This week, a 20-year old woman in Subalpur in West Bengal was sentenced to be gang raped by the sick, deranged conservatives who run her village. The village chief and the 13 rapists were arrested yesterday. After she couldn't pay a 25,000 rupee fine ($459) for dating a Muslim man, the village council decreed she be raped. She's in the hospital after the brutal assault but has identified all 13 of her attackers.
Condemning the incident, a member of the National Commission for Women, Nirmala Sawant Prabhavalkar, highlighted the plight of women in West Bengal state and said that justice should be ensured in this case.“No one has the right to order a woman's rape. This is unlawful and those responsible for the crime would be punished. The victim should be given justice. This is a horrific incident. In wake of this and several other incidents, our commission will hold discussions with the chief minister of West Bengal,” she said.India, with its poorly trained police force and clogged courts, is struggling to curb violence against women.Social commentators say patriarchal attitudes towards women have not been diluted by more than a decade of rapid economic growth.Reports of rape, dowry deaths, molestation, sexual harassment and other crimes against women rose by 6.4 percent in 2012 from the previous year, the government said.
Just as this sickening news was breaking here in the U.S., a backward Arkansas patriarchal type Republican with a similar primitive and featful/hateful mindset, was rallying Republican officials to keep fighting their relentless War Against Women. Preaching to the faithful, Huckabee said Democrats tell women “they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing them for them a prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of government.” He didn't order all the old white men in the audience to rape anyone.Today PBS presented an inspirational story about how Elizabeth Blackwell became the first female doctor in the U.S. A dying friend in Cincinnati told her a female physician would have made her treatment for uterine cancer much more comfortable.
It was a cold, wintry day in upstate, western New York when a 28-year-old Elizabeth Blackwell received her diploma from the Geneva Medical College. As she accepted her sheepskin, Charles Lee, the medical school's dean, stood up from his chair and made a courtly bow in her direction.Only two years earlier, in October of 1847, her medical future was not so certain. Already rejected at schools in Charleston, Philadelphia and New York, matriculating into Geneva represented her only chance of becoming a medical doctor.Dean Lee and his all male faculty were more than hesitant to make such a bold move as accepting a woman student. Consequently, Dr. Lee decided to put the matter up to a vote among the 150 men who made up the medical school's student body. If one student voted "No," Lee explained, Miss Blackwell would be barred from admission.Apparently, the students thought the request was little more than a silly joke and voted unanimously to let her in; they were surprised, to say the least, when she arrived at the school ready to learn how to heal.Geneva Medical College required only a year and a half of formal lectures, and young Elizabeth found her new home to be somewhat daunting.Too shy to ask questions of her fellow classmates or even her teachers, she figured out on her own where to purchase her books and how to study the rather arcane language of 19th century medicine.Most medical students of this era were raucous and rude; it was not uncommon for crude jokes and jeers to be hurled at the lecturer, no matter what the subject. But with Miss Blackwell in the room, as the legend goes, her male classmates quieted down and immediately became more studious than those the Geneva faculty had taught in the past.One of her greatest hurdles was the class in reproductive anatomy. The professor, James Webster, felt that the topic would be too "unrefined" for a woman's "delicate sensibilities" and asked her to step out of the lecture hall. An impassioned Blackwell disagreed and somehow convinced Webster to let her stay, much to the support of her fellow students.Nevertheless, medical school and her summer clinical experiences at the Blockley Almshouse in Philadelphia were hardly a bed of roses. Few male patients were eager to let her examine them, and not a few of her male colleagues treated her with great animosity.Undaunted, Elizabeth persevered and gained a great deal of clinical expertise, especially in the treatment of one of the most notorious infectious diseases of the poor: typhus fever, which became the subject of her doctoral thesis.In April of 1849, Dr. Blackwell crossed the Atlantic to study in the medical meccas of Paris and London. In June, she began her post-graduate work at the famed Parisian maternity hospital, La Maternité, and was acclaimed by her teachers as a superb obstetrician.Unfortunately only few months later, on Nov. 4, 1849, while treating a baby with a bacterial infection of the eyes, most likely gonorrhea contracted from the infant's mother while passing through the birth canal, Elizabeth contaminated her left eye and lost sight in it. This injury prevented her from becoming a surgeon.She subsequently studied at St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London. Ironically, she was permitted to practice all the branches of medicine save gynecology and pediatrics-- the two fields in which she was to garner her greatest fame.When she returned to the United States in 1850, she began practice in New York City but found it tough going, and the patients in her waiting room were few and far between. In 1853, she established a dispensary for the urban poor near Manhattan's Tompkins Square.By 1857, she had expanded the dispensary into the New York Infirmary for Women and Children. One of her colleagues there was her younger sister Emily, who was the third woman in the U.S. to be granted a medical degree.…Dr. Blackwell returned to London a number of times during the 1860s and 1870s and helped establish a medical school for women, the London School of Medicine for Women, in 1874-5. She remained a professor of gynecology there until 1907, when she suffered serious injuries after falling down a flight of stairs… Most often remembered as the first American woman to receive an M.D. degree, Dr. Blackwell worked tirelessly to secure equality for all members of the medical profession. Many might argue we still have a long way to go.
Doctor Blackwell was adamantly opposed to getting married and to have to depend on a man for his livelihood. Her sister Emily was the third woman in the U.S. to ever get a medical degree.