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Komona is just 12 when she is brutally conscripted by rebel soldiers. Before long she falls pregnant under horrific circumstances. The best that can be said about her situation is that it offers fragile hope that life may be made to flourish even in a landscape of violence and death.
Western feminism rejects women who don't ascribe to certain rules, such as putting children in care, pursuing a career or even disliking men. Young women looking for an antidote to such aggressive, individualistic feminism may turn to Africa, where community-centric, gender-inclusive ideologies have been espoused for decades.
Women have fought the long, hard fight, marching into battle with a baby tugging on one heel and a man hanging off the other. And while the man has largely loosened his grip, the baby never will. Many women are still forced to submit, if not to patriarchy then certainly to maternal instinct. Thursday 8 March
When I'm scrabbling around wiping up cereal under the baby's highchair and she's twisting her milky fingers into my hair, what good is it to recall that it is due to the privileging of men's professional work and their superior earning power that it is me, not my husband, who is being subjected to this assault?
When I became a mother for the first time, my mother was there for her baby, not for mine. It had been a difficult birth. 'Heavens,' said Mum, 'You look just as you did after a hard day at school.' 'Oh, Mum,' I said, 'I'm so worried about him.' Mum laughed her head off. 'You're stuck with that feeling now.' How right she was.
Women have fought the long, hard fight, marching into battle with a baby tugging on one heel and a man hanging off the other. And while the man has largely loosened his grip, the baby never will. Many women are still forced to submit, if not to patriarchy then certainly to maternal instinct.
Germaine Greer has said she did not want to be a high priestess of feminism. What may have been extracted from her views and the constant evolution of feminism has been diminished by being reduced to a formula such as that used to denounce Melinda Tankard Reist.
Sydney mother Grace Wang was left paralysed from the waist down due to a botched epidural. When I first heard her story I recalled my own epidural experience with my firstborn, looking fixedly down at the floor trying to ignore the blood pooling around my feet. Childbirth can be a murderous business.
Cardinal Pell, with whom I have voiced disagreement, preached superbly at the mass of thanksgiving after the canonisation of Mary MacKillop. 'She does not deter us from struggling to follow her.' As we wrestle with the common good, let's make a place for all our fellow citizens.
Two poems from a series about Heinrich Himmler's personal masseur, Felix Kersten. He used his influence over Himmler to secure the release of many prisoners — much like Oscar Schindler.
Sydney filmmaker Claire McCarthy spent two months working among Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta. Like many Westerners with egalitarian pretensions, the characters in her film The Waiting City arrive in India bearing a tourist's naivety.
Adoption is shown to be a tumultuous process, as joyful and painful in its own way as pregnancy and birth. Lucy is unable to conceive, but suspects that the motherly bond is about much more than biology. Her husband Joseph, by contrast, values biology greatly.