Bravo, Kavita! I just finished reading this book today, and while it is an excellent primer for the somewhat uninitiated on the challenges facing women around the world, I felt frustrated that the author’s solutions seemed overly simplistic and didn’t address the complex historical, political and socioeconomic context within which we know them to exist. Fantastic review, again, and thank you for sharing the position of the Global Fund for Women with people who obviously care about women in developing nations world wide. As an aside, while I was delighted to see grantees of the Global Fund highlighted in this book, I think given the Global Fund’s leadership role in addressing women’s human rights and fostering advancement of the women’s movement overall, that you deserved a LOT more airtime in this book than you received.
Thank you, Kavita! I felt all your points were very well taken. One message I noted in the book was a bias toward independent action on the ground and infusion of private funding to remedy the injustices that were presented, as opposed to efforts at government restructuring and advocacy for high (UN)-level policy initiatives and implementation. That speaks to your observations about a failure to view the oppression of women in the whole cultural, economic and historical context of their nations and the world. I totally applaud the models of courage and dedication to change the status of women whose stories were profiled in the book. Hopefully, however, readers are moved to a deeper analysis of root causes of gender inequity and to steps they individually and collectively must take toward confronting and ending that paradigm. Your comments on this book are exceedingly valuable, not only because of your position, but to enlighten many to the fact that the information presented in “Half the Sky” is not a revelation.
Thank you, Kavita Ramdas, for your review of “Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide.” Please write a book.
To add:
Do a Google Books search for the words militarization, colonial, hegemony, nationalism, ethnocentrism, governmentality, subaltern, political economy, and collaboration and you’ll get nothing. Racism appears in the context of Jim Crow; imperialism, empire, and liberation are not in any analytical context or framework for deep thought or discussion. This is disturbing.
Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn are very good storytellers, people who light some of the darkness but without dissecting the reasons for the darkness visible. I was hoping for that third space born of critical thought, some applied research, or nonethnocentric discourse about state-sanctioned violence playing out on the bodies of women, plurality as precondition to freedom, secular wars about resources, Othering.
At the very least I needed a definition of the contested term “gender” that transcends the binary and engenders my trust in the authors as narrators. Were we on the same page? Speaking of things trans…if the authors just hopped aboard the women’s rights’ train, dare I ask how long before they get to queer, gay, lesbian, or homosexual—also not mentioned in their book?
I am irritated by the contriteness of the authors confessing their un-PCness in the chapter on misogyny and Islam, the too many “plump” and “round faced” women, some with “hair peeking out” or “light chocolate skin.”
I wanted to like this book, really, and appreciated the authors’ ardor, profiles in courage, and grassroots call to action. But then Kristof and WuDunn go and quote ex-World Bank economist Lawrence Summers about the “highest-return investment available in the developing world” being “investment in girls’ education”—perhaps just as long as it isn’t in math and science where they have less “innate ability” than men—also said by Lawrence Summers (ex-Harvard president in 2005).
With that, any reliable narration went out the window, and in came a gust of questions not about any malintent on the authors’ part, but about their capacity, choices, paucity of intellectual rigor, and even fact-checking.
To paraphrase Marx (don’t bother Googling him) and Kavita’s paraphrasing Marx, the book needs to engage in some “criticism that must not be afraid of its own conclusion.” Absent is not only an understanding or discussion of the political terrain of the times (and/or The New York Times’), but also of the material basis for that terrain—not of women’s or men of the Global South’s, or disenfranchised people’s making.
Kavita has said that there is no such thing as “women’s issues” in a world where women make up 51% of the population. Concomitantly, there is no such thing as half a sky, though the 20% that the U.S. pollutes affects everyone but mostly plays out on the bodies of women and girls in the Global South.
“Half the Sky” means well. And the world, especially women, needs this book’s access, the authors’ power, their awards, their heart and goodwill—and yes, the agency and creativity seemingly denied many of the women profiled in the book ad tedium.
And so, I beseech the authors: There is an abundance of information, studies, and stakeholder research out there to be used, cited, etc. Please go get the help you need and become politically and issue savvy fast! Do your homework, lose some of those fetishizing adjectives, and collaborate with the many willing and knowledgeable organizations and sources worldwide—especially the Global Fund for Women—that have been assiduously studying, and working with and for women’s rights for years.
I applaud this book with one hand. The sound it makes is plaintive.
COMMENTS
BY Nancy Deyo
ON November 28, 2009 04:58 PM
Bravo, Kavita! I just finished reading this book today, and while it is an excellent primer for the somewhat uninitiated on the challenges facing women around the world, I felt frustrated that the author’s solutions seemed overly simplistic and didn’t address the complex historical, political and socioeconomic context within which we know them to exist. Fantastic review, again, and thank you for sharing the position of the Global Fund for Women with people who obviously care about women in developing nations world wide. As an aside, while I was delighted to see grantees of the Global Fund highlighted in this book, I think given the Global Fund’s leadership role in addressing women’s human rights and fostering advancement of the women’s movement overall, that you deserved a LOT more airtime in this book than you received.
BY Elaine Nonneman
ON November 30, 2009 03:06 AM
Thank you, Kavita! I felt all your points were very well taken. One message I noted in the book was a bias toward independent action on the ground and infusion of private funding to remedy the injustices that were presented, as opposed to efforts at government restructuring and advocacy for high (UN)-level policy initiatives and implementation. That speaks to your observations about a failure to view the oppression of women in the whole cultural, economic and historical context of their nations and the world. I totally applaud the models of courage and dedication to change the status of women whose stories were profiled in the book. Hopefully, however, readers are moved to a deeper analysis of root causes of gender inequity and to steps they individually and collectively must take toward confronting and ending that paradigm. Your comments on this book are exceedingly valuable, not only because of your position, but to enlighten many to the fact that the information presented in “Half the Sky” is not a revelation.
BY Lisa Denenmark
ON February 4, 2010 11:54 AM
Thank you, Kavita Ramdas, for your review of “Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide.” Please write a book.
To add:
Do a Google Books search for the words militarization, colonial, hegemony, nationalism, ethnocentrism, governmentality, subaltern, political economy, and collaboration and you’ll get nothing. Racism appears in the context of Jim Crow; imperialism, empire, and liberation are not in any analytical context or framework for deep thought or discussion. This is disturbing.
Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn are very good storytellers, people who light some of the darkness but without dissecting the reasons for the darkness visible. I was hoping for that third space born of critical thought, some applied research, or nonethnocentric discourse about state-sanctioned violence playing out on the bodies of women, plurality as precondition to freedom, secular wars about resources, Othering.
At the very least I needed a definition of the contested term “gender” that transcends the binary and engenders my trust in the authors as narrators. Were we on the same page? Speaking of things trans…if the authors just hopped aboard the women’s rights’ train, dare I ask how long before they get to queer, gay, lesbian, or homosexual—also not mentioned in their book?
I am irritated by the contriteness of the authors confessing their un-PCness in the chapter on misogyny and Islam, the too many “plump” and “round faced” women, some with “hair peeking out” or “light chocolate skin.”
I wanted to like this book, really, and appreciated the authors’ ardor, profiles in courage, and grassroots call to action. But then Kristof and WuDunn go and quote ex-World Bank economist Lawrence Summers about the “highest-return investment available in the developing world” being “investment in girls’ education”—perhaps just as long as it isn’t in math and science where they have less “innate ability” than men—also said by Lawrence Summers (ex-Harvard president in 2005).
With that, any reliable narration went out the window, and in came a gust of questions not about any malintent on the authors’ part, but about their capacity, choices, paucity of intellectual rigor, and even fact-checking.
To paraphrase Marx (don’t bother Googling him) and Kavita’s paraphrasing Marx, the book needs to engage in some “criticism that must not be afraid of its own conclusion.” Absent is not only an understanding or discussion of the political terrain of the times (and/or The New York Times’), but also of the material basis for that terrain—not of women’s or men of the Global South’s, or disenfranchised people’s making.
Kavita has said that there is no such thing as “women’s issues” in a world where women make up 51% of the population. Concomitantly, there is no such thing as half a sky, though the 20% that the U.S. pollutes affects everyone but mostly plays out on the bodies of women and girls in the Global South.
“Half the Sky” means well. And the world, especially women, needs this book’s access, the authors’ power, their awards, their heart and goodwill—and yes, the agency and creativity seemingly denied many of the women profiled in the book ad tedium.
And so, I beseech the authors: There is an abundance of information, studies, and stakeholder research out there to be used, cited, etc. Please go get the help you need and become politically and issue savvy fast! Do your homework, lose some of those fetishizing adjectives, and collaborate with the many willing and knowledgeable organizations and sources worldwide—especially the Global Fund for Women—that have been assiduously studying, and working with and for women’s rights for years.
I applaud this book with one hand. The sound it makes is plaintive.