Annotation of
The Women’s Crusade. By Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. The New York Times Magazine. August 17, 2009.
~ The Editors
An Annotation
Women’s Human Rights
This month’s roundtable centerpiece by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn focuses on the various challenges faced by women and girls in developing countries, with a special emphasis on how enhancing their rights could strengthen political and economic development within their societies. The authors emphasize that the continued patterns of injustice against women are at the center of the contemporary human rights agenda not only due to its immediate political and economic urgency, but also as a moral concern.
“In the 19th century, the paramount moral challenge was slavery. In the 20 th 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.”
The statistics on the plight of women worldwide give a clear picture of persistent patterns of violence, poverty, denial of freedoms, as well as the lack of economic autonomy that women have historically suffered. “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.”
Kristof and WuDunn identify education as one of the key means to improve gender equality and economic development locally. “In many poor countries, the greatest unexploited resource isn’t oil fields or veins of gold; it is the women and girls who aren’t educated and never become a major presence in the formal economy. With education and with help starting businesses, impoverished women can earn money and support their countries as well as their families. They represent perhaps the best hope for fighting global poverty.”
Our panelists this month take this article further, by indicating that there is a need to look at women’s rights as a global phenomenon and not just as a struggle within the developing world. Furthermore, apart from improving women’s educational capacities individually, it is fundamental to evaluate the structural conditions causing disparities among nations and the impact of global economic forces on women. According to our contributors, it is essential to recognize that women around the world face transnational patterns of abuse linked to the broader failure of the global economic order and the international political structure to secure their rights and meet their needs.
These issues and others are considered in this month’s Roundtable.
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
October 2009: Women’s Human Rights
"The Female Entrepreneur"?
by Cath Collins, Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago de Chile
“This article begs at least as many questions as it raises, but to my mind the falsest note it strikes has to do with the argument that women’s status as a legitimate development priority is not inherent. Rather, they are a convenient vehicle for targeting because they are responsible, family-centred—self-sacrificing, therefore—and, even better, potential capitalists too.”
I read the “Women’s Crusade” article that forms the centrepiece of this month’s roundtable with initial interest, gradually turning to a vague sense of disquiet spiced with occasional disbelief. After a few more readings, I tried highlighting the passages that bothered me and stringing them together. Countries “riven by fundamentalism”— that’s presumably the Islamic variety, rather than the Christian variant which holds such sway in the US. The suggestion that “everyone from the World Bank to the US [...] Chiefs of Staff to [...] CARE” now thinks that women are the answer to global extremism hides too many questionable assumptions to list: for now, I’ll stick with the one that implies those three actors complete the fullest possible range of alternative views.
Basically, the aspects of the article that grated on me have to do with its US-centeredness, not just in the casual and potentially defensible sense of offering North American referents for a predominantly North American readership. Good journalism invites empathy; outstanding journalism does so by helping the reader step into the world of the written-about. This journalism does something different: it reads otherness through the codes of the already-familiar, forcing the strange and potentially challenging into the twin moulds of hopelessly exotic (and faintly distasteful), on the one hand, and folksy “we’re all the same at heart-ness,” on the other. The point is more serious than a simple stylistic quibble: presumably Kristof and WuDun have a much better and more professional handle that I do on the best ways to reach their target readership. But aside from the medium, how about the message? The message here has a faintly illiberal tinge, best exemplified in the fact that its central redemptive offer is the seductive power of the (North) American dream. The story’s heroines after all include Tererai Trent, remarkable principally because her maximum aspiration in life turned out to be a US education. Which, of course—and because this is a heart warming story—she achieved.
The article blithely assures us that Tererai, once she has completed the highly sought after PhD education she is now embarked upon, will be returning to her village to selflessly share the fruits of First World insights with her less fortunate sisters. The reality, as the article’s authors really ought to know, is quite different. The brain drain from South to North, in these days of highly competitive, individualizing “value-added” education, is an established phenomenon. So too is the fact that the occasional bootstrap tale adds to, rather than altering, the fundamentally elite nature of this kind of unnatural selection. Individual success and “bettering oneself” may not, say stories of this kind, be the exclusive preserve of the already-privileged few. But they do continue to be the fastest way to the top of the ladder. The ladder, what is more, leans against a pyramid. The kind of individual, go-getter economic success that the article admiringly reports for another of its heroines, Lahore micro-entrepreneur Saima Muhammad, can never by its nature be for anything more than a tiny minority. But the article ducks the big structural questions about whether competitive mini-capitalism really offers the way for whole communities—indeed, a whole gender—to transform their situation for the better.
Saima’s success, after all, leads her to become a respected neighborhood institution and even, as she herself acknowledges, a money-lender. Her standing in her family and community skyrockets, but not because anyone, least of all her mother-in-law, has felt moved to recognize her intrinsic worth. No, Saima’s new respectability is based on her status as breadwinner—and could, presumably, be reversed if things start to go badly on the small business front. Meanwhile, we are not told whether Saima plans to share her good fortune with other women. Does the neighborhood money lender give preferential rates? Does she see herself as a link in a chain of challenge and transformation of unjust structures, or does she simply see a way out for herself and her family?
This article begs at least as many questions as it raises, but to my mind the falsest note it strikes has to do with the argument that women’s status as a legitimate development priority is not inherent. Rather, they are a convenient vehicle for targeting because they are responsible, family-centred—self-sacrificing, therefore—and, even better, potential capitalists too.
Cath Collins has been associate lecturer in politics at the Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago de Chile since October 2007. She was previously Latin America Research Fellow at Chatham House London (The Royal Institute of International Affairs), before which she lectured in the politics of human rights in Latin America at the Institute for the Study of the Americas, University of London. She has lived and worked as a youth and community organizer in Chile, Brazil, Bolivia and the UK.
Violence in the House
by Katherine Hite, Vassar College
"If we are to imagine that another world for women is possible, we need to globalize the atrocities, which mean a fair share of self-implication, confronting our own dirty laundry, putting our house in order as we lecture about what must be done elsewhere."
There was something particularly haunting in reading this Kristof and WuDunn piece during the week’s major US headlines: a girl in California had been imprisoned for eighteen years in the home of a man who kidnapped and raped her, fathered her children, and employed her in his small enterprise—a business card design and printing agency. Business clients interviewed for the story appeared completely taken aback. Clients had always found the now twenty-nine-year-old Jaycee Dugard “professional, polite, and responsive” as well as “creative and talented in her work.” Others expressed similar shock, recounting that Ms. Dugard “was always smiling.” Ms. Dugard’s kidnapper and rapist was also the father of her two daughters, whom neighbors said were “‘well-mannered,’ like normal girls, who loved Hannah Montana.”
The story of Jaycee Dugard captured intense US attention for a week, and television talk news continues to debate its many disturbing dimensions—the psyche of the perpetrator as well as the victim, the way in which the legal system released the perpetrator years ago for previous sexual abuse offenses, the complicity of the perpetrator’s wife, the blindness of the neighbors. What proves unusual about the story, however, is not that Ms. Dugard was missing or raped, but that the atrocious acts were carried out by a non-relative or family acquaintance. According to the US Justice Department, in a typical year, approximately 797,500 US children (younger than eighteen) go missing, an average of 2,185 a day. Only a fraction is attributable to someone unfamiliar to the young person.
In the United States, 15 percent of sexual assault and rape victims are under the age of twelve, like Jaycee Dugard. Another 29 percent are between the ages of 12 and 17. And one in six women (17.7 million American women) has been a victim of serious sexual assault.
In my quick search for the details surrounding the story of Jaycee Dugard, the day’s (September 12 th) CNN videos that appeared in rows on my computer screen included the story of Annie Le, a missing Yale graduate student (now dead); Haleigh Cummings, a missing five-year-old girl in Florida; and Karen Wright, a missing middle-aged California hairstylist whose husband is the chief suspect. The missing girls and women cross US geography, class, and race.
It thus simply boggles the mind that in this article, Kristof and WuDunn dissociate human rights violations against US women from those around the globe. Why do the authors tell these stories and not others? Give me a woman in Pakistan beaten by her husband and I’ll give you a woman in Tennessee murdered by her husband, a US soldier, on September 8 th, or a woman who was shot and killed by her UC-Irvine graduate student estranged husband on September 13 th. We have a term for this: “intimate violence.”
Perhaps it would not have been so egregious a dissociation had Kristof and WuDunn used less patronizing language about the women who constitute their subjects, writing, for example, of an Indian woman with “chocolate skin, black hair, and gleaming white teeth— and a lovely smile” here, of a “round-faced” Pakistani woman there. The article is chock-full of characterizations of women that reproduce the degradation the authors are purporting to describe. The classic “othering,” the patronizing tone, irreparably distracts the reader from the very important denunciation of violence against women throughout the globe, as well as the valuable work of organizations like the Global Fund for Women.
Indeed, why the very title, “Crusade”? What is this meant to evoke? Religious righteousness? A simple story of good and evil? West and the rest? If we are to imagine that another world for women is possible, we need to globalize the atrocities, which mean a fair share of self-implication, confronting our own dirty laundry, putting our house in order as we lecture about what must be done elsewhere. I would like to see Kristof and WuDunn now take on one of the latest issues to surface in the US health care reform debate: it turns out that in at least eight US states, injuries suffered from wife-beating are classified as a pre-existing condition that allows insurers to discriminate against or deny women their benefits. Then we might have a conversation about what US actions like the occupation and devastation of Iraq or the bombing of wedding parties in Afghanistan or Pakistan mean for women trying to hold up half the sky.
Katherine Hite is a professor of political science and director of the Latin American and Latino/a Studies program at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY. She is the author of When the Romance Ended: Leaders of the Chilean Left, 1968-1998 (Columbia University Press, 2000), co-editor (with Paola Cesarini) of Authoritarian Legacies and Democracy in Latin America and Southern Europe (Notre Dame, 2004), and most recently has authored several articles on the politics of memory, commemoration, and human rights in Latin America and Spain.Webpage: http://politicalscience.vassar.edu/bio_hite.html
A Few Drops of Oil Will Not be Enough
by Stephen James, La Trobe University
"...but a focus on the individual capacities and self-reliance of women who can by their own imagination, creativity, energy and efforts turn their families and communities around through entrepreneurship is a rather romantic account. While our hearts are warmed by such inspirational stories they are exceptional stories: most women in their shoes do not overcome the extraordinary odds stacked against them."
Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn provide a rich description of the various kinds of violence, deprivation, depredation and exploitation that women experience on a vast scale in the developing world. They write of sex trafficking, acid attacks, “bride burning,” enslavement, spousal beatings, unequal healthcare (something the USA still struggles with), insufficient food, gendered abortions and infant and maternal mortality. They are right to identify the education of women and girls as part of the solution to the widespread “gendercide.” However, their approach focuses too much on the capacity, indeed the virtue or heroism, of individual women. It does not take adequate account of systemic factors, as many IR, peace and development scholars have done.
Kristof and WuDunn claim that “the best hope for fighting global poverty” is to educate women. The poorest families in the world are even castigated for their spending habits—their profligacy that leaves them without the means to educate wives and daughters. This is a bit much coming from writers from the developed world where there is such extraordinary overconsumption and waste. The “dirty little secret of global poverty,” I would suggest, is not the spending habits of the poor but the systemic dimensions of the world economy. Why is it that transnational corporations (TNCs) operating in the developing world pay their employees so little, that the working conditions there are not comparable to those in the developed world? The authors referred to the World Bank, yet there was no mention of the savage effects of neoliberal structural adjustment programs on the very areas the authors identify as priorities for women’s wellbeing: health, education, labor conditions, and, I would add, social welfare.
What are the causes of the disparities between the developed and developing world? These cannot be explored in this short reflection, but a focus on the individual capacities and self-reliance of women who can by their own imagination, creativity, energy and efforts turn their families and communities around through entrepreneurship is a rather romantic account. While our hearts are warmed by such inspirational stories they are exceptional stories: most women in their shoes do not overcome the extraordinary odds stacked against them. Can the education of women overcome poor terms of trade, developing world debt, government corruption, civil and other wars, pandemics, genocides and sexually motivated violence? While Eleanor Roosevelt said that human rights need to start close to home, and was a fervent supporter of education, she also recognized, as did many other drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that war, racism, sexism, poverty and hunger affect what we now term “human security”; and that a focus on women, the family and the individual is not enough. We must attend to the national, regional, international and global levels as well.
In addition to the UDHR’s endorsement of the equal human rights and dignity of women and men, two provisions of it (and comparable provisions in the 1966 economic and social rights treaty) are especially important to the prospects for women. One is Article 25. It elaborates a human right to an adequate standard of living, one that guarantees everyone adequate health, housing, food and clothing—that is a form of “security” (apparently, according to historian Johannes Morsink, the reference was meant to be to “social security,” and a clerical omission is the reason for the present wording). The other is the very ambitious Article 28 that refers to the right to a world in which all of the UDHR’s human rights can be fulfilled. These articles cannot be realized on the basis of the individual enterprise of women, increased preventive healthcare or education. They can only be realized through the combination of a regulated market, a humane state and a reordering of the priorities of the developed world, not only in terms of consumption, but also regarding the terms of trade, the behavior of TNCs and the conduct of foreign policy. When considering the wastefulness of the poorest families we might also consider the wastefulness of the trillions of dollars spent on arms races, militarization and unwise wars compared with the miniscule proportion of GDP that developed countries devote to foreign aid.
Education is a great thing. No doubt it opens the minds of women and creates opportunities for those who can obtain it. But successful education depends upon capacities, opportunities (for example, the reduced need for women and girls to work) and resources. Kristof and WuDunn conclude that we need dispense only “a few drops of oil in the crankcase of the developing world.” But this assumes that there are no systemic problems, that the crankshaft is sound, as good as any in the developed world. Unfortunately this is not true: a complete overhaul rather than a little lubrication is needed.
Dr. Stephen James is a Research Fellow in the Institute for Human Security at La Trobe University where he edits the international journal Global Change, Peace & Security (Routledge). He holds Arts and Law degrees from the University of Melbourne and a PhD in Politics from Princeton University, where he was a Princeton Wilson Fellow and Lecturer. He is the author of Universal Human Rights: Origins and Development (New York: LFB Scholarly, 2007) and has taught law, politics, history and philosophy at various universities in Australia. He is presently working on a book exploring aspects of the right to an adequate standard of living. Website: http://www.latrobe.edu.au/dialogue/staff.html
From Outrage to Action
by Henry Krisch, University of Connecticut
“The resistance of political authority, economic privilege and gender-based power and customs will be difficult to overcome. Long term gains will require immediate political costs. Who will pay them? What strategies will provide economic and political tools on a large scale? What ideas will reconcile emerging women’s rights with embedded patriarchic privilege?"
Kristof and WuDunn provide a vivid panoramic view of problems faced by women (primarily in the “developing” world), what has been done and what more could be done to help them achieve dignity and autonomy in their lives, and how vindication of their rights could contribute to the broader social development of their societies. In this they provide us with important insights into how human rights might be effectively proclaimed and successfully implemented. In reviewing their considerable contributions, I shall also suggest some limitations on both their analysis and their policy recommendations.
First, as suggested above, they properly link such human rights concerns as lack of simple justice in the face of horrifying brutality with wider concerns of economic, social and cultural development. They demonstrate the importance of active media concern in raising such issues to a level of effective public concern. Furthermore, they detail the efforts of “interveners,” sometimes locals, often NGO outsiders, in seeding the social landscape with hopeful sprouts of change. The authors themselves provide a short list of relatively inexpensive but potentially life changing steps that could be undertaken. Their account, surprisingly so in the face of the misery and brutality they have witnessed, is a hopeful call to energetic action. One wants to cheer them on and, with some cautions in mind, one should.
The authors’ linking of traditional political human rights with economic and social issues reflects a healthy intellectual trend in the study of human rights and moves us away from sterile debates as to the relative importance of political versus socioeconomic rights. Economic advancement empowers people, especially women, in ways that lead to greater political efficacy; both these gains help individuals (again, especially women) escape a restrictive and sometimes degrading social environment.
Good enough: who would object to keeping girls in school by helping them manage menstruation, or to subsidizing salt iodization? But the limitations of this neo-modernization analysis are evident if we automatically expect improvements in the status of women because of growing economic power and a general rise in the prosperity of their societies. In our Western world—prosperous, democratic, and seemingly devoted to gender equity—women often find meaningful advancement at home and at work politically and socially difficult.
This article contributes to the analysis of the media’s role in turning denial of human rights into a public issue. Kristof and WuDunn are refreshingly candid about their own slow awakening as to what constitutes “news”; they have made women’s concerns more visible and politically relevant. If, as they write, “I n this century… the brutality inflicted on so many women and girls around the globe...” will become a major issue, their own work will help make it so. Here it is important to bear in mind the “Cassandra effect.” Surely it is better to bring abuses to light than not, yet crimes in Bosnia or Rwanda, or the current Indian “bride burning,” were not exactly secret. Will today’s Cassandras move political leaders to greater effect than in Troy? That would require a change in the political calculations of political elites; the gradual percolation of human rights ideas into political and scholarly discourse may help. The Obama administration’s actions thus far seem positive, but it is still early in the game. (Recall that the US government has had an Assistant Secretary of State dealing with human rights issues since the Carter administration.) It is not a hopeful sign that so much of the progress Kristof and WuDunn detail is the work of NGOs rather than of governments.
It is precisely this question of political will for large-scale, transnational political action that haunts this hopeful article. We read of a handful of remarkable women who, with timely outside help, have broken free from deprivation and humiliation. Are these exemplary stories misleading? Is not the great mass of women excluded from the help a few women received? Are they (like most people everywhere) lacking in the extraordinary strength of will and character they displayed? As Kristof and WuDunn’s data (readily available to anyone wishing to act) shows, there are millions yet in chains for the few who have fought their way free.
Kristof and WuDunn have service in placing the conditions of women at the center of our concerns and have thereby enriched human rights analysis. But caution is in order. The resistance of political authority, economic privilege and gender-based power and customs will be difficult to overcome. Long term gains will require immediate political costs. Who will pay them? What strategies will provide economic and political tools on a large scale? What ideas will reconcile emerging women’s rights with embedded patriarchic privilege?
The authors’ often heroic personal involvement in their reporting—who will have forgotten the video on the New York Times web site of Kristof pounding on the door of a Pakistani brothel?—has yet not had large scale results in terms of changed policies. To be fair, the authors do not claim such achievements, but the lack of effect on the authorities, especially local police, shows the limitations of even the most provocative journalism. Kristof and WuDunn might reply that working with women will affect changes from below that will change attitudes in communities otherwise resistant to change in mores decreed from a distant capital. Fair enough— but slow work.
Professor Henry Krisch (Political Science emeritus, University of Connecticut) taught political science at the University of Connecticut and Columbia University for almost forty years. He has specialized in Soviet and German, especially East German, politics, and more recently in international human rights issues. At the University of Connecticut, Krisch was Director of the Center for Soviet and East European Studies, co-chaired the academic program committee for the Dodd Year (1995-96) on "Fifty Years After Nuremberg: Human Rights and the Rule of Law." Since 1999, he has been a member of the Gladstein Human Rights Committee. His publications include German Politics under Soviet Occupation (1974), The German Democratic Republic: Search for Identity (1985), Politics and Culture in the GDR (1989), Politics in Germany [co-authored] (2009), and “George Soros,” in The Encyclopedia of Human Rights (2009).
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