Women’s rights ARE Human Rights

• or they ought to be …

So much of what women experience and have experienced for many years results from the control of males. Some of it originates with religion — a major cause of dictates over how women should live and what is acceptable. The dictates of rulers and governments only exacerbates or prolongs this control. In addition, such codes of conduct or practice is insidiously conditioned into the minds of the general populace so that it becomes accepted as ‘normal’ and its demeaning, inappropriate of even harmful features discounted as inevitable — even reasonable or ‘natural’, when in fact they are quite the opposite.

In spite of the feminist movements and greater self-determination for women in some areas of life and some nations, predominantly, women are still oppressed — sometimes outrageously obviously but as much, if not more by these hidden and unrecognised legacies and traditions that have infiltrated societies governed or ruled almost excusively by men, religion and ignorance.

This shows just how far women are from independence in deciding what is best for them and their own bodies. It is time that such factors were highlighted and shared widely and such practices and procedures strongly decried and ceased — unless, in an unlikely event, women themselves want them to continue.