Women become modern-day slaves in brothels. Or they are killed before they are born as in India and China. Or they are left to die from diseases related to childbirth like fistula in poor countries, where gender combines with poverty to become a deadly cocktail of suffering. As wives, their dignity is mostly at the mercy of the men, especially when they are poor and dependent.
Pulitzer-winning journalists Nicholas Kristoff and Sheryl Wudunn have co-written a magnificent book of stories of both the sufferings and heroism of women in different parts of the world. The idea that binds the book is the question of why women should be considered lesser citizens to the extent of being reduced to slavery and worse.
Within their broad thesis is the point that government policies are sometimes to blame. Kristoff and Wudunn point out that sex trafficking took a beating in Sweden the moment the government changed its laws to target customers rather than prostitutes. The result of this was that prostitution dropped 41 per cent in Sweden and the country also ceased to be a popular destination for trafficked women, unlike the Netherlands, which legalised prostitution.
The fact that a girl is killed in the womb or as a child almost every minute in India or Pakistan does not make news in those countries, the authors note. They wonder, quite rightly, if the media would take note if governments on both sides started executing women daily. They blame the media for the continuation of crimes against women, whether it is trafficking, or dowry deaths, or foeticide, or maternal mortality. And they wonder if sex selection should be allowed since women would then give birth only to those girls they want, an extreme view that may not find many takers.
Each story in this book is impactful, as much for its content as for the facile pen the authors wield. There is, for instance, the story of Srei Rath, the Cambodian girl who left her village for work with an employment agent and ended up in a Malaysian brothel. Kept naked and penniless, Rath and the three girls who left with her were forced to work seven days a week, 15 hours a day.
Rath and her friends make their escape from this prison on the tenth floor by pulling a five-inch-wide rack that was used to dry cloths, and balancing it precariously between the balcony in their room and one on the next building. They inched their way along this painfully till they were free. A fall would have meant certain death. But Rath is arrested for illegal migration and later, after a term of one year in jail, sold to a brothel in Thailand. When she finally returns home, she is helped by an NGO to start a shop and later meets a man who loves her and lives happily ever after. There are Indian versions of Rath too in Meena Hasina and her daughter in Bihar.
The adventures of Rath or Hasina are nothing less than those of any classical hero and could have been a book by themselves. This is so with other stories too. Mahbouba Mohammad, an Ethiopian, was 14 years old when she nearly died giving birth; a fistula or a leaking intestine made her an outcast. She was thrown into the jungle to be eaten by jackals but somehow managed to drag her way to a missionary centre in another village. There she became a care giver for other women who suffered from fistula, a common childbirth-related disorder that is caused by hours of obstructed labour.
“A fistula patient (dripping urine and faeces) is a modern-day leper… the reason these women are pariahs is that they are women. If this happened to men, we would have foundations and supplies coming in from all over the world,” the authors quote a person as saying. Survivors like Mahbouba detract from a maternal mortality rate for Africa of 2,100 dead per 100,000 births (in India the number is 400). She was luckly; women like Prudence Lemokouno of Cameroon did not survive a similar fate.
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These harrowing stories might lead you to suppose that this book is a feminine version of the Book of Job. But the authors also write about how education and a bit of financial help through micro-credit can transform the lives of women. There is, for instance, the story of Angeline who was the best in class in her school in Zimbabwe but did not have the money to continue schooling. A small donation from a British housewife changed the life of the little girl and her fellow village girls. Today the small donation centre is a big NGO called Camfed and Angeline is its executive director.
Obviously, the purpose of the book is not just to present disparate stories but to evangelise the cause of the “second sex”, as Kristoff does in his New York Times column. It is part of a huge campaign by the authors to keep these issues alive in public consciousness and end the suffering of women caught in prostitution or disease. Their talent as writers alone would go a long way in spreading the word.
HALF THE SKY
How to change the world
Nicholas D Kristoff and Sheryl Wudunn
Hachette India
328 pages
