Taliban’s Treatment of Women

Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Veiled Threat” (Opinion, Nov. 4) struck a chord with me. I was in the midst of reading “Nickel and Dimed,” her insightful, passionate, first-person account of the plight of the female underclass in this country when Sept. 11 happened. In the grim aftermath, I couldn’t help but feel that there were connections between that important book, our national tragedy and the years-long failure of the world community--starting with the U.S.--to respond to the Taliban’s brutality against women.

One of the connections is that the feminist movement in our country, apparently, has gone on a long lunch break. Back when I was coming of age in the late ‘60s, women of our country marched for empowerment not just for ourselves but for our sisters around the globe. Now, as we and our daughters have become the beneficiaries of remarkable social change, with the only clear and present danger being ongoing threats to our reproductive rights, that movement has fractured. Middle-class professional women and affluent stay-at-home moms are too wrapped up in their kids’ after-school sports, college prep and office politics to worry too much about how the janitorial help makes ends meet and, by extension, what it must be like to live in a society that denies females the basic rights to education and medical care. For the past few months, I’ve found myself asking more than once: Gloria Steinem, where are you?

Nina Stern McCullaugh

Sherman Oaks

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We hear a lot these days about the miserable situation of women in Afghanistan, yet almost nobody mentions the situation of women in other Arab countries, such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Dubai and Bahrain, which is very similar to that in Afghanistan. Are we more concerned about our enemies’ women than about our allies’ women?

Joshua Salik

Tucson

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Ehrenreich is inaccurate when she says the Taliban’s mistreatment of women has “finally been noticed.” Its mistreatment of women has been noticed for years. What has been unnoticed is its mistreatment of men. Ehrenreich herself points out that males are often conscripted as early as age 6. But it does not end there. It carries into adulthood as men are treated as either soldier-pawns or wallets. Maybe the reason we notice the misogyny but not the misandry is that we think of men the same way here in the U.S.

Marc Angelucci

Los Angeles