[Day 7] Hunger
Last year, rageprufrock wrote about women like the burst-open lips of figs, about how women have worn their history as odalisks and sacrifices and mothers and daughters and victims like jewelry -- she wrote about how despite all of this, we sometimes forget how far we have come, and more importantly how far we have yet to go.
It's 2007 and the third most powerful person in American politics, second in line to take over the presidency, is a woman: Nancy Pelosi -- but half of the coverage she earned after her first State of the Union was about the color and cut of her clothes. Hilary Clinton is a two-term senator of New York and former first lady bracing to run for the Office of the Presidency in 2008 -- and yet people are preoccupied by her gender, by how pretty she might be and how she does her hair, whether or not she got plastic surgery. Women are still being raped and killed in Darfur; the Chinese countryside still has families practicing infanticide despite the country's rapidly skewing sex ratios. Girls are still giving themselves eating disorders comparing themselves to impossible standards of beauty, still acting less intelligent than they really are -- to be non-threatening, to be liked. One in three women will still experience sexual assault in her lifetime. So much has changed and so much has stayed the same.
It's 2007 and women are still odalisks and sacrifices and mothers and daughters and victims -- and we owe ourselves and all other women more than that, we owe ourselves better. We can do more.
V can stand for vagina, like Eve Ensler's groundbreaking monologues. V can stand for violence, under whose auspices all women continue to make a home.
V can also stand for victory.
Hunger
852 million people across the world are hungry, and 1.3 billion people are without access to clean water. The number of women that go hungry is substantially higher than men given the cultural traditions in many areas that have them eating least and last.
The Hunger Project says it best on their mission page: The Hunger Project is a global, strategic organization committed to the sustainable end of world hunger.
In Africa, Asia and Latin America, The Hunger Project empowers millions of women and men to end their own hunger. The Hunger Project has pioneered low-cost, bottom-up, gender-focused strategies in each region where hunger persists. These strategies mobilize clusters of rural villages to create and run their own programs that achieve lasting progress in health, education, nutrition and family income.
In all our work, the highest priority is the empowerment of women. Women traditionally bear primary responsibility for family health, education, nutrition and - increasingly - family income. Yet women have been systematically denied information, resources and voice in decisions that affect their lives.