In the House of Women

The house of women is vast and unfinished. The west wing is fairly complete. Most of us who live there enjoy privileges such as the right to vote and run for office. We have access to education and may support ourselves if we choose. We've convinced most of our legislators that domestic violence, sexual harassment and rape are crimes. We have control of our bodies and our sexuality; parents, teachers and leaders may coach us, but not coerce us into or out of relationships. Prospective mates may woo and worship but must swallow their pride if we reject them. (Story continued below...)

As in all homes, things in the west wing don't always run smoothly. Sometimes the rules aren't enforced. Domestic violence is ignored or the perpetrators get off too lightly. Some women feel they don't get equal compensation for doing the same jobs as male colleagues. Others hit a glass ceiling. Thus some women seek to furnish the house with more rules and to smash the see-through roofs.

Go east and you'll find that the house is unfinished. Parts of it have been started, then abandoned, and are now falling into ruin. In others, every time a wall goes up someone bulldozes it down. In what should have been beautiful courtyards are shallow unmarked graves, wherein lie girls who died because they were deemed not worth feeding. In the east, some girls are transported as property—often with their parents' connivance—to gratify adults' sexual desires. Girls work the land, fetch water, tend to livestock, cook and clean from dawn to dusk with no pay. Others are beaten with impunity. Hundreds of thousands die while giving birth because they lack the most basic hygiene and health care.

In some corners of the east, women are not happy when they learn they're pregnant. Often they get a doctor to check the sex of the unborn child. If it's a girl, the doctor removes it, and if the woman can't afford the abortion, the child, once born, is suffocated or left alone to die. This removal of girls is so systematic in some rooms of the east wing that men can't find mates to marry.

In the middle of the east, most women are banished from the public rooms, and when they are glimpsed at all they are covered from head to toe in garments dark and ugly. Many never learn to read or write; they are forced into marriage and seem to live pregnant ever after. They have no reproductive rights. If they are raped, the burden of proof lies on them to show their innocence, and in some rooms, women and girls as young as 13 are publicly flogged and stoned to death for sexual disobedience. In the eastern side of the house, some people are so terrified by a woman's sexuality that they cut the genitals of girl children, mutilating and branding them with the mark of ownership.