L'Ecole des Femmes

Have you read any Molière? He was a 17th century French playwright and, truly, a genius.  I adore Molière. His plays had some of the best social commentary and satire that you will ever encounter. Parts of his plays can make me laugh out loud, although I have a pretty low threshold.  
L'Ecole des Femmes (The School for Wives) is the story of a middle-aged man named Arnolphe who has a 17-year-old ward named Agnes. Agnes has been living in a nunnery since the age of 4, with Arnolphe paying all her bills and calling all the shots in terms of her education. Basically, he has insisted that the nuns not teacher anything that could "lead her astray." He is grooming her to be his wife and he wants her to be so unworldly that she wouldn't even think about cheating on him. He is super-paranoid about being cuckolded. But, of course, the joke's on him because, when he finally moves Agnes to one of his houses, she meets a young man and falls in love with him. All that work and he still doesn't have a wife!

I bring this up because, in recognition of International Women's Day, Human Rights Watch has published a report on child marriage, a practice in which girls under the age of 18 are basically sold to older men as brides. These marriages are common in some countries in Asia and Africa, particularly in the rural regions. Apparently, it can be as easy as going to a girl's father and saying, "Hey!  I'll give you 20 cows for your daughter." If the girl resists, as any sensible girl would, it's likely she'll be beaten by her family or raped by the guy with the cows, the idea being that, once she's lost her virginity, she'll have to stay with the man who took it from her.

Where do I even begin in my reaction to this practice? Well, I begin with a comparison to L'Ecole des Femmes, of course! It seems to me a middle-aged man wanting to buy a teenaged bride is quite like Arnolphe wanting to marry his 17-year-old ward. Any man who would want a girl for his wife is probably looking for the same things as Arnolphe -- someone virginal, sheltered, unworldly, meagerly educated (if at all), grateful for my wealth. Do these countries need their own Molières to help them see how foolish and short-sighted this is? 

Apparently, although I doubt even that would make much of a dent. It saddens me that, in countries where this is happening, there are generally laws against it that go unenforced. So, somewhere along the way, the leaders of these countries acknowledged that this was not a good practice and passed laws against it, but they haven't had the guts to insist that the laws be enforced. In the meantime, girls in these countries remain uneducated (only 39% of elementary-school students are female; only 30% of secondary students), abused, and dealt with (by their own parents!) as if they were livestock. Maybe we should work on staging productions of Lysistrata in these places.