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The blog of the Wilson Center's Environmental Change and Security Program
  • Dot-Mom

    Half the Sky, All the Promise: The Personal is Political in NYT Special Issue

    August 24, 2009 By Gib Clarke
    “The world is awakening to a powerful truth: Women and girls aren’t the problem; they’re the solution,” write Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn in the lead article of this Sunday’s The New York Times Magazine.

    In this special issue devoted to “Saving the World’s Women,” five articles document global failures and personal horrors, but also offer forward-looking solutions from the individual to the institutional. As the subtitle says—“changing the lives of women and girls in the developing world can change everything”— this vital effort can help us not only improve the lives of women, but meet larger goals including international security, global health, and economic development.

    In “The Women’s Crusade,” Pulitzer Prize-winners Kristof and WuDunn, whose new book Half the Sky will be published on September 8, outline the ways in which the world’s women and girls are abused, neglected, and overlooked. They use devastating data to detail how women around the world suffer from lack of education, maternal mortality, sexual violence, trafficking, and economic and political oppression, and then bring these figures to life with women’s personal stories.

    They argue that elevating women is not a “soft” issue, but rather has the power to transform economies and address security threats—a point echoed in an interview with Hillary Clinton, in which she calls women and girls “a core factor in our foreign policy.”

    “I happen to believe that the transformation of women’s roles is the last great impediment to universal progress,” says Clinton, long an informed and passionate advocate for global women’s issues. She encouraged President Obama to create a new ambassadorship for global women’s issues, and filled the opening with Melanne Verveer, a respected activist and former head of the Vital Voices Global Partnership.

    Clinton most strongly emphasizes the connection between women’s issues and national security, calling it “an absolute link”: “If you look at where we are fighting terrorism, there is a connection to groups that are making a stand against modernity, and that is most evident in their treatment of women.” She goes so far as to agree that spending taxpayer money on education and healthcare for girls and women in Pakistan would be more effective than military aid to the country.

    “A woman who is safe enough in her own life to invest in her children and see them go to school is not going to have as many children. The resource battles over water and land will be diminished,” she says. “And it’s an issue of how we take hard power and soft power, so called, and use it to advance not just American ends but, in advancing global progress, we are making the world safer for our own children.”

    Also in the magazine:
  • Dexter Filkins investigates the acid attacks on girl students in Afghanistan in the horrifyingly vivid storytelling he displayed in his best-seller, The Forever War.
  • Lisa Belkin takes note of an emerging generation of female philanthropists using their money to “deliberately and systematically to aid women in need,” spurred by the Hunt sisters’ “Women Moving Millions” campaign.
  • Tina Rosenberg describes how sex-selective abortion and inadequate health care for young girls has led to a “daughter deficit” in China and India, where, somewhat paradoxically, “development can worsen, not improve, traditional discrimination.”
  • Africa’s first female President, Liberia’s Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, tells NYT that if women ran the world, it would be “better, safer and more productive.”
  • The New York Times’ website adds a slide show of Katy Grannan’s portraits of women in South Asia and Africa, and launches a contest soliciting personal stories from the field. Submit your photos and blog posts to Kristof’s blog by September 19.

    To me, such vital voices are the most powerful, proving that the personal is political. The quotes in the lead article from academic studies, local NGO personnel, and women themselves map the way forward:
  • “When women command greater power, child health and nutrition improves” – Esther Duflo of MIT, on micro-finance.
  • “Girls are just as good as boys” – An unidentified man who once beat his wife for not having sons, but changed his mind when a micro-loan turned her into the family breadwinner.
  • “Gender inequality hurts economic growth” – Goldman Sachs, Global Economics Paper, 2008
  • “I can’t talk about my children’s education when I’m not educated myself … If I educate myself, then I can educate my children” – Terarai Trent, a Zimbabwean woman now completing a PhD in the United States.
  • Topics: Afghanistan, development, Dot-Mom, economics, gender, maternal health
    • http://www.blogger.com/profile/08186033047213683502 Michael Renner

      Great piece, Gib! A quick comment on an item (which is not addressed to you per se, but rather intended as a general comment):

      You write: "She [Hilary Clinton] goes so far as to agree that spending taxpayer money on education and healthcare for girls and women in Pakistan would be more effective than military aid to the country."

      I love the view expressed by Clinton — and can't wait for the day when such sentiments get more fully translated into actual budgeting and policy-making. But just yesterday, the Wall Street Journal's August Cole reported (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125107420171052683.html)
      that "the White House's defense-budget request for fiscal 2010 includes approximately $3.5 billion for unmanned aerial vehicles." To think what $3.5 billion could accomplish if invested in human security instead of predator strikes on weddings!

    • http://www.pathfind.org Linda Suttenfield

      Gib, I just came across your post highlighting the important issues raised by Kristof and WuDunn in Half the Sky. As someone (along with Maeghan, Rachel and other ECSP staff) who has talked about the important role of family planning in development and the critical link between increasing population pressures and environmental degradation, I wondered what your thoughts were on the minimal mention of family planning in the New York Time Magazine.

      As a high school student in 1969, seeing the link between these two issues was the first time I became politically engaged. Now four decades later, I still believe that access to contraception and reproductive health is a pivotal component to help women achieve equity and have access to educational and economic opportunities. I have worked in international development for most of my career. I am currently at Pathfinder International (http://www.pathfind.org), a nonprofit that believes reproductive health care is not only a fundamental human right, but is critical for expanding life opportunities for women, communities, and nation, and paving the way for real transformations in environmental stewardship, decreases in population pressures, and innovations in poverty reduction. While I’m excited to see the coverage Kristof and WuDunn’s book is receiving, I’m curious as to why this vital connection is missing from Half the Sky, four decades after the conversation began?

    • http://www.blogger.com/profile/13130831342972439169 Gib Clarke

      Thanks to Michael and Linda for your thoughtful comments.

      Michael’s budget point is a great one, and a useful reminder not to get too carried away: just because someone (or many people) in the Administration endorses things like female education and family planning doesn’t mean that budget and policy decisions will follow these words. Still, I think there is plenty of cause to be hopeful and enthusiastic, but perhaps not carried away just yet.

      I’m not sure why The New York Times series did not say more about family planning. Half the Sky dedicates a chapter to family planning, and references to contraception, condoms, the UNFPA and other providers of family planning and reproductive health organizations appear throughout the book. Kristof’s articles over the past few years have also covered family planning and related issues quite extensively.

      If my responses to your comments weren’t what you were looking for, never fear – you can ask the authors yourselves, as we are hosting Kristof and WuDunn as they present Half the Sky at the Reagan Building on September 10!

      If you are unable to attend the event in person, we will have it available via archived webcast as of 6 p.m. on September 10 at http://www.wilsoncenter.org.

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