An Experiment in Women´s Rights

This past week found me, along with 4 other team members, in Tegucigalpa, participating in a poignant experiment in how women are viewed here in Honduras. A group of local non profits teamed up with United Nations to place 12 larger than life ¨wooden women¨ throughout the capital for 3 weeks to see how they would be treated.

The results were a visual confirmation of the machismo that is so deeply engrained in this culture. While many of the installations were filled with feminist messages solidarity and strength, many were written over with hate speech and vulgar drawings.

All of the installations were brought back to the capital as part of a larger campaign against violence towards women. After displaying the dolls, teams of artists began to work to restore and transform the statues into symbols of strength and creativity.

Being a woman in Honduras is hard. It is difficult/nearly impossible to walk down the street and not receive some kind of cat call or tssssst... anywhere. While many of the males who do the cat calling have yet to grow facial hair, too many are old enough to know better and often even have children with them... I have personally been told on various occassions that I need to be careful not to look ¨too pretty,¨ and, for the first time in my life, had to stop what I was doing and leave for fear of a male (GROSS!).

Women are expected to be quiet and submissive- example: even in the most progressive of families, the wife will eat after the husband or at a different table after serving him.

Most of you know that this does NOT jive with me :) I cook, you clean... you cook, I clean... I quickly learned that I would not make a very good Honduran wife!

Fortunately, I have the education and financial independence to be self suffucient, whereas most women here enter or stay in abusive and adulterous relationships as a survival mechanism (for lack of resources or fear of retaliation).

The majority of our campaigning right now focuses exclusively on women´s rights and trials for perpetrators, but I hope that one day we will be able to address the real issues of respect, understanding, and communication that support healthier cultures free of forced roles, assumption and judgement.