The list of sins against women in the United States is long. We still lag our male counterparts in pay. We just about outnumber men in college but are only a fraction of the bosses in business.
We just about outnumber men in law school too. But there are only two women on the Supreme Court.
We work outside the home but still handle most of the chores in it.
We are in regular danger of having our reproductive rights revoked.
Our daughters are muscled out of the way in science classes. They share only a fraction of the purse in sports.
But those grievances seem like just so much whining when put up against the cruelties visited upon women in the other half of the world: sex slavery, death in childbirth, mass rape, honor killings, genital cutting and the simple indifference of fathers and mothers to their infant daughters.
Nicholas Kristof, a New York Times columnist, and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn --the first married couple to have won the Pulitzer Prize for reporting --have published a book detailing what it might mean to developing countries in economic and political stability if they ceased the systematic abuse and devaluation of women and instead educated and employed them.
"Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide" is the title, and it refers to the Chinese saying, "Women hold up half the sky."
But as the authors retell the stories of individual women in Africa and South Asia and the cruelty they suffered, it becomes an ironic title.
Kristof and WuDunn were assigned to the Times' Beijing bureau, and among their first assignments was the massacre of Chinese students protesting for democracy in Tiananmen Square.
But in the next year, the authors found a little-noticed demographic study that showed 39,000 baby girls --many times the number of students killed in the square --die annually in China because their parents do not give them the same nutrition and medical attention they give their infant sons.
"We began to wonder if our journalistic priorities were skewed," they write.
The authors call the brutality inflicted on women and girls "the paramount moral challenge" of this era.
That what is happening is wrong on so many levels is indisputable. But what is equally evident in the stories of individual women and in supporting data is that educating women and harnessing their energy can do more to lift a country out of poverty than all the foreign aid ever given.
And the participation of women in a country's institutions --political, educational, business and social --also prevents the kind of extremism and terrorism that seems to flourish when a nation is flooded with testosterone.
Of course, the family benefits when women are educated and employed. Kristof and WuDunn found that when extra income is added to the family coffers, women will spend it on food, health care and housing improvements, while men are more likely to spend it on liquor, prostitution, candy, sweet drinks and feasts.
And such simple things can improve the lot of women: micro loans that allow a woman and her neighbors to create or expand a business that will provide money to improve all their lives; new school uniforms for girls every year to keep them motivated to go to school; help for girls in managing menstruation, which causes so many to miss school and eventually to drop out; and iodized salt to improve the brain function of infant girls.
If we can't write a check for the $10 billion the authors recommend for the education of women and girls worldwide, we can do something, and the authors outline several simple steps.
The first is to focus on the particular harm to women that speaks to you: maternal health, education, mass rape, sex trafficking. Then go to one of the listed organizations that can link you directly to a woman or a young girl who needs your help or sponsorship.
Form a giving club with friends of a like mind. Engage your daughters, as well.
Or simply join the CARE Action Network at
www.can.care.org and make your feelings known to policymakers.
Kristof and WuDunn argue that the rights of women are key to a country's progress. Certainly that is just as true in the United States as it is in India or Zimbabwe.
But let's put our issues aside for the moment and focus instead on what small thing we might do to relieve the suffering or lift up the lives of women on the other side of the world.
E-mail Reimer at
susan.reimer@baltsun.com.
(Sept. 25, 2009)
