Not all of them look beyond their individual experience to see that the system is rotten; my mother used to think for years that she could be a good enough wife that my father wouldn’t beat her. My cousin in India, when I was visiting, kept asking if I knew any men she could marry, at a time when she had only recently uncovered her new husband’s plot to sell her to traffickers(!) and had escaped and turned him over to the authorities. She is educated and middle class and it’s not about money. Still, there is an active feminist movement, at least in India. Religion tells them they are inferior, but they don’t all buy into it, just like we don’t here. It’s okay to say that this is wrong, that things are unequal there and that treating women as the property of men leads to daily, casual human rights violations.

As an American woman I’m sad she didn’t marry a man she loved, but that’s a notion I think I’ll touch less because I know so little of their culture. I get the impression that’s significantly harder to do in an ultra conservative society like that, so I feel as though she got a good deal out of what she was dealt. It seems rare for women to take power back in places a council can order gang rape for something she wasn’t even the list of defendants for.