'Women would end war'

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33873, 19 June 1975, Page 6

'Women would end war'

Mrs Leah Rabin, wife of the Israeli Prime Minister (Mr Yitzhak Rabin), said in Mexico City yesterday that there would be no wars if women had more political power.

She was speaking to reporters at the airport on her arrival as the head of the official Israeli delegation to the United Nations Women’s Year world conference which opens today, N.Z.P.A.-Reuter reports.

“If women had had a part in the decision to go to war, if they had had a greater role in the world of politics and in decisionmaking, I am sure that there would not have been wars,” she said.

Asked about the former Israeli Prime Minister, Mrs Golda Meir, Mrs Rabin said: “Golda Meir was not a tyrant, she was a woman in a democratic country who had to consult the members of her Cabinet in the face of a grave situation.

“However, a woman like Golda cannot face 17 or 18 men and still have her own way.”

Earlier, an Iranian speaker had told a seminar that women in her country were oppressed by a need to have as many sons as possible to provide for their old age, N.Z.P.A.Reuter reports. Mrs Sattereh Farman, director of the Social Labour School in Teheran,

was speaking to a meeting of journalists mainly from developing countries which had been organised in conjunction with the conference.

She said the vast majority of Iranian women were tied to their homes by the need to reproduce despite recent improvements in their official status. Fewer than one in 1000 had any form of professional education.

She said birth control campaigns had failed in Iran because mothers looked for security in having the greatest possible number of male children and because women who used contraception ran the risk of being abandoned by their husbands.