Just as Pol Pot's victims could have gardened the killing fields. Still, I think I understand how my friend could entertain his cozy illusion. Our own culture is rife with fundamentalist attitudes that restrict the freedoms of women, and since they are so ingrained and unnoticed here, they leave us conditioned to accept even more radical suppressions elsewhere. In our own culture, as surely as in Islamic countries, religious fundamentalism is the hand that holds women down. Catholic women can't be priests.
Baptist women are to submit to their husbands.
When women struggled for the right to vote, they were struggling against the fundamentalist religious idea, not unlike the Taliban's, that women belonged in the home, where their voices could not be heard. To this day, when women fight for economic parity, they are opposed by the powerful fundamentalist notion that men have a more inherent right to be paid for their day's work. In our own state, the battle shows up most clearly in state-enforced efforts by religious fundamentalists to deny girls important education relating to birth control. Here, as always and everywhere, education is the real threat to fundamentalist control. Keep a girl uneducated and you will keep her at home.