I Am Malala

Every semester here at Palm Beach State College, a board of faculty and administrators meets and chooses a book to be the common reader as a part of the one college- one book initiative. As part of our ENC1101 course, we decided to participate in this initiative. The book that was chosen for us this semester is called I am Malala by Malala Yousafzai. Malala is a girl who was born in Swat Valley, Pakistan who is known for her human rights advocacy, especially for the education of women. Her advocacy of educating women in Swat Valley is what eventually led her to be shot in the head by the Taliban. The story of Malala exposes the sharp contrast between the right and freedoms of Pakistani women and the tights and freedoms enjoyed by American

Even if the male relative in only a few years old, he is still seen as higher up in the eyes of the public. Malala didn’t always have a male escort with her. She was often just with her female friends, which was probably very shocking for people around her to see. In the United States, women can go wherever they want whenever they want without having anyone to escort them, but even though us women can go where we please, if we are alone and something bad happens to us, people are very quick to blame us for whatever happened. For example, if a girl has had too much to drink at a party and a boy takes advantage of the situation, people will be very quick to blame the girl for not being cautious rather than the male for his actions. This has been seen across several college campuses. It’s a very difficult stigma to remove though since there are still women who will lie about something that happened to them such a “the mattress girl.” There was a girl named Emma Sulkowics from Columbia University who, for a performance piece called “Carry that Weight,” carried around her mattress around the campus after being assaulted in her own bedroom. Her story was later found to be false (Charen, Mona). There are many other heart-wrenching stories of assault that are completely true though that tend to be overlooked because of fabricated stories and general disbelief that things like this happen here in the

The people who work in lingerie sections in Pakistan are all men, and because generally the men working are not relatives of the females shopping, they are forbidden from helping with intimate things like bra sizing. Unlike women in Pakistan, all women above the age of sixteen are allowed to work in the United States. Even though women are allowed to all have jobs here in the United States, we tend to not be paid the same as a man for the same work. A white woman makes seventy five cents on a white male’s dollar, and even worse, compared to a white male’s dollar, a black female will only make sixty cents and a hispanic female will only make fifty five cents (Sheth, Sonar and Gould, Skye). Also, only is a woman’s pay for the same work lower than a male’s pay, a woman will often be given easier, more lady-like tasks at many jobs, assuming that a woman couldn’t possibly do a specific task as well or as effectively as a