[fromthestart]

> Washing clothes without a washing machine, scrubbing dusty floors, cooking on charcoal stoves.

Your anglocentric view severely overestimates the similarly between our standards of cleanliness and theirs. I doubt these women are washing loads of clothes daily, if they even have more than a handful of items of clothing, or mopping dirt floors with any frequency.

Cooking on charcoal isn't that much worse than cooking over a modern stovetop.

You also seem to imply that men are just sitting around all day, based on the context of the message this is responding to - but I don't know enough about the culture in these remote African areas to say if that's wrong.

I don't understand this habit of bending over backwards to show that women have it harder everywhere. Aside from hauling water from long distances, the work you describe is hardly grueling - and says nothing of what the men in these areas are experiencing.

If you want to talk about gendered violence and lack of rights as second class citizens, that's one thing, but there seems to be a tendency to exaggerate as a signal of virtue or something.

[jcranberry]

Some of these things might be pretty difficult if it's an elderly woman who's doing it. Which I bet isn't that uncommon.