Half the Sky

Crossposted from the Harvard Political Review blog:

Last week was slavery week on the HPRgument (apparently!). We talked about "intern slavery," twice, and then American slavery. But what about today? Slavery of course is still a very real problem; in absolute terms, by every estimate, there are more slaves today than there ever were in history, and the trade of human lives is more active and more hazardous than before. At the heart of this trade is women. Gender-based crimes, like sex slavery, rape, human trafficking and medical/social neglect persist with astonishing pervasiveness -- and represent, according to Nick Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn in their excellent new book Half the Sky, the world's greatest moral tragedy and also it's greatest opportunity.

Half the Sky is an extraordinary book. I recently read it and for anyone that cares about development, human rights or the future of the world, I would recommend the same. The authors' thesis is that while the central moral challenge of the 19th century was chattel slavery, and of 20th century was totalitarianism - a form of mental, societal slavery - the "paramount moral challenge of this century" will be the "struggle for gender equality around the world," the struggle for the emancipation of women. They hope that their book represents something of a founding text for a new international social movement.

Consider a few of the facts that they bring up:

"More girls have been killed in the last fifty years, precisely because thye were girls, than men were killed in all the battles of hte twentieth century. More girls are killed in this routine 'gendercide' in any one decade than people were slaughtered in all the genocides of the twentieth century."

"All told, girls in India from one to five are 50 percent more likely to die than boys the same age. The best estimate is that a little Indian girl dies from discrimination every four minutes."

There are one million to two million women currently enslaved as prostitutes in India alone -- women who are raped for hours on end, living in cells, for no pay

Women aged fifteen to forty-four worldwide “are more likely to be maimed or die from male violence than from cancer, malaria, traffic accidents, and war combined”

I reviewed the book in full for The Perspective Magazine, the campus' liberal monthly. My central argument was that the authors managed to re-write the vocabulary of worldwide female oppression, transitioning it away from the language of feminism and "critical gender studies" and towards a new language grounded in moral struggle and humanitarianism. Half The Sky is in this way an exemplar of the genre coined by John Stauffer and Tim McCarthy: "protest literature." It deploys its measured prose style for the sake of moral advocacy. A rare and tough thing to pull off. From my review:

The authors pay no heed to these cautions – to these debates about agency, stylization, and discursive embeddedness (or to the older debates about the patriarchy, the sisterhood and the creation of “the other”). They ignore these debates at their peril, but also to their credit. Critical gender theory – I’m not the first to suggest – has the paradoxical effect of impeding the very social change that it advocates. For example, how can one seek to emancipate women without consensus even on what is meant by “woman”? How can one pledge support to the cause of the marginalized and oppressed worldwide, while denying one’s own prerogative to transcend one’s culture and fight for the other? In the authors’ words:

So was it cultural imperialism for Westerners to criticize footbinding and female infanticide? Perhaps. But it was also the right thing to do. If we believe firmly in certain values, such as equality of all human beings regardless of color or gender, then we should not be afraid to stand up for them; it would be feckless to defer to slavery, torture, foot-binding, honor killings, or genital cutting just because we believe in respecting other faiths or cultures…

Kristof and WuDunn decide to bowdlerize the complexity of gender studies for the sake of their movement. In other words, they ignore gender studies for the sake of the women themselves.