Guest Post: Child Brides and Toddlers and Tiaras: a reflection

This article, written by Danielle, originally appeared here at GoGirl Magazine in January 2012 and is re-posted with her permission.

Just having finished the book I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced & a recent National Geographic article on child brides (Too Young to Wed, June 2011), I feel compelled to explore the ramifications both within the countries perpetuating child marriage , as well as take a closer look at our own practices here in the United States of ‘growing up’ our girls.

In over 20 countries around the world from Afghanistan to Yemen, girls, often considered property, are married off without their consent at the excruciatingly young ages of 8,9,10 years old to men frequently decades older. According to the International Center for Research on Women, 25,000 girls are estimated to marry every day. That is a staggering statistic. The projection is that 100 million girls will be married off in the next decade. This practice not only hurts the girls themselves, but hampers the whole country’s development by keeping half of the population uneducated and focused on the hearth and home (included is the religiously-justified marriage of young girls in the US and Canada by the likes of Warren Jeffs).

Nujood, now 14, is an incredibly brave young woman. Married to a man three times her age, he raped and beat her every day. This is when, she said, she learned the definition of cruelty. Her escape is one of the most heroic acts I’ve heard of and her courage earned her the first divorce ever in the country of Yemen for a child bride. She has set an example to other girls married off in the same fashion; so far two more girls, ages 9 and 12, have successfully sought divorces from men that deprived them of unrecoverable innocence.

As with so many acts of VAW, poverty, custom, and lack of education are pillars upholding the convention of child brides. Both tradition and culture justify this patriarchal and soul-robbing practice, but marrying child brides also holds monetary value. Young girls are used to pay back loans, right family wrongs, preserve family honor, and bring in cash or commodity that carries economic benefit. As child marriage is receiving more attention, governments are slowly changing laws to accommodate a more moderate version of marital ‘readiness.’ Indeed, Nujood’s case influenced her own government’s take on marriage, moving the official age to 17 for both girls and boys in 2009. NGO’s and women’s organizations are working in local capacities to identify other ways to make ends meet and keep girls in school longer, thereby postponing marriage.

While my rancour is initially directed to the practice of marrying off young girls, I reserve a good portion of it for messages, often seen as benign, aimed at girls in the US. The show Toddlers and Tiaras reveals to anyone with cable that we continue to value girls, toddlers in fact, for their looks and their entertainment value. These little girls are dressed up in suggestive outfits, wear make-up, sport painted nails, fake eyelashes, spray tans and incredible ‘up’ dos. It is the essence of making tiny girls look and act grown up, channelling them into the stereotypes women’s rights activists have been working so long to redefine.

Source: Amelia Alisoun Blog

This show highlights a struggle (one of many) in the US: perpetuation of gender stereotyping at an age when girls should be able to express interest in many other activities beyond those traditionally “feminine”. An unfortunate consequence, Toddlers and Tiaras provides an example of yet another type of pageant for girls to follow, focusing on shallow hallmarks of traditional femininity. Unremarkably, it appears as if the mothers of these little girls are the ones most eager to perpetuate the gender stereotype that girls should be pretty and perform for others. While incomparable to the practice of child brides, this show lauds a perverse form of sexism for entertainment.

Newest Miss Representation Trailer (2011 Sundance Film Festival Official Selection) from Miss Representation on Vimeo.

Girls in the US are pummeled by mainstream media to grow up quickly. From Disney films that embody gender stereotypes and roles (think Beauty and the Beast), to the shows Bad Girls and Real Housewives, which maintain that women are bitchy, self-absorbed, back-stabbing, one-uppers, girls need to purposefully seek out role models who profess a range of qualities, intelligence and talents apart from what is routinely offered. I hear from friends and family who have girls of Nijood’s age express with frustration that “they are 10 going on 18,” implying that they already are reflecting mainstream needs for the beauty and glam of mainstream women. Our media culture, constructed in bulk by men (men own all the media conglomerations), is a key factor for girls wanting to pursue womanhood as narrowly defined by sexism in order to feel valued.

This is tragic.

And begs a bigger conversation around culture and women’s and girls’ rights. A couple of suggested websites to visit are:Gender Across Borders and Miss Representation. The latter, a documentary everyone should see, is coming to SIFF at Seattle at the end of the month.

The Name Game, part two

Name-changing is a complicated subject for couples of any stripe. But when you throw present or future kids into the mix, things get even messier. As a follow-up to my previous post on last names and marital partnerships, here's further food for thought!

While the traditional route is that a woman marries a man, takes his last name, and then gives his last name to their children, it's a lot more complicated today- especially when the mother (because, for the purposes of this discussion, we're assuming a male-female couple) chooses not to change her last name. What implications does that have for her children's last names? And, more importantly, what implications does that have for her parental rights and responsibilities?

There are so many options available these days, you'd think that people would hardly blink at last names. Many parents with different last names hyphenate their children's names- in which case there's a whole new debate to be had about whose name comes first- but many others pick one parent's name or even combine their last names into a whole new name. I grew up in a family where my sister and I were given our dad's last name, while our mom kept her own. This was pretty common for my friends whose parents had made similar choices regarding their own names- when the mother kept her name, the kids usually got his. A couple of my friends growing up had hyphenated names, but for the most part, many of us had only one. And, if I remember correctly, all of us had our father's last name.

The politics behind such a choice are obviously individual, but do play into a collective trend. For some, the choice has to do with the fact that the last name acts as a surrogate bond between the children and father for the bond created between children and mother by the process of pregnancy and childbirth. "I carried you for 40 weeks and then laboured for you, so this was his contribution," the argument seems to go. Of course, surrogacy and adoption don't really fall into this argument with any sort of neatness, and again the politics of last names brings us to the historical Western tendency to view women and children as the property of male heads of the household.

There's also a problem when children become older and travel with one parent at a time- whether the parents remain together or are separated. When I was about 11, my mom took my sister and me up to Montreal for a brief trip. In order to do this, she had to carry our birth certificates and a notarized document stating that she had our dad's permission to take us abroad. The reason for this, according to the border officials, was that mom's last name wasn't the same as ours. As she ranted later, our aunt- who had taken my dad's family name when she'd married my uncle- would have been able to take us across the border without anyone batting an eye. Nowadays, with heightened awareness about the risks of parental kidnapping, this reasoning may have been different. At the time, however, it was a reflection of the belief that all members of a family ought to share a last name. Similarly, mom generally had to go through a more rigorous process of proving herself to be our parent when she wanted to accomplish anything within our school district, simply because our last names didn't match.

These aren't necessarily challenges that will go away anytime soon, either. When the reverse happens- when children have their mother's last name but not their father's- there's certainly a kerfluffle not only because of the tendency to view the father as somehow weak or wrong, but also because of the social phobia we have about men with children that aren't obviously theirs. This is something I expect my cousin will face as her daughter grows up- she and her husband chose to assign their children's last name on the basis of the first child's assigned sex, and since their first child was assigned female, their kid(s) will have her last name. While her husband is a wonderful person and parent, I would not be surprised if he faces suspicion from institutions when he picks her up, takes her on father-daughter trips, or does anything- however innocently- that involves just him and her in public.

I would also expect that, unless she looks a lot like him as she grows up, the public assumption will be that she's his stepdaughter because their last names don't match. And I'd be willing to bet that, if she shared his last name but not her mother's, no one would assume that she was my cousin's stepdaughter.

I'm not sure what else to write on this topic, since a lot of it mirrors what was said previously. The social tendency to view women and their children as the property of a male partner is pretty deeply ingrained in our general cultural norms, even if it's not our conscious philosophy, and is reflected in the way we create expectations for individuals and treat those who defy them.