I've already told you about Half the Sky, the new book about the state of women around the world by husband-wife team Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. If you're not intrigued enough, Slate columnist Johann Hari has given us some more reasons to check out the book--or at the very least, investigate the subject.
Here is what she writes:

"While we rightly roared at racial apartheid, we act as though gender apartheid is a natural, immutable fact. With absolutely the right Molotov cocktail of on-the-ground reporting and hard social science, Kristof and WuDunn blow up this taboo. They ask: What would we do if we believed women were equal human beings, with as much right to determine their life story as men? How would we view the world differently?"

"They take the reader on a grand tour of all the issues that are ignored because women are ignored. For example—who has heard of fistula? It is today's leprosy, causing 2 million women to live and die as despised outcasts—yet it is virtually unknown. When a woman has a long, obstructed labor with no doctors to help her deliver, the blood supply to her vagina, bladder, and rectum can be cut off. The tissues die, and a hole is ripped in her flesh. From that hole, shit and piss will leak for the rest of her life in one long incontinent streak. Because she stinks, she is rejected by her husband and her community, and forced to live scavenging on the streets.
In every African town, you see fistula-stricken women, wandering aimlessly, their heads down in shame. They are the saddest people I have ever met. But this problem is cruelly easy to treat. For $300, a fistula can be repaired in 90 percent of cases. Fistula can be beaten, if only we value women enough to do it. There used to be a fistula hospital in Manhattan. Today, it is the Waldorf-Astoria.
Or how about the enslavement of women in brothels, which is now far larger than the trans-Atlantic slave trade at its height? Some 3.5 million women are being jailed, drugged, and raped for cash today. This brutalization of women doesn't have to happen any more than the enslavement of Africans did in the 18th century. As the authors write: "The tools to crush modern slavery exist, but the political will is lacking. That must be the starting point of any abolitionist movement." International pressure—set in motion by the acts of ordinary citizens—works."

Hari doesn't blink at the book's flaws, criticizing the couple's defense of sweatshops (Kristof believes the work women find in these squalid factories is, in the long run, better than staying home and working the fields).
Hari says:
"Anti-sweatshop campaigners—who he has explicitly chided—want all factories, everywhere, to adhere to certain minimum standards: No use of beatings, a maximum working day, safety precautions. Then they won't be sweatshops; they'll just be factories.
Whenever he is confronted with this argument, Kristof says that any country that imposes basic human conditions on sweatshops loses its trade to a country that won't and women suffer. But this ignores an obvious truth: Anti-sweatshop campaigners want to see these rules imposed everywhere. There should be no escape clauses and no places where multinational corporations can go to cheaply abuse women for a few extra pennies of profit."

Regardless, I'm planning on checking out this book--and soon. Tell me: are there other books I should add to my reading list? What have you read that informed and inspired you?

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."

More on Fighting Sex Trafficking

Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times is one of my favorite reporters/columnists. He consistently examines difficult global and local issues, and does a phenomenal job of drawing attention to issues that might otherwise be forgotten or ignored. Not only does he write about these issues, but he travels regularly to all corners of the globe, and brings a unique, firsthand perspective to the topics he covers.

This week, he is answering readers' questions for The Times. Here's a query concerning whether it is possible to end sex trafficking. I thought his answer was worth sharing.

Q. How in heaven's name can sex trafficing of young women and girls be halted? It is outrageous that all over the world such abuse continues.
— Dr. James D. Fett

A. The crucial step to end sex trafficking, as with ending traditional slavery in the 19th century, is to shine a light on it. Once people are aware of it, then public pressure builds to end it. So it's important to build a movement to call attention to the abuses, and a number of organizations on left and right are doing that.
One of the impediments, however, is the distrust between left and right. They often disagree about what should be done with prostitution by consenting adults, and so they spar over that — instead of focusing on the huge common ground, the shared belief that no 14-year-old should be kidnapped and forced by a pimp to have sex with customers. My view is that we should focus on the common ground, because if the two sides can work together there'll be far more progress on eliminating child prostitution.
I've seen that progress is possible. In Cambodia, when I first reported on this subject, 10-year-olds were being sold openly to the highest bidder. These days, brothel-owners can go to jail for trafficking in girls, and so they're more careful about keeping younger girls and about keeping them against their will. One brothel owner I interviewed many times over the years found that her profit margins were eroding, and the risk of going to prison was rising, so she closed the brothel and opened a grocery store instead. That's what needs to happen on a broader scale.