“Women hold up half the sky”

The above is a Chinese proverb and the inspiration behind the title of a book that is now on my must read list, “Half The Sky”, written by my today’s pick for Wonderful Women Of The World,  Sheryl WuDunn, a former New York Times reporter. WuDunn co-wrote the book with her husband Nicholas Kristof, a Times columnist.

In 2009, within one week of publication, “Half The Sky” became a best seller, and went into more than twenty printings in hardcover – the paperback version was released just this past summer.

Book: Half The Sky

Here’s a review that I found written by Martha Nussbaum, who is a professor of law and philosophy at the University of Chicago and the author of “Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach” and other books.

Seeing Women’s Rights as a Key to Countries’ Progress

Women and girls die every day in large numbers all over the world, some from violence, some from what Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, in “Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide,” call the “diffuse cruelty of indifference”: inadequate medical care and other practices that betray a widespread undervaluation of the worth of female life. In this passionate yet practical book, the authors argue that the struggle for gender equality is “the paramount moral challenge” of our era.

It is also a development challenge: unleashing women’s energy, they argue, is a key to economic success. The authors’ stated aim is to “recruit” the reader to join a worldwide movement to end these abuses.

Mr. Kristof and Ms. WuDunn have a tricky problem in presentation. It’s difficult to get people to care about daily abuses like lack of education or undernutrition. People like drama, and many of the worst abuses are hard to dramatize. So, skillful journalists that they are (Mr. Kristof is a New York Times Op-Ed columnist, and Ms. WuDunn, his wife, was for many years a Times reporter and editor), they focus on three problems that offer moving individual narratives: forced prostitution, honor killing and maternal mortality. Along the way they introduce the evidence of other deprivations.

Moving rapidly in and out between particular and general, the authors present gripping stories of individual women (for the most part in South Asia and Africa), emphasizing their resilience and ingenuity, even in terrible circumstances. They then deftly introduce a wide range of data supporting their claims that the abuses they describe are widespread and that they stymie national progress. Their descriptions of female resourcefulness alone make the case that neglecting women’s agency is a huge political and economic error.

The authors nicely combine commitment with caution about what we know and don’t know, what does good and what might not. The many failures of foreign aid are not neglected; the aim is simply to show that recognition can stimulate improvement.

Similarly, their attitude toward sex work is nuanced. Although they favor crackdowns on all sex work as the best means of changing traffickers’ economic incentives, they also present the argument for decriminalization with regulation. The readability of the book should not make one underestimate the care of the analysis.

By locating the problems they describe in the “developing world,” Mr. Kristof and Ms. WuDunn surely paint too rosy a picture of what happens to women in richer countries. There, they say, “discrimination is usually a matter of unequal pay or underfunded sports teams or unwanted touching from a boss.” Tell that to the 18 percent of women in the United States who, according to the authoritative National Violence Against Women Survey, say they have experienced rape or attempted rape. Acknowledging misogyny close to home helps us think better about its sources and possible remedies.

Still, the book is both stirring and sensible. The problems are important, they hamper development, and progress can be made on all of them if the political will can be forged. So, while not denying that solutions ultimately require governments to get involved, the authors focus on the creation of a worldwide momentum toward solution and appeal to readers to join in a wide range of nongovernmental organizations working on gender equality.

There’s one weak chapter, called “Is Islam Misogynistic?” Although the authors ultimately suggest that the answer, at least historically, is “no,” their account of the religious history is too superficial to be useful. Nor do they give a systematic account of the wide range of contemporary movements that are both Islamic and feminist. Along the way, they feed some stereotypes that readers are all too likely to hold.

“Such as,” however, suggests a longer list. The authors have already told us that maternal mortality is a particularly large problem in Sub-Saharan Africa, where Muslims are not in a majority. (The annual United Nations Human Development Report confirms this.)

Their account of forced prostitution highlights the problems of countries that are not predominantly Muslim (e.g. India, Thailand, Cambodia), as well as of some Muslim nations. We’ve been given no reason to suppose that Muslim nations do worse. Later, moreover, the authors praise Muslim-majority Bangladesh as a shining example of what can happen when a nation decides to invest in women and girls.

The gravest problem, one that the authors mention but never treat in detail, is the basic denial to girls of life itself, whether through infanticide, discriminatory nutrition and health care in childhood, or the increasingly common practice of sex-selective abortion. Here the nations of East Asia leap into prominence. The natural ratio of girls to boys at birth is typically taken to be 95 to 100. In Singapore and Taiwan, the figure is 92 girls to 100 boys, in South Korea 88, in China only 86.

These figures reflect only sex-selective abortion, and not deaths after birth from infanticide or differential nutrition and medical care. The overall sex ratio, which does include these deaths, is even more striking: China and South Korea have two of the most unbalanced sex ratios in the world.

We’d have to discuss those figures (worse than those of almost all majority-Muslim nations) before making any responsible statement about which cultures are more or less misogynistic.

In the same chapter the authors make a rare inaccurate statement. “Hindu women in India are more autonomous and more likely to be educated than their Muslim women neighbors.” But the only comprehensive survey of Muslim women in India, the highly regarded 2005 study by Zoya Hasan and Ritu Menon, concluded that (adjusting for poverty level, since Muslims are a relatively deprived group in most parts of the nation) the significant differences are regional rather than religious. “Religion per se does not influence the status of women,” they summarize.

Mr. Kristof and Ms. WuDunn, so curious elsewhere, seem unaware of this well-known evidence. In short, why not just confront each manifestation of misogyny where one finds it, rather than play a ratings game that fits too neatly with widespread political prejudices?

This criticism aside, however, this wonderful book combines a denunciation of horrible abuses with clear-eyed hope and some compelling practical strategies. The courageous women described here, and millions more like them, deserve nothing less.

Readers: Perhaps along with me this is a must read to add to your holiday list. And if reading this or the book inspires you to do more for women, join “Half The Sky Movement”. As always, if all of us just do a little more for women, or just do something, how we could change lives and change the world.

“Women aren’t the problem they’re the solution, along with men”

Half the Sky lays out an agenda for the world’s women and three major abuses: sex trafficking and forced prostitution; gender-based violence including honor killings and mass rape; maternal mortality, which needlessly claims one woman a minute. We know there are many worthy causes competing for attention in the world. We focus on this one because this kind of oppression feels transcendent – and so does the opportunity. Outsiders can truly make a difference.

So let us be clear up front: We hope to recruit you to join an incipient movement to emancipate women and fight global poverty by unlocking women’s power as economic catalysts. It is a process that transforms bubbly teenage girls from brothel slaves into successful businesswomen. You can help accelerate change if you’ll just open your heart and join in.

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Not much more to say except I HOPE this write has inspired you. Enjoy the weekend, and as always, I’ll see you back her tomorrow.

Peace out.

Lastly, greed over a great story is surfacing from my “loyal”(?) readers. With all this back and forth about who owns what, that appears on my blog, let me reiterate that all material posted on my blog becomes the sole property of my blog. If you want to reserve any proprietary rights don’t post it to my blog. I will prominently display this caveat on my blog from now on to remind those who may have forgotten this notice.

Gratefully your blog host,

michelle

Aka BABE: We all know what this means by now :)

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