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![]() Women steppe out in Mongolia
![]() While many return to a traditional lifestyle, Mongolian women are spearheading change
By Tim Whewell
Listen to this programme in full As comunism collapsed in the Soviet Union, street protests eventually forced a change of regime. The withdrawal of Soviet subsidies led to industrial collapse, throwing tens of thousands out of work and fuelling massive inflation. Many families fled the cities and reverted to traditional nomadic livestock herding on the open steppe.
But what's even more surprising is that many of the most dynamic of those groups are run not by men -- the traditional rulers of society -- but by women. And they've become driving forces of social change.
But as demonstrators took to the streets, she was swept along by events, able to use the Western contacts she'd acquired through her job to help the pro-democracy movement. Enkhtuya and fellow women activists soon realised that in male-dominated structures, they would inevitably end up doing backroom work. And so they founded Mongolia's first non-governmental organisation, the Liberal Women's Brain Pool - initially a mistranslation of the English term "think-tank", but a name they've come to value for the attention it generates. Women from the Brain Pool fanned out across the country's vast distances, teaching democracy not only in towns but also to the 40pc or so of the population who still live isolated lives in gers - traditional round felt tents. Since then the organisation's grown to include more than 190 branches and 7,500 volunteers, and it's inspired the creation of dozens of other campaigning women's groups.
Its voter education programme has ensured astonishingly high turn out rates of over 90pc in all elections in the last decade. And it's done battle with the male-dominated political establishment to force state institutions to open up to public scrutiny. Thanks to Women for Social Progress, Mongolians can now find out how their elected representatives have voted in parliament. And they can make use of a special "Government Owner's Handbook" published by the group which contains the previously-secret phone numbers of state officials. Although WSP proudly keeps the word "women" in its title, more and more men are volunteering to join the organisation because no other groups have proved as dynamic in bringing about reform.
One is women's astonishingly high level of education compared to that of men: 84pc of the country's university graduates are female, as are 77pc of doctors and 60pc of lawyers. That's partly a legacy of socialism. But even further back in history, women were accustomed to being decision-makers. They ran their households and their communities for long periods while men were away hunting or herding, or on military campaigns. For a single woman to head a family has long been common and socially acceptable in Mongolia. The tradition began before the Communist revolution, when almost half the young men used to become Buddhist monks. And more recently in harsh regions such as the Gobi Desert, men have tended to drift to towns in search of an easier life, leaving women to look after herds and have children by passing peddlers and truck-drivers. Where Mongolian women have failed to make a break-though is in the formal political arena. Even after fresh elections earlier this month (July 2000), there are only a tiny number of female MPs. But while women's organisations are working hard to change that, it's considered less of a set-back than it might have been a few years ago.
They may even be sowing seeds of democracy in Stalinist North Korea. "When the official North Korean women's organisation sent a delegation here," says Enkhtuya, "they started off by asking us to sing a song in praise of our leaders. They were shocked when we said we didn't know any. But by the end of the visit, they seemed to have relaxed a great deal. They wept when it was time to go home." Also in this edition of Crossing Continents, a look at the Green Revolution that's turning Mongolia into a nation of gardeners and teaching the meat-loving descendants of Genghis Khan to appreciate salad. |
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24 Nov 99 | Asia-Pacific
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