August and September were great months for OPC member Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn: their latest book was published and they received the 2009 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Lifetime Achievement for their extensive work chronicling human rights in Asia, Africa and the developing world.
AUGUST AND SEPTEMBER were great months for OPC member Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. Their latest book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide [New York: Knopf] was published.
An essay based on that book was the cover article in The New York Times Sunday Magazine. And they received the 2009 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Lifetime Achievement for their extensive work chronicling human rights in Asia, Africa and the developing world. Now the parents of three children, Nick and Sheryl are the first marred couple to win a Pulitzer Prize.
They won for their coverage of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests when they were New York Times correspondents in Beijing. Nick now travels the world as a Times op-ed columnist. Sheryl, a former Times TV newscaster, business editor and correspondent with her husband in China and Japan, now works in finance and philanthropy.
The authors write about women and children in Africa and Asia who are sold into sex slavery, suffer injuries in childbirth, burned for an inadequate dowry or to allow their husband to remarry, unmarried women killed by their relatives because they were suspected of sleeping with a man and genital cutting. “The heart of this book is the reporting we undertook over many years in Asia, Africa, and Latin America,” the authors wrote.
In their Times Sunday Magazine piece, Kristof and WuDunn wrote: “In the 19th century, the paramount moral challenge was slavery. In the 20th 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.
“Yet if the injustices that women in poor countries suffer are of paramount importance, in an economic and geopolitical sense the opportunity they represent is even greater. ‘Women hold up half the sky,’ in the words of a Chinese saying, yet that’s mostly an aspiration: in a large slice of the world, girls are uneducated and women marginalized, and it’s not an accident that those same countries are disproportionately mired in poverty and riven by fundamentalism and chaos.
“There’s a growing recognition among everyone from the World Bank to the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff to aid organizations like CARE that focusing on women and girls is the most effective way to fight global poverty and extremism. That’s why foreign aid is increasingly directed to women. The world is awakening to a powerful truth: Women and girls aren’t the problem; they’re the solution.”
In their book, the authors list four steps readers can take in the next 10 minutes to help women in distress:
“1. Go to www.globalgiving.org or www.kiva.org and open an account. Both sites are people-to-people, meaning that they link you directly to a person in need overseas. Or try a third site, www.givolgy.com, started by University of Pennsylvania students to help children in developing countries pay for primary school.
“2. Sponsor a girl or a woman through Plan International, Women for Women International, World Vision, or Jewish World Service.
“3. Sign up for e-mail updates on www.womensenews.org and a similar service www.worldpulse.com. Both distribute information about abuses of women and sometimes advise on actions that readers can take.
“4. Join the CARE Action Network at www.can.care.org. Tnis will enable you in speaking out, educating policy makers, and underscoring that the public wants action against poverty and injustice.”