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.
THE BOOK
A series of essays and anecdotes that work together—forms an argument in two parts. The first part argues that the oppression of women in (mostly) developing countries is a devastating and under-recognized injustice that’s the equivalent of slavery, and that demands a moral and political movement as focused and principled as the campaign against slavery to bring it to an end. The second discusses practical ways to create this movement and effect the change that’s needed.
Kristof, a New York Times columnist, and WuDunn, a former Times foreign correspondent who now works independently on multimedia projects involving women’s issues, make their first case effectively, drawing on their years of research (and it’s clear they know the subject and its complexities very well). They tell how women are promised work, then sold into sexual slavery and imprisonment, while authorities turn a blind eye. They tell how these women are beaten, and raped, and drugged if they try to resist the men who have bought them; how many contract AIDS from forced sex work without protection, and die in their twenties; and how returning them to families and normal life is complicated by shame and addiction.
They tell how in some cultures it’s accepted practice for a man to rape the woman he wants to marry to force her to submit to him, and how in others it’s common for rape to be used as a weapon by criminals, or in family feuds—the perpetrators secure in the knowledge that shame will prevent the victim from reporting the attack to the authorities (and will often result in the victim’s suicide).
They describe how families and states fail to invest in education and healthcare for women, so that girls who could be an economic asset to their families and country instead end up controlled by and dependent on male relatives, undernourished and often dead at a young age from preventable diseases, or African women who suffer fistulas in childbirth (a painful, embarrassing condition, but curable by a simple operation) are abandoned to die on the edges of villages. They describe how some traditions that may be seen as oppressive, and are at least very dangerous to women’s health, like genital cutting, can become so ingrained in a culture that women themselves support them.
Reviews:
"New York Times columnist Kristof and his wife, WuDunn, a former Times reporter, make a brilliantly argued case for investing in the health and autonomy of women worldwide. 'More girls have been killed in the last fifty years, precisely because they were girls, than men were killed in all the wars of the twentieth century,' they write, detailing the rampant 'gendercide' in the developing world, particularly in India and Pakistan. Far from merely making moral appeals, the authors posit that it is impossible for countries to climb out of poverty if only a fraction of women (9% in Pakistan, for example) participate in the labor force. China's meteoric rise was due to women's economic empowerment: 80% of the factory workers in the Guangdong province are female; six of the 10 richest self-made women in the world are Chinese. The authors reveal local women to be the most effective change agents: 'The best role for Americans... isn't holding the microphone at the front of the rally but writing the checks,' an assertion they contradict in their unnecessary profiles of American volunteers finding 'compensations for the lack of shopping malls and Netflix movies' in making a difference abroad. (Sept.)" Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
"This gripping call to conscience...tackles atrocities and indignities.... But the poignant portraits of survivors humanize the issues, divulging facts that moral outrage might otherwise eclipse." New York Times
"Kristof and WuDunn forcefully contend that improving the lot of girls and women benefits everyone.... Intelligent, revealing and important." Kirkus Reviews
"Kristof and WuDunn reinforce the truth behind the terrible statistics with passionately reported personal stories...including a final chapter suggesting how readers can help." Booklist
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