Liz Burns of the United Reformed Church in the UK spent most of last year with CWM's Training in Mission (TIM) programme along with 10 other young people from CWM churches around the world. Below she reflects on women's rights after spending six months in India.
When I was a child my sisters used to laugh at me. In fact they used to shout at me too for the very same reason: I had a special talent for turning any conversation into a debate about women's rights. I was the type of girl who gave feminists a bad name. I never lost an argument. I was always right and nothing in life was fair for women. As I got older I mellowed a bit (whether it was due to maturity or the ever-increasing protests of my sisters is up for debate). I had finally noticed that loud arrogant protests were not encouraging respect for women.
I was delighted to hear that I had been accepted on CWM's TIM programme last year and I remember making a conscious decision not to focus on women's issues. I was bored with women and their rights. I thought I knew all that I needed to know. I was in for a shock that let me know just how silly and naive I was. TIM bombarded me with experiences of women's rights (or lack of them) in the Church and society in both India and Britain. If I close my eyes and think of 'TIM', I see an explosion of women's faces: wrinkled faces and smooth faces, laughing faces and crying faces, frightening faces and frightened faces, pathetic faces, wise faces and childish faces, faces with names and anonymous faces.
These women taught me that women can share each other's pain and women can also oppress each other. I worked in a women's hostel where there was a cycle of violence which began with constant verbal abuse from the superior towards her staff and escalated into violence from the staff towards those in their care. I witnessed tears, cuts, bruising and even beatings. I struggled to understand how women could so openly oppress each other. Through living, laughing and crying with women from different stages of the cycle of violence, I was given the opportunity to share their pain. It became clear that the root of their oppression was the very lack of basic human rights that they were all denied simply because they were women.
These women inspired me and showed me how easily power can be abused. I met a woman who had been excommunicated from the church because she took a stand on an issue of justice. Far from letting go of her faith and her sense of calling, she defied those who tried to oppress her, and over the years built up a voluntary organisation which has and is successfully liberating oppressed peoples. I met some churchwomen who were put in positions of power simply because of their marital status. I questioned some of the actions of these women including their motivation. But by living alongside them I began to notice that these positions of power and responsibility bestowed upon them were in fact a denial of their human right to be viewed as individuals not just as extensions of their husbands.
These women taught me exactly what sacrifice was, and these same women taught me how easy it is to ignore the oppressed. I saw women who left their homes and their families, in a society where this was greatly frowned upon, to go out to work for a minimal wage in order to encourage other women to stand up for their rights. I saw women who work long, hard days of physical labour for half the amount of any man only to use it to feed their husband's drinking habit. I saw women who had been given positions of authority and power, but who failed to desire or see the potential to make a difference for their sisters and themselves. I saw a poster in India, which said that 'women's rights are human rights' and all of a sudden I realised just how much I didn't know about the oppression of women.
I close my eyes now and see those women's faces again and thank God for them. I have been lead to believe from my TIM experience that mission is just as much about freeing the oppressed as it is about conversion to the Christian faith, and I learnt the true extent to which women are oppressed. The majority of the world's women are not having sophisticated arguments about how women's brains differ from men's brains, but simply asking for their basic human rights.
TIM has changed me. I have been shown the value and the need for solidarity among all oppressed peoples, but especially women. I have had to ask myself who do I oppress? Who do I abuse? Who do I ignore? The answers I have found have frightened me. Living in a global world, we all have the potential to oppress, abuse and ignore our sisters in faraway lands without even knowing that we are doing it. TIM has challenged me to speak out about the potential that we all have in a global world to share each others' pain, to stand in solidarity with our brothers and sisters and make a sacrifice to free the oppressed in Christ's name.