the laws. The governments, religions and cultures of these countries support the inequalities, thus allowing vicious crimes against women to continue without any recourse by the victims. The phrase "women's rights" refers to the basic human rights that are withheld from women simply because they are women. Women's rights promote political, social and economic equality for women in a society that traditionally confers more status and freedom to men. A basic right is for girls to grow up to be women: today twelve percent of the females born worldwide are missing, many of them victims of infanticide. Other women's rights include: the right to live free of physical abuse, the right to live free of sexual exploitation, the right to health care and nutrition, the right to an acceptable standard of living, the right to chose her own partner, the right to vote, the right to control property, and the right to equal treatment before the law along with freedom of speech. Women in Third World countries do not have the rights that American women enjoy. In most of these countries, women do not even have rights equivalent to those of American women in the nineteenth century. For example, the women have arranged marriages, have very limited access to education and are abused by their arranged husbands. In these countries, women work twice as many hours as men for one-tenth of the income. The inequities vary from country to country, but one thing is in common; the inequalities are all being committed against women. This paper will explore the condition of women in three Third World Countries: Afghanistan, China and Iran.
             "They shot my father right in front of me. He was a shopkeeper. It was nine o'clock at night. They came to our house and told him they had orders to kill him because he allowed me to go to school. The Mujahideen had already stopped me from going to school, but that was not enough. They then came and killed my fath...