Visiting author sees women's rights as key to global progress

Sunday News

Oct 31, 2009 23:50 EST

By MARTHA NUSSBAUM, N.Y. Times News Service

Prudence Lemokouno lived in a village in Cameroon. After she had been in labor for three days, a well-meaning birth attendant jumped up and down on her belly, rupturing her uterus. Her family paid a man to take her to the hospital, 75 miles away. There, after an openly contemptuous doctor held out for more money, an operation was performed several days too late. Neither mother nor baby survived.

Women and girls die every day in large numbers all over the world, some from violence, some from what Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, in "Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide," call the "diffuse cruelty of indifference" and practices that betray a widespread undervaluation of the worth of female life. In this passionate yet practical book, the authors argue that the struggle for gender equality is "the paramount moral challenge" of our era.

It is also a development challenge: Unleashing women's energy, they argue, is a key to economic success. The authors' stated aim is to "recruit" the reader to join a worldwide movement to end these abuses.

People like drama, and many of the worst abuses such as lack of education and malnutrition are hard to dramatize. So, skillful journalists that they are (Kristof is a New York Times Op-Ed columnist, and WuDunn, his wife and a former Times reporter and editor), they focus on problems offering moving narratives: forced prostitution, honor killing and maternal mortality.

They present gripping stories of individuals (mostly in South Asia and Africa), emphasizing their resilience and ingenuity, even in terrible circumstances. They then introduce data supporting their claims that the abuses are widespread and stymie national progress, politically and economically.

The many failures of foreign aid are not neglected; the aim is to show that recognition can stimulate improvement.

The book is both stirring and sensible. The problems are important, they hamper development, and progress can be made on all of them if the political will can be forged. So, while not denying that solutions ultimately require governments to get involved, the authors focus on the creation of a worldwide momentum toward solution and appeal to readers to join in a wide range of nongovernmental organizations working on gender equality.

There's one weak chapter, called "Is Islam Misogynistic?" They feed some stereotypes that readers are all too likely to hold.

"Of the countries where women are held back and subjected to systematic abuses such as honor killings and genital cutting, a very large proportion are predominantly Muslim," they write. The statement may be true, although genital cutting has no basis in Islam. The authors have already told us that maternal mortality is a particularly large problem in Sub-Saharan Africa, where Muslims are not in a majority. (The annual U.N. Human Development Report confirms this.)

Their account of forced prostitution highlights the problems of countries that are not predominantly Muslim (e.g. India, Thailand, Cambodia), as well as of some Muslim nations. The authors praise Muslim-majority Bangladesh as a shining example of what can happen when a nation decides to invest in women and girls.

Although they favor crackdowns on all sex work as the best means of changing traffickers' economic incentives, they also present the argument for decriminalization with regulation.

The gravest problem the authors mention is the basic denial to girls of life itself, whether through infanticide, discriminatory nutrition and health care in childhood, or the increasingly common practice of sex-selective abortion. Here the nations of East Asia leap into prominence. China and South Korea have two of the most unbalanced sex ratios in the world.

This wonderful book combines a denunciation of horrible abuses with clear-eyed hope and some compelling practical strategies. The courageous women described here, and millions more like them, deserve nothing less.

In honor of Franklin & Marshall College's 40 years of coeducation, Kristof will present a free, public lecture at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 5, in Barshinger Center for Musical Arts on campus. Kristof recently gave F&M theater professor Carol Davis his Half the Sky Award for founding the Nepal Health Project, which uses theater to teach women about personal health and hygiene. She received a signed copy of his book.