Written by Dr. Shelli Poe, visiting Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and director of Faith and Work at Millsaps College
In Half the Sky, Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn set out to recruit their readers “to join an incipient movement to emancipate women and fight global poverty by unlocking women’s power as economic catalysts.” Why, we might ask, are these Pulitzer Prize winning journalists spending time on issues that concern feminists? For many in America today, “feminism” is either a dirty word or refers to a movement that is now irrelevant because it has already achieved its goals: women’s right to vote, hold property, and work outside the home.
Indeed, Kristof and WuDunn admit that in the 1980s, when their project began, they didn’t consider women’s oppression a “serious issue.” The book is a result of their “journey of awakening” to the importance of women’s oppression as “one of the paramount problems of this century.” In it, they intend to set right the skewed journalistic priority for covering occasional events rather than those that occur every day, “such as the quotidian cruelties inflicted on women and girls.” I would add to this set of journalistic priorities covering stories that are of particular interest to privileged men. Generally speaking, the well-being of girls and women is not one of them. As one man who was interviewed for the book put it, “A son is an indispensable treasure, while a wife is replaceable.” Even when reporters are supposedly interested in the oppression of women, many are often not interested in the transformative work women themselves are doing, but only in their humiliating experiences of sexual assault. In one interview on CBS, a woman who had suffered sexual violence and then worked tirelessly to help other girls avoid the same was asked, “So what was it like being gang-raped? … Mukhtar indignantly replied: I don’t really want to talk about that…. There was an awkward silence.” Whether reporters and consumers of media want to pay attention, “more girls have been killed in the last fifty years, precisely because they were girls, than men were killed in all the battles of the twentieth century.” The authors do not blame men alone, but point to oppressive social customs fueled by sexism and misogyny, which are absorbed, transmitted, and “adhered to by men and women alike.”
Tragic as the stories told within its pages might be, Half the Sky is essentially a call to continued transformation. One of the genius moves of the book is to show how the empowerment of girls and women does, in fact, relate to those chief concerns of privileged men: the accumulation of wealth and status. Countries cannot afford, so the argument goes, not to educate and empower more girls and women: “Evidence has mounted that helping women can be a successful poverty-fighting strategy anywhere in the world.” In addition, “to deny women is to deprive a country of labor and talent, but—even worse—to undermine the drive to achievement of boys and men.” Likewise, publicity about the maltreatment of women can be so damaging to governmental authorities’ reputations that they take action. Even so, the book predominantly relies on creating moral outrage to rally its readers for action. Indeed, at times throughout the first half of the book its authors may be guilty of providing too detailed narratives of sexual assault, much like the CBS reporters mentioned above were fascinated by rape stories. This is the dangerous line Kristof and WuDunn must walk given their strategy for motivating their readers’ to take action and given that in some arenas, “saving women’s lives is imperative, but it is not cheap.” They propose three problems for women and their supporters across the globe to work against: “sex trafficking and forced prostitution; gender-based violence, including honor killings and mass rape; and maternal mortality.” Their proposed solutions include girls’ education, including reeducation about gender norms “so that women themselves become more assertive and demanding,” and microfinancing women’s businesses.
Half the Sky is required reading for all first-year students at Millsaps College because it incites its readers to ask questions like, How can we account for the current and historic plight of women and girls in societies across the globe? How can such accounts avoid feeding on or contributing to the culture of sexual predation that all of us have absorbed? Are tragedies like the ones recorded in the book just so many inevitabilities that ought to be met with resignation? Who, if anyone, can do something about such oppression? What are the connections between poverty, education, health care, race, class, and sex?
One of the dangers of an undisciplined reading of the book is that it might contribute to a set of narratives Westerners have told themselves about people in other nations: that they are passive peoples who need our help, that we can “free” them (in ways that will also serve our interests), that they ought to be grateful for our interventions and introductions to more “civilized” ways of living. In the past few decades, these misleading and damaging stories have been told especially about Muslim cultures and religion, which Leila Ahmed describes in her masterful and highly recommended historical analysis, Women and Gender in Islam (New Haven: Yale, 1992, see especially chapter 8). Half the Sky also serves, therefore, to raise further questions for Millsaps students like, What narratives adequately account for the history and agency of women in their religions, cultures, and nations? What does it mean to be part of an increasingly global world? What intellectual and active responsibilities do I have within that world? How can (or ought) I evaluate the beliefs, practices, and cultures of others? If it is sometimes legitimate to try to change others’ cultures, what mechanisms are most useful for such transformation—legal action, economic policies, police involvement, education, “moral support,” financial contributions, microloans, food programs, media coverage, or other measures? How should or can “outsiders” take on “supporting roles to local people,” forming an “alliance between first world and third” in a way that avoids neo-colonialism? After all, Kristof and WuDunn admit that “while empowering women is critical to overcoming poverty,… it involves tinkering with the culture, religion, and family relations of a society that we often don’t fully understand.”
Half the Sky raises ethical, racial, socio-economic, cultural, legal, sex and gender, political, religious, and economic questions that are ripe for investigation. Moreover, it challenges its readers with the claim that “sex trafficking and mass rape should no more be seen as women’s issues than slavery was a black issue or the Holocaust was a Jewish issue. These are all humanitarian concerns.” In addition to raising awareness about the continuing global oppression of women and girls, this required reading for Millsaps first-years has the potential to spark questions, reveal complexities, and ignite a passion for ethical thinking and acting that students will carry with them throughout their college careers as they become responsible local and global citizens.
