Ho, March 4, GNA – Miss Leda Limann of the African Legal Aid, a non-governmental organisation, on Thursday cautioned wives to resist the urge to dictate to their husbands in a bid to assert their rights.
On the contrary women activism should be seen as a project aimed at equipping women to be skilful, knowledgeable and confident in changing their own mindset and those of their male counter-parts and society. Miss Limann said this at a Trainer of Trainers Workshop for women leaders in Ho organised by the “Women’s Assistance And Business Association (WABA) a non-governmental organisation.
Miss Limann said Ghana had been making qualitative progress towards eliminating conditions of societal stereotypes that discriminate against women and in promoting and protecting the dignity of women even though at a slow pace especially in the context of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) of 1979.
She said the current wave of focus on some cultural practices as far as women’s rights were concerned was not to question the country’s cultural practices en-block but to get rid of those that have outlived their relevance.
Miss Limann said some cultural practices such as wife inheritance for example were relevant in times past because it served as a means of ensuring widow’s continued welfare on account of her having lost her membership of her family once she got married.
Similarly while in the present dispensation it would amount to infringing a widow’s right to privacy by having other women keep watch over her, in the past the rationale was to prevent such widows from committing suicide by keeping her company and taking her mind off her loss.
Speaking on gender, Miss Mavis Adjeley Okang, Press Relations and Documentation Officer of WABA, said gender was not about sex but the way society assigned roles between the sexes.
