Like in many maquiladoras around the world, women are hired to these positions because it is assumed that they are “docile,” that it isn’t necessary to pay them as much because they must have husbands, and because they have “nimble fingers”–gender essentialism at its worst. Because for many women, these factory jobs are the only opportunities they have to gain some form of income, predatory managers see them as easy targets for sexual assault: if the women speak up, they could get fired.

High-demand holidays such as Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day force workers to work for longer hours in their squalid factories, with no extra-time pay, and still earn as little as $2 a day. The pesticides from these factories drain out into bodies of water, killing much of the local wildlife and entering the local water sources. While there have been no conclusive studies on the subject, it’s not hard to imagine that this overabundance of pesticides plays a part into why women in developing countries are developing breast cancer 10 years earlier than women in developed countries.

— ~Jessica Valenti in her article “Who Stole Feminism?”

An Iranian woman faces death by stoning after being convicted of adultery. Amnesty International yesterday called on the Iranian authorities to halt the imminent execution of mother-of-two Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani and the hanging of another woman said to be a political activist.

Ashtiani was convicted of having an ‘illicit relationship’ with two men in May 2006 and received 99 lashes as her sentence. Despite this, she has also been convicted of adultery and sentenced to death by stoning. The 43-year-old has retracted a ‘confession’ she said was made under duress.

Appealing for help to the international community, her daughter, Farideh, 16, and son, Sajad, 20, said yesterday: ‘Please help end this nightmare and do not let it turn into a reality. Help us save our mother.’

Nice bit of accommodationism there. “We’ll just mutilate baby girls a little bit, to make the misogynist patriarchal assholes happy.” Well, we have no obligation to make misogynist patriarchal assholes happy at all, especially not when it involves waving scalpels about in the genitals of children.

At their most repugnant, the belief that women must be subjugated to the wishes of men excuses slavery, violence, forced prostitution, genital mutilation and national laws that omit rape as a crime. But it also costs many millions of girls and women control over their own bodies and lives, and continues to deny them fair access to education, health, employment and influence within their own communities.