Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide

Somewhere between 60 and over 100 million women and girls are missing from the globe today due to gender discrimination. Kristof and WuDunn argue that the worst of these abuses occur in the Global South, although they acknowledge that the Global North isn’t immune. The fact that millions of women are missing is difficult to comprehend. To help show how this is even possible, the authors document three types of abuses. The first is human trafficking. As the stories of Srey Rath, Meena Hasin, Geeta Gosh, Srey Neth, Srey Momma, Usha Narayane, and Sunitha Krishnan illustrate, traffickers often target women and girls from marginalized backgrounds: “In developing countries, tormenting the illiterate is usually risk-free; preying on the educated is more perilous” (50). The dominant group in communities often view sex work as a way to promote social cohesion—and ignore if traffickers target only poor and illiterate girls. Brothel owners use humiliation, rape, violence, and threats to break the spirit—and subsequently don’t usually need to use force to control women and girls. The authors emphasize that complying with brothel owners’ demands doesn’t mean that these women and girls consent to their situation. Because they are enslaved, they often have nowhere to go for help. Even police officers, whose duty is to protect community members, are often complicit. Trafficking is dangerous to women and girls, partly because of the higher risk of contracting HIV/AIDS. Many feminists and liberals want to legalize sex work, believing that will make the practice safer, but the authors vehemently disagree. Their investigations found that laws and regulations don’t curb the selling of underage girls (especially virgins), don’t lead to safer working conditions (as one example, many brothel owners lie to aid workers and government officials about condom usage, which is often much lower than they claim), and don’t stop the trafficking of women and girls across national and international borders. In fact, the authors think that sex slavery has worsened in the last few decades because of the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and other parts of the world, the rise of globalization, and the spread of HIV/AIDS.

Gender-based violence is the second type of abuse. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that between one-third and two-thirds of women in most countries experience physical or sexual violence with an intimate partner. The authors focus on rape, honor killings, and honor rape and thus expose an upsetting irony: In cultures that revere sexual honor, women often face the worst types of abuse. Some traditional cultures support men over women in cases of rape because women are no longer pure, even though this impurity is due to male violence. They encourage women to marry their rapists, as was the case for Woinshet. In addition, some families kill daughters they think are no longer pure to restore family honor. Fighters use honor rapes in war to terrorize the families and communities of the women they rape. The authors note that while men commit most gender-based violence, women are also culpable. Female infanticides remain an issue in many countries because daughters are perceived as less prestigious than sons. Often, the woman murders her daughter, and mothers-in-law are particularly abusive to young women. They beat their daughters-in-law for perceived transgressions, no matter how minor. Kristof and WuDunn emphasize that “this is not a tidy world of tyrannical men and victimized women, but a messier realm of oppressive social customs adhered to by men and women alike” (69).

The final type of abuse is maternal mortality. Estimates suggest that one woman dies every minute in childbirth, and maternal mortality rates are substantially higher in the Global South than in the Global North. Like many other aspects of oppression, maternal mortality is cyclical: The children of women who die during childbirth are themselves also more likely to die. Maternal mortality results from a combination of cultural, national, and international factors. Many women are unable to access maternal healthcare, especially in rural areas, because society doesn’t deem this access important—but good healthcare reduces maternal deaths and pregnancy complications, including fistula. Simeesh Segaye, a young woman from Ethiopia, exemplifies its value: She experienced obstructed labor. It took two days to get to the nearest hospital by bus, and by then her baby had died and she had a fistula. Additionally, the authors document how some cultural contexts use mythology or theology “to explain why women should suffer in childbirth, and they forestalled efforts to make the process safer” (116). For example, many women were denied anesthesiology because of this perspective.