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Making a Difference

Last fall, a friend gave me Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. It was an unexpected gift, and I was especially pleased to get it because I had been told about the book not long before by someone who had stayed up all night reading it. She had said it was the kind of book that can change your life. It is.

Or at least it is the kind of book that will alter your perspective on the world. Kristof and WuDunn, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for their reporting in China, tackle a huge topic. In their travels as foreign correspondents for The New York Times, they repeatedly encountered the tragic consequences of gender discrimination, and what they saw led them to commit themselves to investigating and writing about the plight of women and girls in much of the developing world. Their ensuing book is intended to launch a movement “to emancipate women and fight global poverty by unlocking women’s power as drivers of economic development” (www.halftheskymovement.org).

At first, Half the Sky is painful to read. It starts off with the very hard reality of sexual slavery and in the first chapter chronicles the life of Meena, who at the age of 12 was kidnapped and then sold to a brothel. She and girls with similar fates are often trapped in slavery because of the complacency, or complicity, of police and others who should be there to protect children.
Other chapters cover the increasingly common use of rape as a weapon of war; the high rate of maternal mortality in cultures where women are marginalized; and the horrific outcome for women without access to treatment for fistulas caused during childbirth.

Yet the book, whose title comes from the Chinese proverb, “Women hold up half the sky,” is far from a recitation of the horrible things women suffer in impoverished parts of the world. Each chapter also tells the story of a woman or girl who manages to find a way out of her tragic circumstances and goes on to a successful life, often devoting herself to helping others.
It also introduces individuals who are making a profound difference in the lives of women through the hospitals they run or the schools they have founded. The book ends with a compelling plea to readers to get involved with groups that are effectively working to change circumstances for women in the developing world.

The story in this issue by Wenda Reed on human trafficking shows us that our region is not immune to the unthinkable forms of modern-day slavery written about by Kristof and WuDunn. Fortunately, there is a broad network of organizations in Seattle that are working together to rescue people from servitude and to prosecute those who enslave others.

This network includes the Refugee Women’s Alliance and the Asian & Pacific Islander Women & Family Safety Center, two admirable groups that, with limited resources, are making significant differences in the lives of the women they serve. And Seattle is full of other organizations, large and small, that are working to achieve change for women both locally and internationally. We’ve already written about some of these groups and look forward to writing about more of them in coming issues.

So this February, a month when love is the dominant theme, I’ll leave you with the words on the Half the Sky Movement Web site: “You can help accelerate change if you’ll just open your heart and join in.”

Marianne Scholl
Publisher and Editor

©February 2010, Caliope Publishing Company