A fresh perspective on continued challenges to women’s lives.
A recent history of the women’s rights movements that have proliferated worldwide.
Vogelstein, a women’s rights lawyer and director of the Women and Foreign Policy Program at the Council on Foreign Relations, and her colleague Stone, a senior fellow at the CFR, offer an inspiring overview of burgeoning women’s movements in Brazil, China, Egypt, Tunisia, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Sweden. Social media platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp, and Twitter have proved indispensable to this powerful wave of activism, allowing women to share their experiences, support one another, and organize to address their concerns. Although sometimes inciting severe backlash for participants, the movements, the authors show, have generated positive results: More women have been elected to government, beneficial laws have been enacted and enforced, and policies have been reformed. For each country represented, the authors create vivid profiles of activists who have spoken out against cultural norms that discriminate against women and that condone abuse. In Latin America, for example, harassment and violence “are endemic to machismo culture, and Brazilian women are particularly at risk,” facing the highest incidence of femicide in the region. In China, although the constitution recognizes equal rights for women, with no specific legal prohibitions against sexual harassment and gender discrimination, women can face personal and professional retribution by protesting. In Egypt, feminist activism is suppressed by an authoritarian government, causing women to risk constant surveillance, house arrest, exile, or imprisonment if they dare to organize and speak out. In contrast, in nearby Tunisia, the nation’s constitution, ratified in 2014, contains provisions for guaranteeing women’s safety and equality. Even in a country as socially progressive as Sweden, “staggering numbers of women” have testified to sexual harassment and discrimination. The authors suggest an agenda for change that includes meaningful redress, legal reform, women’s equal representation in all areas, fair allocation of resources, and recalibration of the social norms that allowed abuse. #MeToo founder Tarana Burke provides the foreword.
A fresh perspective on continued challenges to women’s lives.Pub Date: July 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5417-5862-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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