Message-ID: <s3525549.027@crs.loc.gov> Date: Mon, 14 Apr 1997 16:01:21 -0500 From: Jonathan Sanford <mailto:JSANFORD@CRS.LOC.GOV> Subject: Educating girls -Reply To: mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU
Dear David,Education for girls does actually reduce birth rates. And it's not just because the girls are too busy studying to mess around! Rather, it is because they start to see that they have other options besides early marriage and lots of children. And their future economic prospects are not defined by the number of children they raise to maturity. They also have fewer kids because they are better able to raise them. Also, if women have more education they tend to have more social standing and more ability to insist that their sexual partners take precautions. Or they feel themselves more able to tell an abusive or risky partner to take a hike, confident that they can find another. Most poor illiterate 14 year old girls don't think they have that kind of bargaining power.
Young girls may not have much choice in husbands if their fathers make the choices for them in order to get them onto someone else's dinner roster. When girls aren't worth much, their menfolk don't protect them much -- other than safeguarding their virginity until they are sold or married. And that protection of virginity is more a function of protecting the family's honor than of protecting the girl's future. The girl can argue that her new husband must wear condoms, but he may not listen to her if she's got little status. (If her husband isn't much older than she is, then the real power in the family will probably be the mother in law. And she'll also have her own agenda, which doesn't put the girl's preferences very high on the list.) If the girl doesn't go along with her husband's conditions, then he might send her back to her father, who'll probably be unhappy to find her back at his dinner table. The road then to the whorehouse or the sweatshop can often be very short. Nobody will want to feed her unless she cooperates and she lacks any independent method of supporting herself because she has no education or skills.
Jon Sanford