OK, so none of our classes have anything to do with South America so why an article about it? I saw this article in the IHT today about South America's growing trend of female Defense Ministers. Currently, four South American countries have named females to that post: Argentina, Chile, Ecuador and Uruguay (the latter three also have female Presidents). Pretty good for a continent that tends to be on the macho side. Check it out. Sorry you will have to cut and paste the address. For some reason, the link doesn't work for me.
http://iht.com/articles/2007/01/30/news/defense.php
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3 comments:
true that is interesting and probably a good thing but i look at the forms of government some of those counties in my life time have had and i think its could also be attributed to the wide swings of political thought instead of gender equality in most lines of work. i think i better stop there before i get into more trouble
i'm not confident enough of my knowledge of south America, which is close to non-existent, but one thing's for sure: we are seeing more women elected and/or appointed to high office worldwide. We have Angela Merkel in Germany and next door, France's first female Presidential candidate, Segoline Royal. She's taken a lot of very personal abuse, and is up against a popular Nicholas Sarkozy(the pride of Hungarians everywhere as the son of Hungarian 56er parents), but she soldiers on and she has a chance to win. In some respects, France is the unlikeliest place for female politicians, because it didn't give women the VOTE even until l945(!)...
as for the reasons why this is happening, I don't really know...I think Mrs. Thatcher blazed the trail, along with Golda Meir in Israel, and it just took the next generation a bit to catch up, maybe.
actually, upon some thought, i think german might be onto something there, i.e. attributing these developments to political trends or ideology. i recently polled a cross-section of friends, both dems and repubs, and asked each of them whether the country would elect an african-american or a woman. to a man and woman, all of them answered they believed it would, if the candidate in question was a good candidate and held positions of which they approved. so it may well be that we have moved beyond that stage, i.e. focusing on gender or race, and look now more at positions and thought.
i'm not sure i believe that, but my little unscientific sample seems to indicate that this might be true.
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