A documentary called "A Walk to Beautiful" highlights the many facets of this oppression through the stories of fistula patients in Ethiopia.
"Fistula" is the medical term for a tear in a woman's vaginal wall which allows the passage of either feces or urine (or both), leading to continual incontinence. It is often a completely preventable result of prolonged childbirth, made all but inevitable for these women from the earliest ages. In situations where there is not enough food for the whole family, it is often (though not always) the women and girls who are underfed; boys are fed first because they are seen as the eventual "social security" of their parents. These girls are also worked incredibly hard hauling water and fuel wood and attending to daily household chores. The combination of extremely hard work and lack of food means that their growth is severely stunted. They are then kidnapped and raped or married off at incredibly young ages (thirteen, fifteen, etc.), resulting of course in pregnancies for which their bodies would not be prepared even if they were healthy and at the right size for their age. Medical care is another thing that globally is more likely to go to men than women, so of course the idea of prenatal care or a birth attended by a professional is laughable. The result is often births that are incredibly prolonged--as much as a week or ten days--and that result in stillborn infants, and severe damage to these young women's bodies. The incontinence that results from these fistulas adds immeasurably to their suffering--they are stigmatized because of the smell, physically debilitated, and prone to frequent, painful infections and other problems.
There are so many ways that women are oppressed, in just this one example, from just this one part of the world. It is staggering.
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