The Better Half
Helping Women Help the World
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Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
Knopf
2009
320 pp.
9780307267146
$27.95
When U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton toured Africa in August 2009, she went out of her way to meet with women's groups -- female farmers in Kenya, rape victims in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, microfinance entrepreneurs across the continent. In South Africa, she spent twice as long visiting a women's housing project near Cape Town as she did meeting with the country's president, Jacob Zuma. Some quietly sniped that Clinton was devaluing her office by meeting with so many grass-roots female activists; others applauded the fact that a U.S. secretary of state had made women's rights a critical foreign policy issue. Clinton defended her agenda, noting that such attention serves to "change the priorities" of governments.
Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn's new book, Half the Sky, should convince any reader of why those priorities do, in fact, need to change. Kristof and WuDunn argue that "the brutality inflicted routinely on women and girls in much of the world" is "one of the paramount human rights problems of this century." Their statistics are numbing: every year, at least two million girls worldwide "disappear" due to gender discrimination. Given little societal value, girls are not vaccinated, not treated when they are sick, not educated, and often not even fed. Women between the ages of 15 and 44 are more likely to be maimed or killed by male violence than by war, cancer, malaria, and traffic accidents combined. More women have been killed by neglect and violence in the last 50 years than men have by all the wars of the twentieth century. The cost to the world is staggering -- not only in human terms but also in economic terms: lost IQ, lost GDP, cyclical poverty.
But Kristof and WuDunn do not simply fall into moral outrage. Instead, they acknowledge the difficulty of eliminating the deeply rooted social practices underlying gender discrimination, while also presenting a series of colorful vignettes that demonstrate the resilience of the human spirit. Many of the characters will be familiar to regular readers of Kristof's New York Times columns: for example, Srey Neth and Srey Momm, the young Cambodian girls Kristof bought from a brothel and set free (only to see Momm make her way back to prostitution); Mukhtar Mai, the illiterate Pakistani woman who was gang-raped but defied tradition by refusing to commit suicide and instead opened a local school for girls; and Mahabouba Muhammad, a young Ethiopian girl who was sold as a second wife to a 60-year-old man and who then suffered terrible fistula injuries when she tried to deliver a baby by herself in the bush (an obstetric fistula is a hole between a woman's birth canal and her internal organs caused by obstructed childbirth, and it often results in permanent incontinence; fistulas can also be caused by sexual violence).
The story of Muhammad -- like many of the stories in the book -- is one of a woman who is brutalized by a misogynistic culture but whose will to survive leads to greater societal good. After her fistula left her stinking of leaking waste, villagers took her to an exposed hut on the edge of town to be eaten by hyenas. She dragged herself to a hospital, where doctors cared for her injuries. (The World Health Organization estimates that there are about two million women with untreated fistula conditions worldwide -- most in sub-Saharan Africa -- many of whom could be treated with a relatively uncomplicated surgery that costs several hundred dollars.) At the hospital, Muhammad learned to read and write. She now works there as a nurse's aide, helping new patients who suffer from the same condition. Kristof and WuDunn see such local women -- with international women's groups providing critical sources of money and expertise -- as the backbone of an emerging global movement to "emancipate women and girls." Half the Sky is an unabashed call to support them: in other words, to get on the right side of history.
GIRL POWER
This movement has gained some influential supporters in recent years. By the early 1990s, development economists had produced a substantial body of research that quantified the economic benefits of empowering women. In particular, the funding of girls' education came to be seen as a highly effective way to improve economic growth and to overcome cyclical poverty. Educated women provide better nutrition, health care, and education to their families, in addition to having fewer children and lower rates of maternal mortality, than those women with little or no education. The result is a virtuous cycle for the entire community.
Swayed by such evidence, major development organizations, such as the World Bank, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and CARE, now target their resources toward women. Today, most microfinance organizations also explicitly focus on women -- not only because women are statistically more likely to be poor than men but also because women tend to use any marginal increases in their incomes to invest in their families' nutrition, health, and education.
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