Opression in a Thousand Splendid Suns Essay Example for Free

Opression in a Thousand Splendid Suns Essay Taslima Nasrin once said: â€Å"Those religions that are oppressive to women are also against democracy, human rights, and freedom of expression. † This quote also applies to a book called a thousand splendid suns by Khaled hosseini and Deepa Metha’s Film Water. A thousand splendid suns in a book about two women in Afghanistan with an abusive husband. They struggle for survival and for their human rights that have been overlooked by the Taliban and a patriarchal society. Water is a movie about widows living in India. They are sent to the country side to live with other widows supposedly so they can live pure lives. In actuality they are cast aside and denied the basic respect all humans deserve. Ironically, the only way they can make enough money to survive is by committing acts as impure as it gets. They are forced to turn to prostitution. These two stories show that a cultural society’s refusal to change religious practices causes the oppression of women. The characters Mariam, kalyani, and chuyia demonstrate this. Mariam is a woman living in Afghanistan from the book A Thousand Splendid Suns. Mariam grew up very poor living in a small hut excluded from society. As a child she was taught only to endure and was never given the opportunity to stand up for herself. Mariam was the daughter of a maid that her father Jalil had an affair with and he was very ashamed of this. To solve this â€Å"problem† he got rid of her. Jalil married her off to a much older man named Rasheed. Shortly after the start of their marriage, Rasheed rapes her. He justifies it with the Quran. â€Å"‘It’s what married people do. It’s what the prophet himself and his wives did. There is no shame. ’† (Hosseini, 77). In this quote Rasheed refers to the prophet Muhammad in the Quran. This shows how Rasheed perverted the events Quran, the sacred Islamic text, to justify the rape of a young girl who hadn’t even turned 16. Marrying young girls still in their teens is an old custom that is embedded in Islam and the Afghan culture. Society’s refusal to change this practice caused the ruthless humiliation of a young girl and in the long run made the oppression of all women an accepted practice. Kalyani is a character in the movie Water. She is a widow most likely in her 20s who never met her husband. Her husband died shortly after her marriage and was sent to the ashram as a young girl. Since she is the only young widow in the ashram she is forced to turn to prostitution to bring in extra money so the widows can at least have enough money for 1 meal a day. Her entire life story shows the subjugation of women. She was married at around the age of 10 because of religious traditions that have not changed in hundreds of years. This tradition has given men the power to oppress women. This oppression is shown through the death of the husband. If the husband dies before the wife, the wife is sent away. If the opposite happen the husband is free to remarry as he pleases. This happens because of the religious belief that when a husband dies, half of the woman also dies. This makes it easier to mistreat women because it makes them seem less than human. It is also believed that the death of a husband is punishment for something done in a previous life. Society’s refusal to change theses Hindi beliefs and practices create the oppression of women by making their mistreatment seem justified and by making them seem less than human. Chuyia is a young girl who was married at the age of 8 and was widowed the next day. She doesn’t even remember getting married but is forced to suffer the same fate as Kalyani. She is young and innocent and her innocence causes her to question practices that everyone else simply accepts. Deepa Metha uses this character to point out inconsistencies in the Hindi religion and traditional society. At one point in the story she asks why there isn’t a place for men to go if they are widowed. She is quickly ridiculed by both men and women. This event shows that the refusal to change religious practices has brainwashed both men and women to accept and even endorse the oppression of women. Taslima Nasrin words are clearly tied to the theme of these two stories. She explains in her quote that a religion cannot be providing people basic rights if it discriminates against women. The theme reiterates the same message by declaring that religion can sometimes cause oppression of women. These three characters show how traditions and old religious practices have made the oppression of women possible all over the world. By displaying this message in the authors’ books and movies, the authors hope to encourage all people around the world to not follow blindly old traditions and practices. They want people to decide for themselves what is right and what is wrong. When people fail to do this, bad things start happening such as the oppression, humiliation, and subjugation of women who are actually just as intelligent, strong, and able as any man.

Abortion :: essays research papers

  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Abortion is murder. It is the process in which an undeveloped human being is killed, and unable to live the life it could have lived. Why is it okay for women to kill a human being through abortion and not be punished, when someone else is intentionally killing someone and being sent to life in prison? A fetus is helpless, it cannot scream or run away when an abortion is happening. The person who is supposed to be the protector is the person who made the choice to murder it. Abortion is not the answer. So why do women chose to have them? Abortions happen because women are scared of the responsibilities of caring for a child; they are both financially and mentally unstable. But most importantly abortions happen because women don’t want the baby. Whose fault is it? The women are the mistake. They made the choice to have unprotected sex. Now after they had their fun, they run. They run away from reality. Women run to abortions as means of relief but little do they know their reality is waiting to happen.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  According to B.A. Robinson many women who have abortions are under the age of twenty-five, are unmarried or separated from their spouse, and poor. In a study by Torres and Forrest a vast majority of women have abortions because they are financially unstable, they feel that they are incapable of raising a child; they feel that their life would drastically change, and they are too young and immature to raise a child. Why is it that after the child is conceived that women start to realize their own faults? If women were to realize their flaws ahead of time, abortion rates would be much lower, and aborted fetuses might have been given a chance to develop and to live a life. Abortion may seem like the answer to all the problems. But women don’t realize that they are not only killing a human being, but also endangering their own lives.

Harvest of Empire by Juan Gonzalez

The book Harvest of Empire offers many examples of the factors leading to migration, which include economic and political persecution. The book has a direct connection between the hardships Latinos faced economically and military in their perspective countries. By reading this book it is clearly stated that Latinos are on the verge of becoming the largest minority group in America. Juan Gonzalez presents a devastating perspective on U. S. history rarely found in mainstream publishing aimed at a popular audience. Few of those countries were immigrants from Puerto Rico, Mexico, Dominican Republic and Central Americans.Gonzales develops his thesis by asserting that Latin American immigration and Latino presence in the United States are markedly different from European immigration history to this country in at least three main ways: Latino immigration is closely tied to the growth and needs of the U. S. empire; race and language attitudes in this country have had the effect of moving Lat in Americans not from immigrant to mainstream status, but rather from an immigrant to a racial caste status and how Latin Americans have arrived when the United States is already the dominant world power. Harvest of Empire† mentions how since the 1820’s Mexicans have migrated to the United States. They’re the second largest immigrant nationality in our history. Meixco is the most populous Spanish speaking country in the world. Most of the country’s wealth flows outside of Mexico, meaning the U. S. After the tragedy of World War II , the United States reached an agreement with Mexico to import Mexicans for a certain period of time and after their harvest was done they’ll go back to their country.This was the bracero program, which brought millions of immigrants into the United States only for seasonal work and once they were supposed to leave, they managed to stay illegally in order for them to provide to their families. World War II also made Mexica n Americans active in the U. S armed forces. â€Å"Santos Molina and Manuel Garza were two Canales family member who served in combat, in the same army so many of their ancestors had fought against.Nearly all his men were killed or wounded that day, and while Molina survived unscathed, he was severely wounded by machine gun fire later in Germany†. ( 103) Even after all this tragedy of people being killed Mexican Americans returned home and still faced racial discrimination. Tejano, Texans of Spanish and Mexican descent, formed several organizations in the early 20th century to protect themselves from official and private discrimination, but made only partial progress in addressing the worst forms of official ethnic discrimination.The movement to overturn the many forms of state-sponsored discrimination directed at Hispanic Americans was strongest in Texas during the first fifty years of the 20th century. It was just right after World War II that returning veterans joined the League of United Latin American citizens (LULAC) to end segregation. Their main goal was to have equal rights for Mexicans. â€Å"According to the U. S Census, tejanos comprised 32. 4 percent of the workers in the state and owned 33 percent of its wealth†. (102) Between 1961 and 1986 more than 400,000 people legally immigrated to the United States from the Dominican Republic. More than 300,000 Dominicans lived in New York City by 1990, and the total was expected to reach 700,000 early in the millennium, making Dominican migration one of the largest to this country of the past forty years†. (117) The causes of the Dominican immigration are various and have changed over time. the first significant immigration from the Dominican Republic to the United States was in large part the product of political and social instability at home.Those who opposed or had reason to fear the new regime in 1965 and those who were fleeing violence throughout the 1960s came to the United State s in notable numbers. As time went on, however, and the political situation stabilized, Dominicans continued to emigrate, because of limited employment opportunities and poor economic conditions. Through the 1930s, 40's and 50’s, the Dominican Republic was ruled by the former cattle rustler and now dictator, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, better known in the United States as simply Trujillo. He surrounded himself with murderers who kept the public intimidated.The Dominicans who came at this time were usually more educated and more politically active. â€Å"One 1980 study revealed that 41 percent of New York City’s Dominican immigrants had completed ten years of high school or better, nearly twice the average of city dwellers in the Dominican Republic†. (125)Once they arrived, they started making their own business like owning their own bodegas and supermarkets. Most Dominicans work in nonunionized workplaces for wages that most â€Å"established† Americ ans would refuse. Many Dominicans have encountered race prejudice in the United States also.The mixed Afro-Hispanic heritage of many Dominicans has led them to be categorized as black by white Americans, they have encountered the same racial prejudice that African Americans have experienced for centuries. Despite the accusations by their compatriots that they have been assimilated into American culture, Dominicans have tended to be seen by Americans as especially resistant to assimilation and committed to their country, culture, and language of origin. Dominicans also joined political parties and even manage to start their own organization.Most Dominicans that arrived in the 1960’s began to settled themselves on the Upper West of Manhattan, Washington Heights. Dominican Americans are one of the newer national-cultural communities in the United States. They are still in process of creating a unique place for themselves here. Their relationships to the United States and its cul ture and to the Dominican Republic and Dominican culture are still evolving. However, the Dominican American community will find its own ways of living in the United States, and will make its own unique culture.Puerto Rico has been an unincorporated territory of the United States, they’re the onlyLatin Americans who once they arrived to the U. S they’re already U. S citizens, without the need of a resident card. The massive migration of Puerto Ricans to the United States was largest in the early and late 20th century. Between the 1950s and the 1980s, large numbers of Puerto Ricans migrated to New York, especially to the Bronx, and Spanish Harlem. Juan Gonzalez shares his story and the reason why his family and himself moved to the U.S and settled in â€Å"El Barrio† is due to the fact that jobs over there didn’t provide sufficient money to provide for his big family. â€Å"The 1930’s were the most turbulent in Puerto Rico’s modern history , and Ponce, where my family had settled, was the center of the storm. The Depression turned the island into a social inferno even more wretched than Haiti today†. (84) Meaning that they were facing hard times. There was a lot of violence and crime. By the 1960’s, more than a million Puerto Ricans were living in the United States with jobs like washing dishes in hotels, restaurants, maintenance in apartment buildings, factories or bodegas. 90) â€Å"The Puerto Rican community became dominated during the 1980’s by two different social classes, both highly dependent on government. † â€Å"Massive disinvestment by government in public schools and epidemics of drug and alcohol abuse, all tore up the quality of city life†. (95) They also faced identity and language problems. Juan Gonzalez throughout the whole book has a combination of historical analysis that led to immigration and racial discrimination.He describes in details the experiences of working c lass families from different countries like Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Central America and Dominicans and how they have approach to assimilate their new lifestyle once they get to the United States. The author gives out reasons of how immigrants really go through hardships in order to get to America and live â€Å"The American Dream†. Latinos don’t just come here to get on government programs like Section A, welfare, etc. They actually come here for a better prosperity for them and their families even though this may cause them to be far away from them.

The Positive Parenting Program The Triple P Program

The Positive Parenting Program also known as the Triple P Program is a proposed study developed to help improve parent adolescent relationships. The target audience for this study will include single mothers and their adolescent children who live in underserved communities. I hypothesized that poverty can lead to maladaptive childhood outcomes for children. I analyzed five articles. Each article I examined focused on the negative effects that contribute to poor parenting and harmful child outcomes. There has been evidence to state that depression, poverty, and family structure all contribute to poor parenting skills. The Triple P will be divided into three components. These components will include education, parent and child communication skills, and group counseling. Throughout the program, mothers will slowly develop on how to practice positive parenting skill. 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