less needy, less valuable.

In many poor countries, mothers often breastfeed sons for two years or more, especially when other food is scarce or uncertain. Daughters are usually nursed for less than half that time.

What happens in the mind of a girl child who is denied her own mother’s body, or in the mind of her brother who is not?

In India, like other countries where the poor must make painful choices, female infanticide is often carried out by the denial of scarce food and health care. Its practice is so common that a ratio of only eighty females to one hundred males is the norm in some parts of the country.

Economists say that scarcity increases value, but that rule doesn’t seem to hold when the commodity is female. Mothers of daughters, no matter how poor their health, are expected to bear more and more children until they have sons. Families of bridegrooms go right on demanding dowries from the families of brides. If someone pays the price of scarcity, it seems to be the women themselves. Brides may be kidnapped from neighboring areas. The childbearing burden of a woman may be increased because her husband’s brothers have no wives.

The cultural belief in a female’s lesser worth goes so deep that many women accept and perpetuate it. “Food distribution within the family arises from the deliberate self-deprivation by women,” concludes a 1974 study of nutrition in India, “because they believe that the earning members (and the male members who are potential earning members) are more valuable than those who do domestic work and the child rearing, which they consider devoid of economic value.”

What happens to the spirits of women who not only deprive themselves, but police the deprivation of their daughters?

Even in this wealthier, luckier country, we may know more than we admit. Black slave women and indentured white women were advertised as breeders or workers, and also as assets who would eat and cost less than males. The hard-working farm women of the frontier served men and boys more plentifully and first, yet the toll of their own hard work and childbearing was so great that the two-mother family was the average family: most men married a second time to replace a first wife who died of childbirth, disease, or overwork. Within our own memories, there are wives and daughters of immigrant families who served meals to fathers and brothers first, sometimes eating only what was left on the men’s plates. Right now, some homemakers still save the choice piece of meat for the “man of the house” or “growing boys” more often than for their growing daughters—or themselves. Millions of women on welfare eat a poor and starchy diet that can permanently damage the children they bear, yet their heavy bodies are supposed to signify indulgence.

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