Half-A-Dozen Housekeepers / A Story For Girls In Half-A-Dozen Chapters By Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin - Rating: 3.5 From 29 Reviews This book is perfectly tailored for a pleasing reading on a virtual reader. “Half the Sky is a passionate and persuasive plea to all of us to rise up and say ‘No more!’ to the 17 th-century abuses to girls and women in the 21 st-century world. This is a book that will pierce your heart and arouse your conscience.”. Half the Sky - Nicholas D. Kristof & Sheryl WuDunn [PDF download] - ebooklibrary. The questions and topics that follow are intended to enhance your group’s conversation about Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s enlightening and inspiring book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. Listen to Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide audiobook by Sheryl WuDunn, Nicholas D. Stream and download audiobooks to your computer, tablet or mobile phone. Bestsellers and latest releases. Try any audiobook Free!
Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
Sheryl WuDunn & Nicholas Kristof
320 pages, Knopf, 2009
Sheryl WuDunn andNicholas Kristof’sbook Half the Sky isan absorbing narrativeof stories that arerarely heard: a NewJersey teenager israising awareness about the status of girls inpoor countries, an Afghan schoolteacher isleading a learning insurgency, and a formerfirst lady of Somalia’s hospital is saving thelives of mothers in Somaliland. These andother vignettes bring to life the strugglesand courage of unforgettable women whoare, as the book’s subtitle suggests, turningoppression into opportunity.
Half the Sky begins by outlining the mostegregious ways in which human rights areviolated: trafficking and slavery, prostitution,rape and honor killings, and maternalmortality. The authors do not flinch fromdescribing experiences that are horrifyingtestimony to the deeply rooted gender inequalitythat persists around the globe.
The book also explores the reasons forsuch discriminatory practices—including attitudestoward religion and traditional culturalbeliefs—effectively stoking the reader’sgrowing sense of moral outrage. We learn,for example, that the world’s leaders are effectivelyignoring the 500,000 women whodie each year either giving birth or trying tocope with unplanned births, by relegatingmaternal mortality to a “women’s issue.”
After convincing the reader that thisstate of affairs can no longer be tolerated,the authors use the latter part of the book toshare what they believe are some of themost promising strategies for changing thisbrutal reality. Their top three choices: investingin education, microfinance strategies, and the effective exercise of politicalwill. They also argue passionately for greaterinvestment at the grassroots level, a causethe Global Fund for Women has championedfor more than 20 years.
The fervor of the book can be attributedto the authors’ self-confessed status as recentconverts to the cause of women’s rights. Thisis both the book’s greatest strength and itsgreatest weakness. Although it offers valuableinsights into the lives of individual women,the book may frustrate readers seeking deeperanalyses of the complex factors that contributeto extreme gender discrimination.
To paraphrase Karl Marx, women strugglefor their rights not in circumstancesof their own choosing butwithin a broader historic, socioeconomic,and political context.In describing the Democratic Republicof the Congo (DRC) as“the world capital of rape,” for example,the book rightly calls attentionto the terrible violencefaced by women there. Yet thereader is not led to reflect on thefact that the experience of Congolese womenis inextricably linked to the larger strugglesof the DRC. The culture of violence inthe Congo has roots that include vicious colonialoccupation, the fallout of the Rwandangenocide, ongoing mineral extraction bymultinational corporations, and an armsrace fueled by the United Kingdom, France,and the United States, who are among thelargest suppliers of small arms to variousfactions. Finally, the DRC experience is notcontrasted with other recent mass rape incidents,such as in the former Yugoslavia,which could have led a reader to reflect onhow this phenomenon extends far beyondthe world’s poorest countries.
Similarly, the chapter titled “Is Islam Misogynistic?”could have been more clearlylinked to the previous chapter—“FamilyPlanning and the ‘God Gulf.’” There, the authorsdo touch on the way in which evangelicalsand right-wing Christian extremistscontribute annually to the deaths of womenby refusing access to contraception and insistingon “abstinence only” strategies. Achapter titled “Is Religion Misogynistic?”might have been more effective in exploringthe multiple ways in which most of theworld’s religious and cultural traditionshave found “divine” reasons to justify andcontinue the systematic oppression ofwomen. Instead, the chapter on Islamcomes perilously close to reinforcing widelyheld negative stereotypes about Muslims.
The book misses the opportunity tomake the critical point that the realizationof women’s rights depends on the existenceof secular civil space that is only possible aftersocieties have achieved genuine separationof church and state. That separationwas crucial for the gradual emancipationof women in the West, astruggle that has taken centuries.Women in the developing worldare trying to achieve their rights incompressed time frames—most of their societies gained independencefrom European colonizersbarely 50 years ago.
What the book does effectivelyis to make the foreign terrain ofwomen’s rights accessible to an averageAmerican. Although they may not have intendedto, the authors blow a fresh wind intothe sails of the women’s movement righthere in the United States, for much moreneeds to be done at home as well as overseas.Violence against women in the United Statescontinues to be a leading public health menace,women and children make up 70 percentof the poor, and women still constitute amere 14 percent of the U.S. Congress.
It is critical that the message we takeaway from this book is not simply horror atthe epidemic of global gender violence andinjustice. Half the Sky reminds us that womenalso hold solutions to our world’s greatestchallenges. If Sakena Yacoobi and thegirls of Afghanistan can risk their lives toovercome illiteracy, poverty, and violence,then we must be their allies by holding ourown governments, corporations, and philanthropicsectors to their promises to realizewomen’s rights. That would make thesky that women hold up a little lighter andour collective futures much brighter.
Kavita Nandini Ramdas is president and CEO of theGlobal Fund for Women. A lifelong advocate for women’srights, she is also a member of the board of trustees ofPrinceton University and Mount Holyoke College, and amember of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s GlobalDevelopment Program Advisory Panel.