Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Half the Sky

"IN THE 19TH CENTURY, the paramount moral challenge was slavery. In the 20th century, it was totalitarianism. In this century, it is the brutality inflicted on so many women and girls around the globe: sex trafficking, acid attacks, bride burnings and mass rape."
Thus begins this weekend's piece in the NY Times Magazine by Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and his wife, journalist Sheryl WuDunn. Their article, entitled "The Women's Crusade," takes on the crucial issue of women's rights around the world. They've just written a new book, "Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide." (This title is based on a Chinese proverb which says that "Women hold up half the sky.")
Below are several quotes from their article that hit home with me on subjects near and dear to my own heart.
Also, be sure to check out this video on the NY Times site. Kristoff narrates a five minute slide show highlighting the issues he delves into in the magazine piece.
His last words?
"Women and girls aren't the problem. They're the solution."
Ok, here are the quotes.

Microfinancing and women:
"...Saima signed up with the Kashf Foundation, a Pakistani microfinance organization that lends tiny amounts of money to poor women to start businesses. Kashf is typical of microfinance institutions, in that it lends almost exclusively to women, in groups of 25. The women guarantee one another’s debts and meet every two weeks to make payments and discuss a social issue, like family planning or schooling for girls. A Pakistani woman is often forbidden to leave the house without her husband’s permission, but husbands tolerate these meetings because the women return with cash and investment ideas.
Saima took out a $65 loan and used the money to buy beads and cloth, which she transformed into beautiful embroidery that she then sold to merchants in the markets of Lahore. She used the profit to buy more beads and cloth, and soon she had an embroidery business and was earning a solid income — the only one in her household to do so."

Does this story sound familiar to any of you fair traders out there? I can think immediately of several groups we order from that work primarily with women (Sari Bari, Freeset, Hope for Women...)

Female mortality rate:
"Girls vanish partly because they don’t get the same health care and food as boys. In India, for example, girls are less likely to be vaccinated than boys and are taken to the hospital only when they are sicker. A result is that girls in India from 1 to 5 years of age are 50 percent more likely to die than boys their age. In addition, ultrasound machines have allowed a pregnant woman to find out the sex of her fetus — and then get an abortion if it is female.The global statistics on the abuse of girls are numbing. It appears that more girls and women are now missing from the planet, precisely because they are female, than men were killed on the battlefield in all the wars of the 20th century. The number of victims of this routine “gendercide” far exceeds the number of people who were slaughtered in all the genocides of the 20th century."

Death in childbirth:
"Another huge burden for women in poor countries is maternal mortality, with one woman dying in childbirth around the world every minute. In the West African country Niger, a woman stands a one-in-seven chance of dying in childbirth at some point in her life. (These statistics are all somewhat dubious, because maternal mortality isn’t considered significant enough to require good data collection.) For all of India’s shiny new high-rises, a woman there still has a 1-in-70 lifetime chance of dying in childbirth. In contrast, the lifetime risk in the United States is 1 in 4,800; in Ireland, it is 1 in 47,600. The reason for the gap is not that we don’t know how to save lives of women in poor countries. It’s simply that poor, uneducated women in Africa and Asia have never been a priority either in their own countries or to donor nations."

Human trafficking and modern-day slavery:
"In the developing world, meanwhile, millions of women and girls are actually enslaved. While a precise number is hard to pin down, the International Labor Organization, a U.N. agency, estimates that at any one time there are 12.3 million people engaged in forced labor of all kinds, including sexual servitude. In Asia alone about one million children working in the sex trade are held in conditions indistinguishable from slavery, according to a U.N. report. Girls and women are locked in brothels and beaten if they resist, fed just enough to be kept alive and often sedated with drugs — to pacify them and often to cultivate addiction. India probably has more modern slaves than any other country."

2 comments:

Scott said...

Great post about a shocking situation. It is wonderful to see that given the chance...women ARE the solution...It is also frighteningly obvious that MEN are the problem...

Beth said...

Thanks for reading, Scott! You should check out the full article on the Times site... very thought-provoking, to say the least.