71: The Self-Empowered Woman: Kankuben Lalabhai Parmar

Dear Followers,

Today - thanks to Guy Trebay and the New York Times - I'd like to tell you about an amazing woman who has defied all odds and become an international business woman even though, for many years, she'd never traveled outside her own home.

Kankuben Lalabhai Parmar is from the village of Madhutra in the Indian State of Gujarat. To get to Manhattan, where her crafts are being sold at the Asia Society, her journey involved an oxcart, a trishaw, a jeep flatbed. an open-topped shuttle, and then her first-ever airplane ride.

Ms. Parmar officially belongs to a "scheduled caste," which meant that she was considered untouchable; the men were limited to their region or village, and the women were traditionally bound to their homes. She is now 50 years old, but never met a man who wasn't a close relative until she was an adult.

Married at 14, she is the mother of seven children, and her life changed dramatically when (two decades ago) the not-for-profit Sewa Project came to her village to help preserve native handicrafts and create "alternative employment."

Ms. Parmar creates patchwork embroideries that often include small pieces of mirror that she buys (as scrap) by the pound. Her pillow covers, for example, require almost a week's worth of sewing and sell for about $15 at her local market. Today, she earns about $60 a month, which has made her the family's chief breadwinner.

As she told Trebay, "When I was a girl, all the assets belonged to the father or the husband or the brother...now that I have my own business and make my own money, my husband shows me respect."

Ms. Parmar is an informal ambassador for Sewa and the Crafts Council of India; it's estimated that in India alone 40 to 60 million people earn part of their living making crafts.

In New York, Ms Parmar visited museums, bought gifts at CVS for her daughters, and enjoyed all the sophistication of Manhattan even though she is illiterate and must use her thumbprint for a signature.

Twenty years have made a huge difference in the lives of the once-untouchable women of Madhutra, India. Their quiet and dignified example of global feminism should inspire us all.

Looking forward to your comments...

27. Nobel Prize-Winning Women

Dear Followers,

If you've been following the news you probably know that a record FIVE women won Nobel Prizes this year (the previous record was three, in 2004).

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The winners include:

Elizabeth Blackburn, 60, (dual U.S.-Austrailian citizenship) and Carol Grieder, 48, (American) who shared the Physiology/Medicine Nobel Prize with Jack Szostak. Greider worked in a research lab in UC Santa Barbara and (Chapter Thirteen: More Than Meets the Eye) was put into remedial classes as a schoolgirl because she had dyslexia.

Ada Yonath, 70, (Israel) who shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Steitz and Ramakrishnan (Americans).

Herta Mueller, 56, (Romanian-born German) won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Elinor Ostrom, 76, (American) the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences (shared with American Oliver Williamson). Ostrom is a professor at Indiana University and (Chapter Seventeen: Dreaming Your Own Dream) was discouraged from seeking a doctorate when she applied for graduate school.

The first woman to win a Nobel Prize was Marie Curie who (with her husband Pierre and Antoine Henri Becquerel) won the Physics Prize in 1903. She is the only woman woman to win two Nobel Prizes, because she also won in 1911, for Chemistry.

Forty Women have won Nobel Prizes, including Toni Morrison and Doris Lessing (Literature) and (Chapter Thirteen) Iranian Shirin Ebadi.

If you (like me) are obsessed with stories about female high-achievers, a book that might interest you is Nobel Prize Women in Science: Their Lives, Struggles, and Momentous Discoveries.

Looking forward to your comments...