Unit1 The Burden of Womanhood
女人的负担
Too often in the Third World, a female‟s life is hardly worth living.
往往在第三世界，女性的生活几乎是不值得活的。
By: John Ward Anderson & Molly Moore
约翰.沃德.安德森和莫莉.摩尔1.When Rani returned home from the hospital cradling her newborn daughter, the men in the family slipped out of her mud hut while she and her mother-in-law mashed poisonous oleander seeds into a dollop of oil and dropped it into the baby‟s throat. As soon as darkness fell, Rani crept into a nearby field and buried her baby girl in a shallow, unmarked grave next to a small stream.
当拉尼抱着她刚出生的女儿从医院回到家时，男人们溜出了她的土屋，她和她的婆婆将有毒的夹竹桃种子捣碎成一团油，并将其塞到婴儿的喉咙里。夜幕一降临，拉尼就蹑手蹑脚地来到附近的一块土地，将她的女婴埋在一条小溪浅旁边的一个不深的、没有标记的坟墓内。
2.“I never felt any sorrow,” Rani, a farm laborer with a weather-beaten face, said through an interpreter. “There was a lot of bitterness in my heart toward the baby because the gods should have given me a son.”
“我从来没有感到任何悲哀”，脸部饱经风霜的拉尼通过翻译说，“我的心对孩子充满了辛酸，因为神本应该赐予我一个儿子”。
3.Each year hundreds and perhaps thousands of newborn girls in India are murdered by their mothers simply because they are female. Some women believe that sacrificing a daughter guarantees a son in the next pregnancy. In other cases, the family cannot afford the dowry that would eventually be demanded for a girl‟s marriage.
在印度每年有数百甚至数千名新生女婴被他们的母亲谋杀，只因为他们是女孩。有些妇女认为，牺牲一个女儿将保证下次怀孕是儿子。在其他情况下，家庭买不起女孩结婚时所需的嫁妆。
4.And for many mothers, sentencing a daughter to death is better than condemning her to life as a woman in the Third World, with cradle-to-grave discrimination, poverty, sickness and drudgery. 对于很多母亲而言，判处女儿死刑胜过让她在第三世界作为一个女人生活，经历一辈子的歧视、贫困、疾病和劳苦。
5. While women in the United States and Europe-----after decades of struggling for equal rights----often measure sex discrimination by pay scales and seats in corporate board rooms, women in the Third World gauge discrimination by mortality rates and poverty levels.
虽然欧美国家的妇女，在经过了几十年对平等权利的抗争之后，通常以工薪标准和董事会中的席位来衡量性别歧视，但第三世界的妇女以死亡率和贫困程度来衡量歧视。
6. “Women are the most exploited among the oppressed,” says Kauna Chanana Ah med, a New Delhi anthropologist who has studied the role of women in developing countries. “I don‟t think it ‟s even possible to eradicate discrimination, it‟s so deeply ingrained.”
“妇女是最受压迫和剥削的”，研究妇女在发展中国家的地位的新德里的人类学家Karuna
Chanana Ahmed说，“我认为消除歧视甚至是不可能的，因为歧视已经根深蒂固。”
7. This is the first in a series that will examine the lives of women in developing countries around the globe where culture, religion and the law often deprive women of basic human rights and sometimes relegate them to almost subhuman status. From South America to South Asia, women are often subjected to a lifetime of discrimination with little or no hope of relief.
这是第一次系列地调查全世界范围内发展中国家妇女的生活，这些国家里的文化、宗教和法律常常剥夺妇女们的基本人权，并时常将她们归入几乎低于人类的地位。从南美到南亚，妇女通常遭受一生的歧视，很少或根本没有希望获得减轻。
8. As children, they are fed less, denied education and refused hospitalization. As teenagers, many are forced into marriage, sometimes bought and sold like animals for prostitution and slave labor. As wives and mothers, they are often treated little better than farmhands and baby machines. Should they outlive their husbands, they frequently are denied inheritance, banished from their homes and forced to live as beggars on the streets.
作为孩子，她们被给予的食物少、被剥夺了教育，并被拒绝住院。作为青少年，许多人被迫结婚，有时像动物一样被买卖从事卖淫活动和辛苦的劳动。作为妻子和母亲，她们的待遇与雇农和婴儿机器相比没有区别。如果她们活得时间比她们的丈夫久，她们经常被拒绝继承遗产，被驱逐出她们的家园，被迫在大街上以乞讨为生。
9.Although, the forms of discrimination vary tremendously among regions, ethnic groups and age levels in the developing world. Shahla Zia , an attorney and women‟s activist in Islamabad, Pakistan, says there is a theme:”Overall, there is a social and cultural attitude where women are inferior---and discrimination tends to start at birth.”
巴基斯坦伊斯兰堡的律师和妇女活动家Shahla Zia说，虽然发展中国家不同地区、不同民族和不同年龄层次之间的歧视形式差异巨大，但存在一个统一的主题：“总的来说，在社会和文化的态度中妇女处于劣势，歧视往往从出生时开始。”
10.Sociologists and government officials began documenting sporadic examples of female infanticide in India about 10 years ago. The practice of killing newborn girls is largely a rural phenomenon in India; although its extent has not been documented, one indication came in a recent survey by the Community Services Guild of Madras, a city in Tamil Nadu. Of the1,250 women questioned, the survey concluded that more than half had killed baby daughters.
大约10年前，社会学家和政府官员开始记录印度杀害女婴的零星的例子。在很大程度上，杀害新生女婴的做法是印度农村的现象，虽然其程度尚未记载，但泰米尔纳德邦马德拉斯社区服务协会的一项调查已经表明了这一点。在1250名被质疑的妇女中，调查得出的结论是，超过一半的妇女杀死了女婴。
11. In urban areas easier access to modern medical technology enables women to act before birth. Through amniocentesis, women can learn the sex of a fetus and undergo sex-selective abortions. At one clinic in Bombay, of 8,000 abortions performed after amniocentesis, 7,999 were female fetuses, according to a recent report by the Indian government. To be sure, female infanticides and sex-selective abortion are not unique to India. Social workers in other South Asian states believe that some communities also condone the practice.
