Half the Sky Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide

by Kristof, Nicholas D.; WuDunn, Sheryl

• ISBN13: 9780307267146
• ISBN10: 0307267148
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-09-08
• Publisher: Knopf

Summary

Two Pulitzer Prize winners issue a call to arms against our era's most pervasive human rights violation: the oppression of women in the developing world.

Author Biography

Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, husband and wife, won a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of China as New York Times correspondents. Mr. Kristof won a second Pulitzer for his op-ed columns in the Times. He has also served as bureau chief in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Tokyo, and as associate managing editor. At the Times, Ms. WuDunn worked as a business editor and as a foreign correspondent in Tokyo and Beijing. They live in the New York area.

Table of Contents

Introduction The Girl Effect
 
Chapter One Emancipating Twenty-First-Century Slaves
   Fighting Slavery from Seattle
 
Chapter Two Prohibition and Prostitution
   Rescuing Girls Is the Easy Part
 
Chapter Three Learning to Speak Up
   The New Abolitionists
 
Chapter Four Rule by Rape
   Mukhtar's School
 
Chapter Five The Shame of "Honor"
   "Study Abroad"—in the Congo
 
Chapter Six Maternal Mortality—One Woman a Minute
   A Doctor Who Treats Countries, Not Patients
 
Chapter Seven Why Do Women Die in Childbirth?
   Edna's Hospital
 
Chapter Eight Family Planning and the "God Gulf"
   Jane Roberts and Her 34 Million Friends
 
Chapter Nine Is Islam Misogynistic?
   The Afghan Insurgent
 
Chapter Ten Investing in Education
   Ann and Angeline
 
Chapter Eleven Microcredit: The Financial Revolution
   A CARE Package for Goretti
 
Chapter Twelve The Axis of Equality
    Tears over Time Magazine
 
Chapter Thirteen Grassroots vs. Treetops
   Girls Helping Girls
 
Chapter Fourteen What You Can Do
   Four Steps You Can Take in the Next Ten Minutes
 
Appendix: Organizations Supporting Women
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

Excerpts

INTRODUCTION

The Girl Effect

What would men be without women? Scarce, sir, mighty scarce.

— MARK TWAIN



Srey Rath is a self-confident Cambodian teenager whose black hair tumbles over a round, light brown face. She is in a crowded street market, standing beside a pushcart and telling her story calmly, with detachment. The only hint of anxiety or trauma is the way she often pushes her hair from in front of her black eyes, perhaps a nervous tic. Then she lowers her hand and her long fingers gesticulate and flutter in the air with incongruous grace as she recounts her odyssey.

Rath is short and small-boned, pretty, vibrant, and bubbly, a wisp of a girl whose negligible stature contrasts with an outsized and outgoing personality.When the skies abruptly release a tropical rain shower that drenches us, she simply laughs and rushes us to cover under a tin roof, and then cheerfully continues her story as the rain drums overhead. But Rath's attractiveness and winning personality are perilous bounties for a rural Cambodian girl, and her trusting nature and optimistic self-assuredness compound the hazard.

When Rath was fifteen, her family ran out of money, so she decided to go work as a dishwasher in Thailand for two months to help pay the bills. Her parents fretted about her safety, but they were reassured when Rath arranged to travel with four friends who had been promised jobs in the same Thai restaurant.The job agent took the girls deep into Thailand and then handed them to gangsters who took them to Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia. Rath was dazzled by her first glimpses of the city's clean avenues and gleaming high-rises, including at the time the world's tallest twin buildings; it seemed safe and welcoming. But then thugs sequestered Rath and two other girls inside a karaoke lounge that operated as a brothel. One gangster in his late thirties, a man known as "the boss," took charge of the girls and explained that he had paid money for them and that they would now be obliged to repay him."You must find money to pay off the debt, and then I will send you back home," he said, repeatedly reassuring them that if they cooperated they would eventually be released.

Rath was shattered when what was happening dawned on her. The boss locked her up with a customer, who tried to force her to have sex with him. She fought back, enraging the customer. "So the boss got angry and hit me in the face, first with one hand and then with the other," she remembers, telling her story with simple resignation. "The mark stayed on my face for two weeks." Then the boss and the other gangsters raped her and beat her with their fists.

"You have to serve the customers," the boss told her as he punched her. "If not, we will beat you to death. Do you want that?" Rath stopped protesting, but she sobbed and refused to cooperate actively. The boss forced her to take a pill; the gangsters called it "the happy drug" or "the shake drug." She doesn't know exactly what it was, but it made her head shake and induced lethargy, happiness, and compliance for about an hour.When she wasn't drugged, Rath was teary and insufficiently compliant—she was required to beam happily at all customers—so the boss said he would waste no more time on her: She would agree to do as he ordered or he would kill her. Rath then gave in.The girls were forced to work in the brothel seven days a week, fifteen hours a day. They were kept naked to make it more difficult for them to run away or to keep tips or other money, and they were forbidden to ask customers to use condoms. They were battered until they smiled constantly and simulated joy at the sight of customers, because men would not pay as much for sex with girls with reddened eyes and haggard faces.The girls were never allowed out on the street or paid a penny for their work.

"They just gave us food to eat, but they didn't give us much because the cus

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Excerpted from Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas D. Kristof, Sheryl WuDunn
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