Perfect FONT choice --- and Happy Birthday!

I love your posts from this amazing trip. Beautiful and inspiring! Have a happy birthday!

Okay, now I want to go get my baby from daycare and squeeze him REALLY HARD.

Thank you for telling this story.

I'm just finishing the novel "Brick Road" by Monica Ali. If you haven't read it, I think you'd enjoy it after your travels to Bangladesh. It's a very powerful story about Bengali women's rights and place in society--both in Bangladesh and in the West.

Thanks for taking this trip and for sharing this moving story!

I have had "What alcoholics call 'A moment of clarity'" (Thanks, Pulp Fiction.) It IS about making men/boys see what strong women can accomplish! It is about the Y chromosome being more secure, more willing to admit that women are so much more than they realize. They must recognize that nothing on this planet goes on without women. We women get it....we need to teach those males in the world to get it.

Wow. The eyes have it. Amazing.

A beautiful way to celebrate your birthday by sharing these beautiful people with us-you can literally see their spirit in their bright eyes.

thanks Heather for doing such important work- & happy birthday!

If you are serious about learning what it would really take to change these things, read the article by Gerry Mackie in the American Sociological Review, on Footbinding and Infibulation. You'll find it relevant and amazing.

Here's a link to it: http://www.violenceisnotourculture.org/files/Macki...

I love the montage. :)

A thought that I hope you might consider:

I think it's important to be very careful about assigning blame along gender lines. As far back as Frederick Douglass and before, some men have been very important and vocal allies in fights for fairness. Likewise, women can be just as guilty and are often even more vicious in policing gendered boundaries and privileges. Think about your own experiences with other women; think about your experiences in junior high school. Think about their comments about your appearance, your behavior, your childbirth choices, your parenting decisions. Women are just as guilty, and it's just as true in other cultures as it is here.

It's not men alone who need to be invited to join struggles for reasonable behavior; it's all people who have not yet stopped to think critically about the realities of the world we inhabit, and how they wish to engage that. It's all people who protect their own positions of privilege by policing the status quo, and those people are just as likely to be women as to be men.

Thank You for sharing your amazing trip. Wishing you a very Happy Birthday. Marlo is your little "mini me" after seeing that picture of you when you were her age. What a resemblance. Have an AMAZING DAY.

Beautiful pictures. Thank you for sharing them with us. And for inspiring so many to do what they can.

And, as a side note, we as Western women need to get more comfortable with COLOR! Lovely colors of clothing!

Work to be done in the US too - the medical advisory panel has suggested that all health plans cover birth control under the new health care law.
Seems so obvious to me that women should have the ability to control their own destiny and reproductive health. Thanks for bringing attention to the issue. Great post on the economist about this issue in the US: http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica

Though we can say it starts with educating the girl child it also has to do with the financial aspects. Educating her means more money out of the pocket. Educating her means less money in terms of what she could get if she picked up some odd job.
And though we can keep screaming against child labour the fact is child labour still exists because of financial reasons. That is why so many organisations offer education to children in such a way that the children have free time (to do whatever their family wants them to do)

Another social and cultural aspect one must consider is that women traditionally (in Bangladesh and in India) have to be married off. Which means dowry. Which is another added expense to the family.