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Video: Girl 'Cries Stones' in Yemen

Video: Girl 'Cries Stones' in Yemen

The Yemeni television channel Azal has posted a bizarre video online of a young girl crying small, dark stones.

With her condition labeled a medical mystery, 12-year-old Saadiya Saleh has been a source of unease for her village, where some wonder if she is possessed by the devil or ill with an unknown contagious disease.

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Society

The Modern "Housewife" Has Another Job — And As Raw A Deal As Ever

Women play a vital role in the workplace, so the German government is introducing policies that reward families with two working parents. However, the strain of raising a family still falls unfairly on mothers, making them victims of capitalism.

A hand in a yellow glove cleans the surface near a sink

Cleaning surfaces is one of many household tasks that may fall to housewives.

Eva Marie Kogel

-Analysis-

BERLIN — In the early 2000s, there was an advert for vacuum cleaners. A stylish woman at a party was asked in a somewhat disparaging tone what she did for work. The woman smiled briefly and flipped her immaculately blow-dried hair. Then she said, “I manage a successful family business.” So there. The other person, a high-powered career woman, hadn’t reckoned with that comeback.

The joke was that the family business was in fact not a business, but a family, and of course the punchline hinged on a recognition of what is now called “care work,” but could just as easily be called “women’s work,” because that is precisely what it is.

Today, like then, the share of housework done by men and women in Germany is ridiculously unequal. Although it is true that modern men do more around the house than previous generations, the German Institute for Economic Research estimates that, on average, women spend around 10 hours a day caring for their families, while men spend three.

German mothers therefore often work part-time because there are only 24 hours in a day, and they can’t fit in full-time employment alongside caring for their families. This means that, overall, women don’t work any less than men, but a large proportion of their work is unpaid. paid.

Germany’s Minister for Family Affairs Lisa Paus recently waded into the middle of this heated issue by announcing a cap on the parental allowance (paid to parents in the first year of their child’s life), which sparked outrage. Women! Equality! Feminists were dismayed to see hard-won advances rolled back.

It took a day before the Ministry for Family Affairs calmed fears by explaining that the cap would only affect a small proportion of those families who are entitled to the parental allowance: only those with a taxable annual income of €150,000 or more.

However, the debate raged on. This is about more than just whether a few well-off families should continue to receive a state benefit. The introduction of the parental allowance was part of a wider story about emancipation: liberating women through paid work. This announcement cuts to the heart of views about mothers, children, fathers and equality, and above all, how the state rewards families with two working parents.

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