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Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide (Vintage)

Description

From two of our most fiercely moral voices, a passionate call to arms against our era’s most pervasive human rights violation: the oppression of women and girls in the developing world.

With Pulitzer Prize winners Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn as our guides, we undertake an odyssey through Africa and Asia to meet the extraordinary women struggling there, among them a Cambodian teenager sold into sex slavery and an Ethiopian woman who suffered devastating injuries in childbirth. Drawing on the breadth of their combined reporting experience, Kristof and WuDunn depict our world with anger, sadness, clarity, and, ultimately, hope.

They show how a little help can transform the lives of women and girls abroad. That Cambodian girl eventually escaped from her brothel and, with assistance from an aid group, built a thriving retail business that supports her family. The Ethiopian woman had her injuries repaired and in time became a surgeon. A Zimbabwean mother of five, counseled to return to school, earned her doctorate and became an expert on AIDS.

Through these stories, Kristof and WuDunn help us see that the key to economic progress lies in unleashing women’s potential. They make clear how so many people have helped to do just that, and how we can each do our part. Throughout much of the world, the greatest unexploited economic resource is the female half of the population. Countries such as China have prospered precisely because they emancipated women and brought them into the formal economy. Unleashing that process globally is not only the right thing to do; it’s also the best strategy for fighting poverty.

Deeply felt, pragmatic, and inspirational, Half the Sky is essential reading for every global citizen.

Reviews

Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-09-08
Summary: "Central Moral Challenge of this Centrury: Gender Inequity"

This book resonates with what I have always believed: when all the women of the world have choice, this world will be a better place for everyone. As others have said in their reviews, this is the most important book I have ever read. Yes, some of the stories are horrific and difficult to read--but they MUST BE READ. This book is solution oriented and about hope. I cannot just sit by and do nothing, and this book gives me the tools to do SOMETHING!! I do not know how anyone could read this book and not be moved to take action. Bless you and thank you Mr. Kristoff & Ms WuDunn.

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Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-09-04
Summary: "Heartbreaking and Inspiring"

Half the Sky by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
Vintage Books, 2009
254 pages
Non-fiction; Feminism
5/5 stars

Summary: Short chapters talk about some of the oppression currently experienced by women such as sex trafficking and maternal mortality and are interspersed with chapters sharing how it's being fought.

Thoughts: My readings of Larsson's books are actually connected as they featured sexual abuse of women and sex traffickers. That was purely accidental on my part but I like that they connect. Saying that, this was a tough reading week because of the horrible stories shared.

Nearly every page has an example of women being abused and undervalued, which would be almost unbearable if it had not been accompanied by some of the most uplifting stories. These stories share failures and how they learned from those failures. Any effort by Westerners to sweep in and radically remake the culture usually failed but talking and listening helped. Most successful was giving funds directly to determined individuals to help them help themselves.

Something Kristof and WuDunn highlighted was encouraging Western (especially American) students to travel abroad as a volunteer in order to remind them of their own privileges and make them in to activists who can change the world. I think this is an exciting time for that (rather my) generation. We have a big problem to confront and if we put our considerable abilities and advantages to it, we could make a big change.

This book made me angry because so-called women's issues are consistently shunted aside as not mattering although it's pretty obvious that getting women involved leads to a stronger economy and a more successful country; it saves lives and improves the quality of life. It also inspired me to get involved.

Cover/Title: I love the title, coming from the Chinese proverb "Women hold up half the sky" and I like the mix of faces on the cover although my paperback only has one row with different faces.

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Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-08-31
Summary: "Making a difference"

If enough people read this book and responded by supporting either a group opf women or a single woman trying to stop the cycle of abuse and poverty that is the reality of their lives, a real change would occur that might set the stage for a true cultural revolution. I have never been more moved to action and I have lent my copy of this book to several friends to read. The authors present a fair and accurate depiction of the issues without preaching.

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Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-08-31
Summary: "Only columnists could deliver this"

I have complained in other reviews about policy issues that I needed *more*- either better statistics, a human face or a success story. This book has all three. However, the authors purposefully downplay statistics, citing research that as soon as people start to see problems as quantities, their logical brain takes over and they decide their ability to help is limited. So while the statistics are interspersed throughout the book, the stars are the women, many of whose stories brought me to tears.

Women in much of the world are made to suffer through honor killings or rapes, maternal mortality or morbidity, run of the mill beatings by husbands, fathers, brothers (and mothers and mothers-in-law), sex trafficking, genital mutilation and the chronic, every day problem of having more responsibilities than most can manage with the bare resources they have. That is, if they aren't aborted, murdered shortly after birth or allowed to die of something before the age of five that their brothers would get immediate treatment for. The most shocking statistic in the entire book is that there are between 60 and 100 millions girls missing. China, India and Pakistan are big offenders, although they are not the only ones. The joke is on them, as the boys they valued above girls are now going to find it increasingly difficult to find a wife. (No one is laughing.)

It's a grim, bleak picture for many of these women, but despite the odds, not only do many survive, some also thrive, lifting not only themselves up but also their families and their communities. There are several mechanisms that can accelerate their rise, but education, healthcare (most especially family planning and reproductive services) and access to financial tools (including savings and loans, frequently provided by microfinancing organizations) are the ones that made the biggest impacts in the stories here.

There is discussion interspersed about how much better the finances of the communities and countries become when women are treated with more respect, but the authors stress that this both shouldn't be overstated and shouldn't be the only reason women are treated with respect. They make a convincing argument that women's rights is to the 21st century what abolitionism was to the 18th and 19th centuries. (And, surely, when you read about the horrific treatment sex slaves and "disobedient" daughters and wives are made to endure, it's hard to disagree.) A young social entrepreneur activist put it best: "Girls' rights are human rights."

The tone of the book is realistic but hopeful, and the authors provide three or four pages of links that readers can log onto to help in their own way. This is not dispassionate journalism- there are about three instances where the authors admit to intervening in their subjects' stories- but that doesn't diminish the work. I applaud the authors for shining a light on these issues, and I hope they can keep that spotlight on.

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Rating: 4 / 5
Date: 2010-08-29
Summary: "World Peace Comes Through Women"

This book's thesis argues that a country's economic advancement does not exist without improvement in women's socioeconomic status. Women's rights cannot be considered a side issue to 'economics' or 'foreign policy'. The two are intrinsically intertwined.

The thesis is important and much of the evidence for re-conceptualizing the way which we think about policy and policy making is important. I do agree that the world and it's priorities would look much different if discussions about women's rights were thoroughly interwoven into the terms of a debate.

But as Golda Meir illustrated having women involved does not automatically make a state more egalitarian. Women are just as capable of implementing policies which are not nurturing or compassionate to the populace. Here is where the author's thesis has weak spots. It gnawed in the back of my mind while I was reading the text.

Subconsciously I know that I was the author's intended target audience, a woman's rights activist who wants to get more women's voices thoroughly included in government policies. But there is no guarantee that the women brought into the government are going to want or need to feel compassion or empathy towards other women out of a shared sense of sisterhood. Merely having similar anatomy does not provide enough of a unifying device to create a 'sisterhood' which then does things such as creating this idealized foreign policy.

And then there would be the other dimension of what does a women's rights advocate do if during this campaign for increased public opportunities, they run up against women who demand the right to adhere to tradition? Also participating in public decision-making about women's agency, these women are opposing the expanded economic opportunities for women. And by the book's thesis therefore, the entire country.

Acknowledging these women is uncomfortable because it is difficult imagining why a woman living without resources or opportunity would not welcome it. But the introduction of this is change and it is difference from what they have also known, so it is scary to some women too.

I do recognize women are denied access to education and economic opportunities based on gender, but I am cautious if including more women will be the 'magic bullet' to eradicate both sexism and a country's poor socioeconomic status.