With apologies to Virginia Woolf,
After reading this article, I should conclude that in my day women were treated this way quite often. Women were merely objects similar to houses or pets, and could certainly not easily own property. In my written work, “A Room of One’s Own,” I discuss how a woman in Shakespeare’s position would not have stood a chance at recognition for her talent as he had. She indeed would not have been up to producing such works of genius because women in that time and mine were not allowed the education that men were. We were merely expected to run a household, bear children and live our days that way until our death. To come back to the article aforementioned, women here are described trading sex for green cards when money could not be found to use. In my book, I mention how beating women was, in certain circumstances considered acceptable such as if a woman refused an arranged marriage. Marriage was rarely based on true love, but on a pact set between the families from soon after the children’s birth. Here I quote from my work a passage most fitting in this circumstance of subject matter.
“Indeed, if women had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think even greater. But this is a woman in fiction. In fact, . . . she was locked up, beaten and flung across the room” (Woolf 45).
This passage can be related to the trapped feeling women in this article feel when they want a green card but have no money. The women are pressured by immigration agents, who are the law enforcement to trade their bodies for United States citizenship. It shows that little has changed since my time where women were regarded more as property than people.
While glancing over the text of chapter four I recalled how I had written of how means by way of money helped women find their voice in my day. All the notable woman writers were wealthier, which thus allowed them their solitude and accordingly helped produce some of the notable books of my age. Means and solidarity were by no means easy to come upon however; women were either left land in a will or inherited money from a relative. Breaking from the harsh mold of society was a task worthy of recognition for not many succeeded in doing just that.
Find this article titled ‘Sex (with a married woman)= green card’ at: http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2008/03/21/sex-with-a-married-woman-greencard/