Top Quotes: “Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women” — Sheryl WuDunn & Nicholas Kristof

Introduction

“We found ourselves standing on the edge of Tiananmen Square watching troops fire their automatic weapons at prodemocracy protesters. The massacre claimed 400–800 lives and transfixed the world. It was the human rights story of the year, and it seemed just about the most shocking violation imaginable.

Then, the following year, we came across an obscure but meticulous demographic study that outlined a human rights violation that had claimed tens of thousands more lives. This study found that 39k baby girls die annually in China because parents don’t give them the same medical care and attention that boys receive — and that’s just in the first year of life. One Chinese family-planning official explained it this way: ‘If a boy gets sick, the parents may send him to the hospital at once. But if a girl gets sick, the parents may say to themselves, ‘Well, let’s see how she is tomorrow.’ The result is that as many infant girls die unnecessarily every week in China as protesters died in the one incident at Tiananmen. Those Chinese girls never received a column inch of news coverage, and we began to wonder if our journalistic priorities were skewed.

A similar pattern emerged in other countries, particularly in S. Asia and the Muslim world. In India, a ‘bride burning’ — to punish a woman for an inadequate dowry or to eliminate her so a man can remarry — takes place approximately once every 2 hours, but these rarely constitute news. In the twin cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi, Pakistan, 5k women and girls have been doused in kerosene and set alight by family members or in-laws — or, perhaps worse, been seared with acid — for perceived disobedience just in the last 9 years.”

“The implication of the sex ratios, Prof. Sen found, is that about 107 million females are missing from the globe today. Follow-up studies have calculated the number slightly differently, deriving alternative figures for ‘missing women’ of 60–101 million. Every year, at least 2 million girls worldwide disappear because of gender discrimination.

In the wealthy countries of the West, discrimination is usually a matter of unequal pay or underfunded sports teams or unwatched touching from a boss. In contrast, in much of the world discrimination is lethal. In India, for example, mothers are less likely to take their daughters to be vaccinated than their sons — that alone accounts for 1/5 of India’s missing females — while studies have found that, on average, girls are brought to the hospital only when they’re sicker than boys taken to the hospital. All told, girls in India from 1–5 years old are 50% more likely to die than boys the same age. The best estimate is that a little Indian girl dies from discrimination every 4 minutes.”

“To prevent sex-selective abortion, China and India now bar doctors and ultrasound techs from telling a pregnant woman the sex of her fetus. Yet that’s a flawed solution. Research shows that when parents are banned from selectively aborting female fetuses, more of their daughters die as infants. Mothers don’t deliberately dispatch infant girls they’re obligated to give birth to, but they’re lackadaisical in caring for them. A development economist quantified the wrenching trade-off: on average, the deaths of 15 infant girls can be avoided by allowing 100 female fetuses to be selectively aborted.”

“80% of the employees on the assembly lines in coastal China are female, and the population across the manufacturing belt of E. Asia is at least 70%. The economic expansion of Asia was, in large part, an outgrowth of the economic empowerment of women. ‘They have smaller fingers, so they’re better at stitching,’ the manager of a purse factory explained to us. ‘They’re obedient and work harder than men,’ said the head of a toy factory. ‘And we can pay them less.’

Women are indeed a linchpin of the region’s development strategy. Economists who scrutinized E. Asia’s success noted a common pattern. These countries took young women who’d previously contributed negligibly to gross national product (GNP) and injected them into the formal economy, hugely increasing the labor force. The basic formula was to ease repression, educate girls as well as boys, give the girls the freedom to move to the cities and take factory jobs, and then benefit from a demographic dividend as they delayed marriage and reduced childbearing. The women meanwhile financed the education of younger relatives, and saved enough of their pay to boost national savings rates. This pattern has been called ‘the girl effect.’”

Sex Work

“Meena is an Indian Muslim who for years was prostituted in a brothel run by the Nutt, a low-caste tribe that controls the local sex trade. The Nutt have traditionally engaged in prostitution and petty crime, and theirs is the world of intergenerational prostitution, in which mothers sell sex and raise their daughters to do the same.”

“‘I was 8 or 9 when I was kidnapped and trafficked,’ Meena begins. She’s from a poor family on the Nepal border and was sold to a Nutt clan, then taken to a rural house where the brothel owner kept prepubescent girls until they were mature enough to attract customers. When she was 12 — she remembers that it was 5 months before her first period — she was taken to the brothel.”

“Meena and the other girls were never allowed out of the brothel and were never paid. They typically had 10+ customers a day, 7 days a week.”

“Paradoxically, it’s the countries with the most straitlaced and sexually conservative societies, such as India, Pakistan, and Iran, that have disproportionately large numbers of forced prostitutes. Since the young men in those societies rarely sleep with their girlfriends, it’s become acceptable for them to relieve their sexual frustration with prostitutes

The implicit social contract is that upper-class girls will keep their virtue, while young men will find satisfaction in the brothels. And the brothels will be staffed with slave girls trafficked from Nepal or Bangladesh or poor Indian villages. As long as the girls are uneducated, low-caste peasants like Meena, society will look the other way.”

“It’s not hyperbole to say that millions of women and girls are actually enslaved today. (The biggest difference from 19th-century slavery is that many die of AIDS by their late 20s.) The term that’s usually used for this phenomenon, ‘sex trafficking,’ is a misnomer. The problem isn’t sex, nor is it prostitution as such. In many countries — China, Brazil, and most of sub-Saharan Africa — prostitution is widespread but mostly voluntary (in the sense that it’s driven by economic pressure rather than physical compulsion). In those places, brothels don’t lock up women, and many women work on their own without pimps or brothels. Nor is the problem exactly ‘trafficking,’ since forced prostitution doesn’t always depend on a girl’s being transported over a great distance by a middleman. The horror of sex trafficking can more properly be labeled slavery.

The total number of modern slaves is difficult to estimate. The International Labor Org estimates that at any one time there are 12.3 million people engaged in forced labor of all kinds, not just sexual servitude. A UN report estimated that 1 million children in Asia alone are held in conditions indistinguishable from slavery. And a medical journal in Britain calculated that ‘1 million children are forced into prostitution every year and the total number of prostituted children could be as high as 10 million.’”

“In the peak decade of the transatlantic slave trade, the 1780s, an average of just under 80k slaves were shipped annually across the Atlantic. The average then dropped to a bit more than 50k between 1811–50. In other words, far more women and girls are shipped into brothels each year in the early 21st century than African slaves were shipped into slave plantations each year in the 18th or 19th century — although the overall population was of course far smaller then.”

“While there’s been progress in addressing many humanitarian issues in the last few decades, sex slavery has actually worsened. One reason for that is the collapse of Communism in E. Europe and Indochina. In Romania and other countries, the immediate result was economic distress, and everywhere criminal gangs arose and filled the power vacuum. Capitalism created new markets for rice and potatoes, but also for female flesh.

A second reason for the growth of trafficking is globalization. A generation ago, people stayed at home; now it’s easier and cheaper to set out for the city or a distant country. A Nigerian girl whose mother never left her tribal area may now find herself in a brothel in Italy. In rural Moldova, it’s possible to drive from village to village and not find a female between 16–30.

A third reason for the worsening situation is AIDS. Being sold to a brothel was always a hideous fate, but not usually a death sentence. Now it often is. And because of the fear of AIDS, customers prefer younger girls whom they believe are less likely to be infected. In both Asia and Africa, there’s also a legend that AIDS can be cured by sex with a virgin, and that’s nurtured demand for young girls kidnapped from their villages.”

“In 1993, Sen. Tom Harkin wanted to help Bangladeshi girls laboring in sweatshops, so he introduced legislation that would’ve banned imports made by workers under age 14. Bangladeshi factories promptly fired tens of thousands of these young girls, and many of them ended up in brothels and are presumably now dead of AIDS.”

“Rescuing girls from brothels is important, Krisher believes, but the best way to save them is to prevent them from being trafficked in the first place — which means keeping them in school. So American Assistance for Cambodia focuses on educating rural children, especially girls. Bernie Krisher’s signature program is the Rural School Project. For $13k, a donor can establish a school in a Cambodian village. The donation is matched by funds from the World Bank and again by the Asian Development Bank.

Grijalva had a brainstorm: his students could sponsor a school in Cambodia and use it as a way of emphasizing the importance of public service. Initially the response from students and parents was polite but cautious, but then the attacks of 9/11 took place, and suddenly the community was passionately concerned with the larger world and engaged in this project. The students conducted bake sales, car washes, and talent shows, and also educated themselves about Cambodia’s history of war and genocide. The school was built in Pailin, a Cambodian town on the Thai border that’s notorious for cheap brothels that cater to Thai men.”

“To address financial pressures, American Assistance for Cambodia started a program called Girls Be Ambitious, which in effect bribes families to keep girls in school. If a girl has perfect attendance in school for one month, her family gets $10. A similar approach has been used very effectively and cheaply to increase education for girls in Mexico and other countries. For donors who can’t afford to fund an entire school, it’s a way to fight trafficking at a cost of $120 per year per girl. The approach helps because it is typically girls like Kun Sokkea who end up trafficked. Their families are desperate for money, the girls are poorly educated, and a trafficker promises them a great job selling fruit in a distant city.”

“While sitting in the border shack, Nick began talking with one Indian officer. The man said he’d been dispatched by the intelligence bureau to monitor the border.

‘So what exactly are you monitoring?’ Nick asked.

‘We’re looking for terrorists, or terror supplies,’ said the man, who wasn’t monitoring anything very closely, since one truck after another was driving past. ‘After 9/11, we’ve tightened things up here. And we’re also looking for smuggled or pirated goods. If we find them, we’ll confiscate them.’

‘What about trafficked girls?’ Nick asked. ‘Are you keeping an eye out for them? There must be a lot.’

‘Oh, a lot. But we don’t worry about them. There’s nothing you can do about them.’

‘Well, you could arrest the traffickers. Isn’t trafficking girls as important as pirating DVDs?’

The intelligence officer laughed genially and threw up his hands. ‘Prostitution is inevitable.’ He chuckled. ‘There’s always been prostitution in every country. And what’s a young man going to do from the time when he turns 18 until when he gets married at 30?’

‘Well, is the best solution really to kidnap Nepali girls and imprison them in Indian brothels?’

The officer shrugged, unperturbed. ‘It’s unfortunate,’ he agreed. ‘These girls are sacrificed so that we can have harmony in society. So that good girls can be safe.’

‘But many of the Nepali girls being trafficked are good girls, too.’

‘Oh, yes, but those are peasant girls. They can’t even read. They’re from the countryside. The good Indian middle-class girls are safe.’”

“People get away with enslaving village girls for the same reason that people got away with enslaving blacks 200 years ago. The victims are perceived as discounted humans. India had delegated an intelligence officer to look for pirated goods because it knew that the US cares about intellectual property. When India feels that the West cares as much about slavery as it does about pirated DVDs, it will dispatch people to the borders to stop traffickers.”

“There’s empirical evidence that crackdowns can succeed, when combined with social services such as job training and drug rehab, and that’s the approach we’ve come to favor. In countries with widespread trafficking, we favor a law enforcement strategy that pushes for fundamental change in police attitudes and regular police inspections to check for underage girls or anyone being held against their will. That means holding governments accountable not just to pass laws but also to enforce them, and monitoring how many brothels are raided and pimps are arrested. Jail-like brothels should be closed down, sting operations should be mounted against buyers of virgin girls, and national police chiefs must be under pressure to crack down on corruption as it relates to trafficking. The idea is to reduce the brothel owners’ profits.

We won’t eliminate prostitution. In Iran, brothels are strictly banned, and the mayor of Tehran was a law-and-order hardliner until, according to Iranian news accounts, he was arrested in a police raid on a brothel where he was in the company of 6 naked prostitutes. So crackdowns won’t work perfectly, but they tend to lead nervous police to demand higher bribes, which reduces profitability for the pimps. Or the police will close down at least those brothels that aren’t managed by other police officers.

‘It’s pretty doable,’ says Gary Haugen, who runs International Justice Mission. ‘You don’t have to arrest everybody. You just have to get enough that it sends a ripple effect and changes the calculations. That changes the pimps’ behavior. You can drive traffickers of virgin village girls to fence stolen radios instead.’”

“Congress took an important step in 2000 by requiring the State Department to put out an annual Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report. The report ranks countries according to how they tackle trafficking, and those in the lowest tier are sanctioned. This meant that for the first time US embassies abroad had to gather info on trafficking. American diplomats began holding discussions with their foreign ministry counterparts, who then had to add trafficking to the list of major concerns such as proliferation and terrorism. As a result, the foreign ministries made inquiries of the national police agencies.

Simply asking questions put the issue on the agenda. Countries began passing laws, staging crackdowns, and compiling fact sheets. Pimps found that the cost of bribing police went up, eroding their profit margins.

This approach can be taken further. Within the State Department, the trafficking office has been marginalized, even relegated to another building. If the secretary of state publicly and actively embraced the trafficking office, taking its director along on relevant trips, for instance, that would elevate the issue’s profile. The president could visit a shelter like Apne Aap’s on a state visit to India. Europe should have made trafficking an issue in negotiating the accession of Eastern European countries wishing to enter the European Union, and it can still make this an issue for Turkey in that regard.

The big-stick approach should focus in particular on the sale of virgins. Such transactions, particularly in Asia, account for a disproportionate share of trafficker profits and kidnappings of young teenagers. And the girls, once raped, frequently resign themselves to being prostitutes until they die. It is often rich Asians, particularly overseas Chinese, who are doing the buying-put a few of them in jail, and good things will happen: The market for virgins will quickly shrink, their price will drop, gangs will shift to less risky or more profitable lines of business, the average age of prostitutes will rise somewhat, and the degree of compulsion in prostitution will diminish as well.”

Sexual Assault

“According to neighbors in the slum, Akku Yadav once raped a woman right after her wedding. Another time he stripped a man naked and burned him with cigarettes, then forced him to dance in front of his sixteen-year-old daughter. They say he took one woman, Asho Bhagat, and tortured her in front of her daughter and several neighbors by cutting off her breasts. Then he sliced her into pieces on the street. One of the neighbors, Avinash Tiwari, was horrified by Asho’s killing and planned to go to the police, so Akku Yadav butchered him as well.

Akku Yadav continued his assaults. He and his men gang-raped a woman named Kalma just ten days after she gave birth, and she was so mortified that she doused herself with kerosene and burned herself to death. The gang pulled another woman out of her house when she was seven months pregnant, stripped her naked, and raped her on the road in public view. The more barbaric the behavior, the more the population was cowed into acquiescence.

Twenty-five families moved away from Kasturba Nagar, but most Dalits had no choice. They adjusted by pulling their daughters out of school and keeping them locked up inside their homes where no one could see them. Vegetable vendors steered clear of Kasturba Nagar, so housewives had to trek to distant markets to buy food. And as long as Akku Yadav targeted only the Dalits, the police didn’t interfere.”

“Some pulled chili powder from under their clothes and threw it in the faces of Akku Yadav and the two police officers guarding him. The police, blinded and overwhelmed, fled at once. Then the women pulled out knives from their clothing and began stabbing Akku Yadav.

“Forgive me,” he shouted, in terror now. “Forgive me! I won’t do it again.” The women passed their knives around and kept stabbing him. Each woman had agreed to stab him at least once.

Then, in a macabre retaliation for his having cut off Asho Bhagat’s breasts, the women hacked off Akku Yadav’s penis.”

“The hundreds of women in the slum decided among themselves that if they all claimed responsibility, no one person would be culpable for the murder. They reasoned that if several hundred women each had stabbed Akku Yadav once, then no single stab wound would have been the fatal one.”

“Ehlers came up with a product she called Rapex. It resembles a tube, with barbs inside. The woman inserts it like a tampon, with an applicator, and any man who tries to rape the woman impales himself on the barbs and must go to an emergency room to have the Rapex removed.”

In the Ethiopian countryside, if a young man has an eye on a girl but doesn’t have a bride price (the equivalent of a dowry, but paid by the man), or if he doubts that the girl’s family will accept him, then he and several friends kidnap the girl, and he rapes her. That immediately improves his bargaining position, because she is ruined and will have difficulty marrying anyone else. The risks to the boy are minimal, since the girl’s parents never prosecute the rapist — that would aggravate the harm to their daughter’s reputation and would be resented in the community as a breach of tradition. Indeed, at the time of Woineshet’s rape, Ethiopian law explicitly provided that a man could not be prosecuted for violating a woman or girl he later married.”

“Such a culture in rural Ethiopia might seem impervious to change. But Woineshet found support in an unlikely corner: indignant Americans, mostly women, who wrote angry letters demanding change in the Ethiopian legal code. They couldn’t undo the trauma Woineshet suffered, but the moral support was important to her and her father — reassurance when virtually everyone around them condemned the family for breaching tradition. Americans also provided financial support and a stipend to help Woineshet pursue her education in Addis Ababa. The letter writers were mobilized by Equality Now, an advocacy organization based in New York that tackles abuses of women around the world. Its founder, Jessica Neuwirth, had worked at Amnesty International and had seen how letter-writing campaigns could help free political prisoners. So in 1992, she founded Equality Now.”

“Equality Now launched appeals on behalf of Woineshet, but it seems unlikely that Aberew will go to prison again. However, Equality Now’s army of letter writers did shine enough of a spotlight on Ethiopia that it was shamed into changing its laws.

Today, a man is liable for rape even if the victim later agrees to marry him.”

Infancticide & Honor Killings

“Female infanticide persists in many countries, and often it is mothers who kill their own daughters. Dr. Michael H. Stone, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University and expert on infanticide, obtained data on Pakistani women who killed their daughters. He found that they usually did so because their husbands threatened to divorce them if they kept the girl.”

“The United Nations Population Fund has estimated that there are 5,000 honor killings a year, almost all in the Muslim world (Pakistan’s government uncovered 1,261 honor killings in 2003 alone). But that estimate appears too low, because so many of the executions are disguised as accidents or suicides. Our estimate is that at least 6,000, and probably far more, honor killings take place annually around the world.

In any case, that figure doesn’t begin to capture the scope of the problem, because it doesn’t include what might be called honor rapes — those rapes intended to disgrace the victim or demean her clan. In recent genocides, rape has been used systematically to terrorize certain ethnic groups. Mass rape is as effective as slaughtering people, yet it doesn’t leave corpses that lead to human rights prosecutions. And rape tends to undermine the victim groups’ tribal structures, because leaders lose authority when they can’t protect the women. In short, rape becomes a tool of war in conservative societies precisely because female sexuality is so sacred. Codes of sexual honor, in which women are valued based on their chastity, ostensibly protect women, but in fact they create an environment in which women are systematically dishonored.”

Childbirth

“Mahabouba couldn’t afford a midwife, so she tried to have the baby by herself. Unfortunately, her pelvis hadn’t yet grown large enough to accommodate the baby’s head, a common occurrence with young teenagers. She ended up in obstructed labor, with the baby stuck inside her birth passage. After seven days, Mahabouba fell unconscious, and at that point someone summoned a birth attendant. By then the baby had been wedged there for so long that the tissues between the baby’s head and Mahabouba’s pelvis had lost circulation and rotted away. When Mahabouba recovered consciousness, she found that the baby was dead and that she had no control over her bladder or bowels. She also couldn’t walk or even stand, a consequence of nerve damage that is a frequent by-product of fistula

“People said it was a curse,” Mahabouba recalled. “They said ‘If you’re cursed, you shouldn’t stay here. You should leave.”

Mahabouba’s uncle wanted to help the girl, but his wife feared helping someone cursed by God. She urged her husband to take Mahabouba outside and leave the girl to be eaten by wild animals. He gave Mahabouba food and water, but he also moved her to a hut at the edge of the village.

“Then they took the door off,” she added matter-of-factly, “So that the hyenas would get me.” Sure enough, after darkness fell the hyenas came. Mahabouba couldn’t move her legs, but she held a stick in her hand and waved it frantically at the hyenas, shouting at them. All night long, the hyenas circled her; all night long, Mahabouba fended them off.

She was fourteen years old.”

“It costs about $300 to repair a fistula, and about 90 percent of them are repairable. But the vast majority of women who suffer fistulas are impoverished peasants.”

Instead of receiving treatment, these young women, often just girls of fifteen or sixteen-typically find their lives effectively over. They are divorced from their husbands and, because they emit a terrible odor from their wastes, are often forced to live in a hut by themselves on the edge of the village, as Mahabouba was. Eventually, they starve to death or die of an infection that progresses along the birth canal.”

“Huichol believed that the pain of childbirth should be shared, so the mother would hold on to a string tied to her husband’s testicles. With each painful contraction, she would give the string a yank so that the man could share the burden. Surely if such a mechanism were more widespread, injuries in childbirth would garner more attention.”

Abortion and Contraception

“In the thirty-two counties in China where UNFPA operates pilot programs, it has reduced abortion rates by 40 percent, to a rate lower than that in the United States.

Indeed, UNFPA achieved a major breakthrough for Chinese women that it has never received credit for. In the past, women in China had always used a steel-ring IUD that cost only four cents to make but often failed or caused severe discomfort. That steel ring led to millions of unintended pregnancies and then to abortions. Under UNFPA pressure, China grudgingly switched to a kind of IUD called the copper-T. This kind was more expensive to manufacture – twenty-two cents each — but far more comfortable and effective. That was a huge advance for the 60 million Chinese women with IUDs, and it averted about 500,000 abortions every year. In short, since then, UNFPA has prevented nearly 10 million abortions in China. That’s a record far better than that of any pro-life organization.

That has been the pattern again and again: With the best of intentions, pro-life conservatives have taken some positions in reproductive health that actually hurt those whom they are trying to help — and that result in more abortions. Pro-choice and pro-life camps, despite their differences, should be able to find common ground and work together on many points, in particular on an agenda to reduce the number of abortions. Visit clinics in Estonia, where abortions were widely used as a form of birth control, where some women had ten or more abortions, and you see the resulting high levels of infertility and other complications.”

“The 4th and by far the most cost-effective approach was also the simplest: warning of the perils of sugar daddies. Schoolchildren were shown a brief video of the dangers of teenage girls going out with older men, and then were informed that older men have much higher HIV infection rates than boys. Few students had been aware of that crucial fact.

The warning didn’t reduce girls’ sexual activity, but they did end up sleeping with boyfriends their own age rather than with older men. The boys were more likely to use condoms-apparently because they were shaken by learning from the school presentation that teenage girls were much more likely than teenage boys to have HIV. This simple program was a huge success: It cost less than $1 per student, and a pregnancy could be averted for only $91. It’s also a reminder of the need for relentless empiricism in developing policies. Conservatives, who have presumed that the key to preventing AIDS is abstinence-only education, and liberals, who have focused on distribution of condoms, should both note that the intervention that has tested most cost-effective in Africa is neither.”

Islam

“ When a girls’ junior high school caught fire in Saudi Arabia in 2002, the religious police allegedly forced teenage girls back into the burning building rather than allow them to escape without head coverings and long black cloaks. Fourteen girls were reportedly burned to death.

The Koran explicitly endorses some gender discrimination: A woman’s testimony counts only half as much as a man’s, and a daughter inherits only half as much as a son. When these kinds of passages arise in the Bible, Christians and Jews mostly shrug them off. It has been much harder for pious Muslims to ignore unpleasant and antiquated passages in the Koran, because it is believed to be not just divinely inspired but literally the word of God.

Still, many modern-minded Muslims are pushing for greater gender equality. Amina Wadud, an Islamic scholar in the United States, has written a systematic reinterpretation of chauvinist provisions in the Koran. For example, verse 4:34 refers to wives and is usually translated roughly like this: “As for those from whom ye fear rebellion, admonish them and banish them to beds apart, and beat them.” Feminist scholars like Wadud cite a barrage of reasons to argue that this is a mistranslation. For example, the word translated above as “beat” can have many other meanings, including to have sex with someone. Thus one new translation presents that same passage this way: “As for women you feel are averse, talk to them persuasively; then leave them alone in bed (without molesting them), and go to bed with them (when they are willing).”

The Islamic feminists, as these scholars are known, argue that it is absurd for Saudi Arabia to bar women from driving, because Muhammad allowed his wives to drive camels. They say that the stipulation that two female witnesses equal one male witness applied only to financial cases, because women at the time were less familiar with finance. That situation is now obsolete, they say, and so is that provision. The feminist exegesis argues if the Koran originally was progressive, then it should not be allowed to become an apologia for backwardness.

A useful analogy is slavery. Islam improved the position of slaves compared to their status in pre-Islamic societies, and the Koran encourages the freeing of slaves as a meritorious act. At the same time, Muhammad himself had many slaves, and Islamic law unmistakably accepts slavery. Indeed, Saudi Arabia abolished slavery only in 1962, and Mauritania in 1981. In the end, despite these deep cultural ties, the Islamic world has entirely renounced slavery. If the Koran can be read differently today because of changing attitudes toward slaves, then why not emancipate women as well?”

“Muhammad himself was progressive on gender issues, but some early successors, such as the Caliph Omar, were unmitigated chauvinists. One reason for their hostility to strong women may have been personality clashes with the Prophet’s youngest wife, Aisha, the Islamic world’s first feminist.”

“After Muhammad died in Aisha’s arms (according to Sunni doctrine, which is disputed by Shiites), she took on an active and publie role, in a way that annoyed many men. Aisha vigorously contested views of Islam that were hostile to women, and she recorded 2,210 hadith, or recollections of Muhammad used in Islam to supplement and clarify Koranic teachings. Ultimately Aisha even led an armed rebellion against a longtime adversary, Ali, after he became caliph. That insurrection is called the Battle of the Camel, because Aisha commanded her troops by riding among them on a camel. Ali crushed the rebellion, and then for centuries Islamic scholars discounted Aisha’s importance and rejected her feminist interpretations. All but 174 of her hadith were discarded.

Yet in recent decades some Islamic feminists, such as Fatema Mernissi, a Moroccan, have dusted off Aisha’s work to provide a powerful voice for Muslim women. There is, for example, a well-known statement attributed to Muhammad stipulating that a man’s prayers are ineffective if a woman, dog, or donkey passes in front of the believer. As Mernissi notes, Aisha ridiculed that as nonsense: “You compare us now to donkeys and dogs. In the name of God, I have seen the Prophet saying his prayers while I was there.” Likewise, Aisha denied various suggestions that her husband considered menstruating women to be unclean.”

“Jordan, Qatar, and Morocco have been among the leaders in giving women greater roles. In Morocco King Muhammad VI married a computer engineer who does not veil herself and who has become a role model for many Moroccan women. King Muhammad also reformed family law, giving women more rights in divorce and marriage, and he supported the pathbreaking appointment of fifty women imams, or preachers.”

Education

“Sakena wanted to help her people, and so she moved to Pakistan to work in the Afghan refugee camps, where she tried to provide health care and education. She began by opening a girls’ school in Peshawar with three hundred pupils; a year later, she had fifteen thousand students. The Taliban barred girls from getting an education in Afghanistan, but Sakena nonetheless opened a string of secret schools for girls there.

“It wasn’t easy, and it was very risky,” she recalls. “I negotiated that if people supplied houses and protected the schools and the students, then we would pay the teachers and provide supplies. So we had thirty-eight hundred students in underground schools. We had rules that the students would arrive at intervals, no men were allowed inside, and people would work as lookouts.”

The operation was immensely successful, protecting eighty secret schools and suffering only one Taliban raid.”

“About one quarter of Mexican families are served in some way by Oportunidades, and it is one of the most admired anti-poverty programs in the world. The poor get cash grants in exchange for keeping children in school, getting them immunized, taking them to clinics for checkups, and attending health education lectures. Grants range from $10 per month for a child in the third grade to $66 for a girl in high school (grants are highest for high school girls because their dropout rates are highest).

The payments are made directly by the central government, to reduce local corruption, and to mothers rather than fathers.

That’s because research has shown that mothers are more likely to use cash for the children’s benefit, and because the payments elevate the status of the mothers within the household.”

“Ann and others have had to face the additional problem of sexual abuse by teachers. Particularly in southern Africa, some teachers trade good grades for sex: Half of Tanzanian women, and nearly half of Ugandan women, say they were abused by male teachers, and one third of reported rapes of South African girls under the age of fifteen are by teachers. “If a girl feels that if she goes and talks to the teacher in private, she’ll be fondled, then she’s not going to do well,” Ann says. She also notes that Westerners sometimes create problems by sponsoring scholarships to be awarded by teachers or the principal. The scholarship winners are sometimes the prettiest girls, who in return are expected to sleep with the principal. Camfed avoids this problem by having the girls selected by a committee, without giving a central role to the principal.”

Conclusion

“Edward Miguel, found that in Tanzania, extreme rainfall patterns- either droughts or flooding — are accompanied by a doubling in the numbers of unproductive old women killed for witchcraft, compared to normal years (other murders do not increase, only those of “witches”). The weather causes crop failures, leading to worsening poverty-and that’s when relatives kill elderly “witches” whom they otherwise would have to feed.

Another reason for making women and girls the focus of anti-poverty programs has to do with an impolitic secret of global poverty: Some of the most wretched suffering is caused not just by low incomes, but also by unwise spending — by men. It is not uncommon to stumble across a mother mourning a child who has just died of malaria for want of a $5 mosquito bed net and then find the child’s father at a bar, where he spends $5 each week. Several studies suggest that when women gain control over spending, less family money is devoted to instant gratificaton and more for education and starting small businesses.

Because men now typically control the purse strings, it appears that the poorest families in the world typically spend approximately ten times as much (20 percent of their income on average) on a combination of alcohol, prostitutes, candy, sugary drinks, and lavish feasts as they do on educating their children.”

“Half a world away, in Indonesia, a woman continues to control economic assets that she brought into a marriage. A study found that if the wife has brought more resources into the marriage and thus has more spending money afterward — then her children are healthier than those of families of equal wealth where the assets belong to the man. What matters to the children’s well-being isn’t so much the level of the family’s wealth as whether it is controlled by the mother or by the father.”

“ Indeed, women leaders haven’t even been particularly attentive to issues like maternal mortality, girls’ education, or sex trafficking. One reason may be that when women rise to the top of poor countries — think of Indira Gandhi, Benazir Bhutto, Corazón Aquino, Gloria Maca-pagal-Arroyo-they are almost always from elite families and have never directly encountered the abuses that poor women suffer.

On the other hand, the conventional wisdom in development circles is that women officeholders do make a difference at the local level, as mayors or school board members, where they often seem more attentive to the needs of women and children. One fascinating experiment took place in India after 1993, when the Indian constitution was amended to stipulate that one third of the positions of village chief were to be reserved for women. These were allocated randomly, so it became possible to compare whether villages run by women were governed differently from those ruled by men. Indeed, spending priorities were different. In villages run by women, more water pumps or taps were installed, and these were also better maintained.

This may be because fetching water is women’s work in India, but other public services were also judged to be at least as good as in men-run villages. The researchers could find no sign that other kinds of infrastructure were being neglected. Local people reported that they were significantly less likely to have to pay a bribe in the villages run by women.

Nevertheless, both male and female villagers declared themselves less satisfied with women leaders.”

“When women gained the vote, the politicians in that state scrambled to win favor from women voters by allocating more funds to child health care; this did not happen in states where women remained unable to vote. “Within a year of suffrage law enactment, patterns of legislative roll call voting shifted, and local public health spending rose by roughly 35 percent,” Professor Miller wrote. “Child mortality declined by 8–15 percent with the enactment of suffrage laws… Nationwide, these reductions translate into roughly 20,000 averted child deaths each year.”

The same thing happened at a national level. A year after the Nineteenth Amendment gave women all across the country the right to vote in 1920, Congress passed the Sheppard-Towner Act, a landmark program for public health. The “principal force moving Congress was fear of being punished at the polls” by the new women voters, one historian wrote. The improvement in America’s health during this period was stunning: The mortality rate for children aged one to four plummeted 72 percent between 1900 and 1930, although there are many other reasons for this decline as well, of course.”

“Goretti was largely a prisoner in her hut, which was made of red adobe clay. Women here are supposed to get their husband’s permission each time they leave the property, and her husband, a grouchy man named Bernard, didn’t like to give it. Goretti was thirty-five years old and a mother of six, but she wasn’t even allowed to go to the market by herself.

Bernard and Goretti grew bananas, cassava, potatoes, and beans on a depleted half-acre plot, but they barely earned enough to survive. They were too poor to afford mosquito nets for all the children, even though malaria kills many people in the area. Bernard typically goes three times a week to a bar to drink homemade banana beer, spending $2 a session. His trips to the bar cost the family 30 percent of its disposable income.

Goretti, who had never been to school, was not permitted to buy anything, or to deal with cash at all. In her entire life, she had never touched even a one-hundred-franc note, worth less than ten American cents. She and Bernard would walk together to the market to shop, he would hand over the money to the seller, and then she would carry the goods home. Goretti’s interactions with Bernard consisted mostly of being beaten, interspersed with having sex.”

“CARE’s program operates with “associations” of about twenty women each. So with her grandmother and other women anxious to get involved, Goretti formed a new CARE association.

The members promptly elected Goretti as their president. Often the members work together, cultivating one family’s field one day and another’s the next time. So the twenty women all came to Goretti’s fields and tilled her entire parcel of land in one day.

“When my husband saw this, he was very happy,“ Goretti said slyly. “He said, ‘This group is really good.’ So he let me continue

Each woman brings the equivalent of a dime to each meeting. The money is pooled and loaned to one of the members, who must invest it in a money-making effort and then repay the sum with interest. In effect, the women create their own bank

Goretti borrowed $2, which she used to buy fertilizer for her garden. That was the first time she handled money. The fertilizer produced an excellent crop of potatoes that Goretti was able to sell over several days in the market for $7.50. So after just three months Goretti paid off her loan ($2.30, including interest), and the capital was then loaned to another woman.

Flush with cash from her potatoes, Goretti used $4.20 of the remaining profit to buy bananas to make banana beer, which sold very well in the market. That led her to launch a small business making and selling banana beer.”

“Engineering an economic takeoff is really about using a nation’s resources most efficiently. Many East Asian economies enjoyed a sustained boom by moving young peasant women from farms to factories, after giving them a basic education for free. In Malaysia, Thailand, and China, export-oriented industries like garments and semi-conductors predominantly employed young women who had previously been working in less productive family farms or doing household work. The economies got multiple benefits from this transition. By improving the labor productivity of the young women, growth was raised. By employing them in export industries, the countries got foreign exchange which could be used to buy needed capital equipment. The young women saved much of their money or sent it back to relatives in the village, raising national saving rates. Because they had good jobs and income-earning opportunities, they also delayed marriage and childbearing, lowering fertility and population growth rates. So a major factor in East Asia’s economic success was the contribution of its young peasant female workforce.”

“Implicit in what we’re saying about China is something that sounds shocking to many Americans: Sweatshops have given women a boost. Americans mostly hear about the iniquities of garment factories, and they are real-the forced overtime, the sexual harassment, the dangerous conditions. Yet women and girls still stream to such factories because they’re preferable to the alternative of hoeing fields all day back in a village. In most poor countries, women don’t have many job options, In agriculture, for example, women typically aren’t as strong as men and thus are paid less. Yet in the manufacturing world, it’s the opposite. The factories prefer young women, perhaps because they’re more docile and perhaps because their small fingers are more nimble for assembly or sewing. So the rise of manufacturing has generally raised the opportunities and status of women.”

“In the aftermath of the genocide, 70 percent of Rwanda population was female, and so the country was obliged to utilize women. But it was more than necessity. Men had discredited themselves during the genocide.

Women were just minor players in the slaughter, so that only 2.3 percent of those jailed for the killings were female. As a result, there was a broad sense afterward that females were more responsible and less inclined to savagery. The country was thus mentally prepared to give women a larger role.”

“ Then, in September 2008, a new election left Rwanda the first country with a majority of female legislators-55 percent in the lower house. In contrast, 17 percent of members of the United States House of Representatives were women in 2008, leaving the United States ranked sixty-eighth among countries of the world in the share of women holding national political office.”

“Two scholars, Chaim Kaufmann and Robert Pape, calculate that for sixty years Britain sacrificed an annual average of 1.8 percentage points of its GNP because of its moral commitment to ending slavery. That is an astonishing total, cumulatively amounting to more than an entire year’s GNP for Great Britain (for the United States today, it would be the equivalent of sacrificing more than $14 trillion), a significant and sustained sacrifice in the British standard of living. It was a heroic example of a nation placing its values above its interests.”

“ British public opinion confronted what it meant to pack human beings into the hold of a ship — the stink, the disease, the corpses, those bloody manacles — citizens recoiled and turned against slavery. It’s a useful lesson that what ultimately mattered wasn’t just the abolitionists’ passion and moral conviction but also the meticulously amassed evidence of barbarity.

Likewise, success came not only from making politicians see the “truth” but also from putting relentless domestic political pressure on them. Clarkson traveled thirty-five thousand miles on horseback, and a former slave, Olaudah Equiano, lectured all over Britain on a five-year book tour. In 1792, 300,000 people boycotted sugar from the West Indies — the greatest consumer boycott in history until that point. That year, more people signed a petition against slavery than were eligible to vote in British elections. And in Parliament, Wilberforce bargained furiously to build a voting bloc to overcome the shipping and slavery lobby. Then, as now, government leaders found ethical arguments most persuasive when they were backed by the raw insistence of voters.”

“Globo is known for its soap operas, which have huge and passionate followings and whose main characters are women with few children. It turns out that when the Globo network reached a new area in Brazil, in the following years there were fewer births there-particularly among women of lower socioeconomic status and women already well along in their reproductive years. That suggested that they had decided to stop having children, emulating the soap opera characters they admired.

A second study focused on television’s impact on rural India.

Two scholars, Robert Jensen of Brown University and Emily Oster of the University of Chicago, found that after cable television arrived in a village, women gained more autonomy-such as the ability to leave the house without permission and the right to participate in household decisions. There was a drop in the number of births, and women were less likely to say they preferred a son over a daughter. Wife-beating became less acceptable, and families were more likely to send daughters to school.

These changes occurred because TV brought new ideas into isolated villages that tended to be very conservative and traditional. Before TV arrived, 62 percent of women in the villages surveyed thought it was acceptable for husbands to beat wives, and 55 percent of women wanted their next child to be a son (most of the rest did not want a daughter; they just didn’t care).

And fully two thirds of the women said they needed their husband’s permission to visit friends. Then, with television, new ideas infiltrated the villages. Most of the popular cable television programs in India are soap operas set among middle-class families in the cities, where women hold jobs and come and go freely. Rural viewers came to recognize that the “modern” way is for women to be treated as human beings. The effect was huge: “introducing cable television is equivalent to roughly five years of female education,” the professors report.”