Women S Rights

Sometimes, it's the forbidden stories, the ones people are afraid to tell in full, the ones that emerge only in fragments, that reveal the truth about a place. This is such a story. It's being told now not because the complete truth is known, but because the story nags at those familiar with its outlines, and because it says as much about Iraq's progress as it does about Iraq's resistance to change.

The mourners carried her severed body inside the white brick mosque on a frosty morning before the sun rose, before the children arrived for school. Removing their shoes, wives and mothers shrouded in black passed through the women's prayer area, cordoned off from the men's with white drapes, and made their way to the washing room.

Lucie Kundra is something of a feminist rebel -- not because she wouldn't take her husband's name when they got married last year, but because she did. She adopted his surname exactly as it was, and in doing so defied centuries of tradition and the wishes of her own mother. That's because she refused to add the customary feminine suffix "ova" at the end, as the Czech language normally dictates; she answers to Lucie Kundra, not Lucie Kundrova.

Xie Lihua's parents wanted a boy. But on the day Xie was born in a poor village in rural Shandong province, her mother learned she had given birth to a second daughter. She wept in anger. And she slapped her new baby. "Another girl!" she cried. The year was 1951. Girls were considered a worthless commodity in an agrarian society that relied upon the strength of young men to flourish. Xie grew up knowing her place -- as a handmaiden to her younger brother.

Heidi Marie Petersen's knowledge of strategy and spreadsheets at a board meeting in Norway last year made a male colleague sit up and take note. "Wow! You actually know something about business," the man said after the meeting, Petersen says. The 49-year-old mother of two now serves on the boards of 11 companies, including Norsk Hydro, Europe's second-largest aluminum producer, and Aker Kvaerner, Norway's biggest engineering company.

Teresa Malof knew she wasn't in Kentucky anymore when a cleric issued a fatwa against her secret Santa gift exchange. Malof proposed the idea at the King Fahad National Guard Hospital, where she has worked for more than a decade.

Saudi Arabia, appearing Thursday for the first time before a United Nations women's rights panel, faced tough questions over restrictions on "virtually every aspect of a woman's life" in the kingdom. The U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women monitors adherence to a 1979 international bill of rights for women. Saudi Arabia ratified that pact in 2000, with the proviso that Islamic Sharia law would prevail if there were any contradiction with its provisions.

If Cal Poly San Luis Obispo had wanted to start an engineering program for a university in someplace like Norway, the proposal probably would have sailed through without much comment either on campus or off. But the school's plan to start an engineering department in Saudi Arabia is a different story.

Darlene Ewing is a Democratic activist, longtime feminist and very frustrated Hillary Rodham Clinton supporter. Like many who have dreamed of seeing a woman in the Oval Office, Ewing doesn't understand why women are drifting in ever-greater numbers away from Clinton toward her rival, Barack Obama. This trend, which has imperiled the candidacy of the woman once considered a shoo-in for her party's nomination, infuriates the frank-talking Texan.

She purses her lips in a "tsk-tsk" when asked difficult questions. Questions about her life, about the husband who beats her, the father who denies her an inheritance and a place to live. Slightly hunchbacked, her thin frame barely fills the several layers of donated clothing she wears. At 26, she looks 15. She has three children and an elementary-school education. When she showed up at the door of a women's shelter here, purple bruises blotched her face and framed her shattered, crooked nose.