Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
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For most of history, slavery had been accepted as sad but inevitable. The Athenians were brilliant philosophers and abounded in empathy that made them wonderful writers and philosophers, yet they did not even debate their reliance on slavery. Jesus did not address slavery at all in the Gospels; Saint Paul and Aristotle accepted it; and Jewish and Islamic theologians believed in mercy toward slaves but did not question slavery itself. In the 1700s, a few Quakers vigorously denounced slavery, but they were dismissed as crackpots and had no influence. In the early 1780s, slavery was an unquestioned part of the global landscape--and then, astonishingly, within a decade, slavery was at the top of the British national agenda. The tide turned, and Britain banned the slave trade in 1807 and in 1833 became one of the first nations to emancipate its own slaves.
For more than half a century, the British public bore tremendous costs for their moral leadership. On the eve of the British abolition of slave-trading, British ships carried 52 percent of the slaves transported across the Atlantic, and British colonies produced 55 percent of the world's sugar. Without new slaves, the British colonies in the New World were devastated, and Britain's great enemy, France, benefited enormously. So did the United States. Sugar production in the British West Indies fell 25 percent in the first thirty-five years after Britain's abolition of the slave trade, while production in competing slave economies rose by 210 percent.
The British navy led the way in trying to suppress the slave trade, both in the Atlantic and within Africa itself. This led to the loss of some five thousand British lives, plus higher taxes for the British people. And such unilateral action was costly diplomatically, enraging other countries and putting Britain in open conflict with rival military powers. The British antislavery efforts led to a brief war with Brazil in 1850 and to war scares with the United States in 1841 and with Spain in 1853, as well as to sustained tense relations with France. Yet Britain did not flinch. Its example ultimately prompted France to abolish slavery in 1848, inspired the American abolitionists and the Emancipation Proclamation, and pushed Cuba to enforce a ban on slave imports in 1867, in effect ending the transatlantic slave trade.
Two scholars, Chaim Kaufmann and Robert Pape, calculate that for sixty years Britain sacrificed an annual average of 1.8 percentage points of its GNP because of its moral commitment to ending slavery. That is an astonishing total, cumulatively amounting to more than an entire year's GNP for Great Britain (for the United States today, it would be the equivalent of sacrificing more than $14 trillion), a significant and sustained sacrifice in the British standard of living. It was a heroic example of a nation placing its values above its interests.
Credit for the abolitionist movement usually goes to William Wilberforce, and indeed he was one of the foremost leaders of the movement and the one who turned the tide. But Wilberforce joined after abolitionism was well under way, and the public wasn't stirred solely by Wilberforce's eloquence. A central part of the campaign--and one worth learning from today--was a meticulous effort to explain to the English exactly what conditions were like on slave ships and plantations.
Slavery did not exist in Britain itself, only in British territories abroad, so for the average English family slavery was out of sight. As with sex trafficking in India today, it was easy to cluck about the brutality of it all and then move on. The abolitionist who overcame that challenge was Thomas Clarkson, who had first become interested in the issue as a student at Cambridge when he wrote about slaves for a Latin contest. His research so horrified him that he became an ardent abolitionist for life. Clarkson became the driving force behind the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade. "If anyone was the founder of the modern human-rights movement," The Economist has observed, "it was Clarkson."
After leaving university, Clarkson undertook enormous risks to move clandestinely through ports in Liverpool and Bristol where slaving ships docked, to talk to seamen and to gather evidence about the trade. Clarkson acquired manacles, branding irons, thumbscrews, leg shackles, and gruesome implements that were used to force a slave's jaws open. He found a former captain of slave ships who came forward and described their holds. And Clarkson obtained a diagram of a Liverpool slave ship, the Brookes, and made posters showing how it was loaded with 482 slaves. That image became the icon of the abolitionist movement, and it underscored an important point: Clarkson and the abolitionists were scrupulous about not exaggerating. The Brookes, in fact, had carried up to 600 slaves on some journeys, but Clarkson thought it best to use the most carefully documented and conservative figures to guarantee credibility.
Apologists for slavery at the time often described benevolent farming operations in the West Indies, indulgently caring for slaves' every need, but Clarkson's evidence proved that conditions were often revolting. The slavers were furious and paid a group of sailors to assassinate Clarkson; they nearly beat him to death.
Clarkson and Wilberforce seemed to be fighting a hopeless campaign: Britain had a huge economic stake in the continuation of the slave trade, and the suffering was endured by distant peoples whom many Britons considered inferior savages. Yet when British public opinion confronted what it meant to pack human beings into the hold of a ship--the stink, the disease, the corpses, those bloody manacles--citizens recoiled and turned against slavery. It's a useful lesson that what ultimately mattered wasn't just the abolitionists' passion and moral conviction but also the meticulously amassed evidence of barbarity.
Likewise, success came not only from making politicians see the "truth" but also from putting relentless domestic political pressure on them. Clarkson traveled thirty-five thousand miles on horseback, and a former slave, Olaudah Equiano, lectured all over Britain on a five-year book tour. In 1792, 300,000 people boycotted sugar from the West Indies--the greatest consumer boycott in history until that point. That year, more people signed a petition against slavery than were eligible to vote in British elections. And in Parliament, Wilberforce bargained furiously to build a voting bloc to overcome the shipping and slavery lobby. Then, as now, government leaders found ethical arguments most persuasive when they were backed by the raw insistence of voters.
In the 1790s, it was common to dismiss the abolitionists as idealistic moralizers who didn't appreciate economics or understand geopolitical complexities such as the threat from France. In the same way, these days, the "serious issues" are typically assumed to be terrorism or the economy. But the moral issue of the subjugation of women isn't frivolous today any more than slavery was in the 1790s. Decades from now, people will look back and wonder how societies could have acquiesced in a sex slave trade in the twenty-first century that, as we've seen, is bigger than the transatlantic slave trade was in the nineteenth. They will be perplexed that we shrugged as a lack of investment in maternal health caused half a million women to perish in childbirth each year.
Leadership must come from the developing world itself, and that is beginning to happen. In India, Africa, and the Middle East, men and women alike are pushing for greater equality. These people need our support. In the 1960s, blacks like Dr. King led the civil rights movement, but they received crucial backing from Freedom Riders and other white supporters. Today, the international movement for women needs "freedom riders" as well--writing letters, sending money, or volunteering their time.
Moreover, emancipation of women offers another dimension in which to tackle geopolitical challenges such as terrorism. In the aftermath of 9/11, the United States tried to address terrorism concerns in Pakistan by transferring $10 billion in helicopters, guns, and military and economic support; in that same period, the United States became steadily more unpopular in Pakistan, the Musharraf government less stable and extremists more popular. Imagine if we had used the money instead to promote education and microfinance in rural Pakistan, through Pakistani organizations. The result would likely have been greater popularity for the United States and greater involvement of women in society. And, as we've argued, when women gain a voice in society, there's ev
idence of less violence. Swanee Hunt, a former U.S. ambassador to Austria now at Harvard, recalled the reaction of a Pentagon official in 2003 in the aftermath of the "shock and awe" invasion of Iraq: "When I urged him to broaden his search for the future leaders of Iraq, which had yielded hundreds of men and only seven women, he responded, Ambassador Hunt, we'll address women's issues after we get the place secure.' I wondered what 'women's issues' he meant. I was talking about security."
Think about the major issues confronting us in this century. These include war, insecurity, and terrorism; population pressures, environmental strains, and climate change; poverty and income gaps. For all these diverse problems, empowering women is part of the answer. Most obviously, educating girls and bringing them into the formal economy will yield economic dividends and help address global poverty. Environmental pressures arise almost inevitably from surging population growth, and the best way to reduce fertility in a society is to educate girls and give them job opportunities. Likewise, we've argued that one way to soothe some conflict-ridden societies is to bring women and girls into schools, the workplace, government, and business, partly to boost the economy and partly to ease the testosterone-laden values of these countries. We would never argue that the empowerment of women is a silver bullet, but it is an approach that offers a range of rewards that go far beyond simple justice.
Consider Bangladesh for a moment. It is poor, often politically dysfunctional, with tremendous uncertainties ahead of it. Yet it is also incomparably more stable than Pakistan, of which it was a part until 1971 (Bangladesh was called East Pakistan until then). After the country split, Bangladesh was initially presumed to be hopeless, and Henry Kissinger famously dubbed it a "basket case." It suffered from the same political violence and poor leadership as Pakistan, and yet today its future looks more assured. There are many reasons for the different outcomes, including the cancer of violence that spread from Afghanistan to Pakistan and the Bengali intellectual tradition that has moderated extremism in Bangladesh. Yet surely one reason Bangladesh is more stable today is that it invested enormously in women and girls, so that a girl in Bangladesh is far more likely to go to school than a Pakistani girl, and afterward far more likely to hold a job. The upshot is that Bangladesh today has a significant civil society and a huge garment industry full of women workers who power a dynamic export sector.
Nearly everyone who works in poor countries recognizes that women are the third world's greatest underutilized resource. "The first thing we learned is that men are often untrainable," said Bunker Roy, who runs Barefoot College, an India-based aid organization that operates in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. "So now we work only with women. We pick a woman from Afghanistan, from Mauritania, from Bolivia, from Timbuktu, and in six months we train her to be a barefoot engineer" working on water supplies or other issues.
Almost invariably around the globe, countries and companies that have deployed women according to their talents have prospered. "Encouraging more women into the labor force has been the single biggest driver of Euro-zone's labor market success, much more so than 'conventional' labor market reforms," Goldman Sachs wrote in a research report in 2007. Likewise, public companies that have more women executives consistently perform better than those with fewer women. One study of America's Fortune 500 companies found that the one quarter with the most female executives had a return on equity 35 percent higher than the quarter with the fewest female executives. On the Japanese stock exchange, the companies with the highest proportion of female employees performed nearly 50 percent better than those with the lowest. In each case, the most likely reason isn't that female executives are geniuses. Rather, it is that companies that are innovative enough to promote women are also ahead of the curve in reacting to business opportunities. That is the essence of a sustainable economic model. Moving women into more productive roles helps curb population growth and nurtures a sustainable society.
Consider the costs of allowing half a country's human resources to go untapped. Women and girls cloistered in huts, uneducated, unemployed, and unable to contribute significantly to the world represent a vast seam of human gold that is never mined. The consequence of failing to educate girls is a capacity gap not only in billions of dollars of GNP but also in billions of IQ points.
Psychologists have long noted that intelligence as measured by IQ tests has risen sharply over the years, a phenomenon known as the Flynn Effect, after a New Zealand intelligence researcher named James Flynn. The average American IQ, for example, rose by eighteen points from 1947 to 2002. Over thirty years, the IQ of Dutch conscripts rose twenty-one points and those of Spanish schoolchildren by ten points. One scholar estimated that if American children of 1932 had taken an IQ test in 1997, then half of them would have been classified as at least borderline mentally retarded.
The cause of the Flynn Effect isn't fully understood, but it affects primarily those with lower scores, who may not have received adequate nutrition, education, or stimulation. Iodine deficiency is a factor in some countries. As people become better nourished and better educated, they perform better on intelligence tests. Thus it's no surprise that a particularly large Flynn Effect has been detected in developing countries such as Brazil and Kenya. The IQ of rural Kenyan children rose eleven points in just fourteen years, a pace greater than any Flynn Effect reported in the West.
Tererai Trent in front of the hut in which she was born, in Zimbabwe (Tererai Trent)
Girls in poor countries are particularly undernourished, physically and intellectually. If we educate and feed those girls and give them employment opportunities, then the world as a whole will gain a new infusion of human intelligence--and poor countries will garner citizens and leaders who are better equipped to address those countries' challenges. The strongest argument we can make to leaders of poor countries is not a moral one but a pragmatic one: If they wish to enliven their economies, they had better not leave those seams of human gold buried and unexploited.
One of the groups that has increasingly focused on women for these pragmatic reasons is Heifer International, an aid organization based in Arkansas that gives cows, goats, chickens, or other animals to farmers in poor countries. Its head is Jo Luck, a former state cabinet official in Arkansas under then-governor Bill Clinton. On assuming the presidency of Heifer in 1992, Jo traveled to Africa, where one day she found herself sitting on the ground with a group of young women in a Zimbabwe village. One of them was Tererai Trent.
Tererai is a long-faced woman with high cheekbones and a medium brown complexion; she has a high forehead and tight cornrows. Like many women around the world, she doesn't know when she was born and has no documentation of her birth. She thinks it may have been 1965, but it's possible that it was a couple of years later. As a child, Tererai didn't get much formal education, partly because she was a girl and was expected to do household chores. She herded cattle and looked after her younger siblings. Her father would say: Let's send our sons to school, because they will be the breadwinners. "My father and every other man realized that they did not have social security and hence they invested in male children," Tererai says. Tererai's brother, Tinashe, was forced to go to school, where he was an indifferent student. Tererai pleaded to be allowed to attend, but wasn't permitted to do so. Tinashe brought his books home each afternoon, and Tererai pored over them and taught herself to read and write. Soon she was doing her brother's homework every evening.
The teacher grew puzzled, since Tinashe was a poor student in class but always handed in perfect homework. Finally, the teacher noticed that the handwriting was different for homework and for class assignments, and whipped Tinashe until he confessed the truth. Then the teacher went to the children's father, told him that Tererai was a prodigy, and begged for her to be allowed to attend school. After much argument, the father allowed Tererai to attend school for a couple of terms, but then he married her off at about age eleven.
Tererai's husband barred her from attending school, resented her li
teracy, and beat her whenever she tried to practice by reading a scrap of old newspaper. Indeed, he beat her for plenty more as well. She hated her marriage but had no way out. "If you're a woman and you are not educated, what else?" she asks.
Yet when Jo Luck came and talked to Tererai and the other young women, Jo kept insisting that things did not have to be this way. She kept saying that they could achieve their goals, repeatedly using the word "achievable." The women caught the repetition and asked the interpreter to explain in detail what "achievable" meant. That gave Jo a chance to push forward. "What are your hopes?" she asked the women, through the interpreter. Tererai and the others were puzzled by the question, because they didn't really have any hopes. Frankly, they were suspicious of this white woman who couldn't speak their language, who kept making bewildering inquiries. But Jo pushed them to think about their dreams, and, reluctantly, they began to think about what they wanted. Tererai timidly voiced her hope of getting an education. Jo pounced and told her that she could do it, that she should write down her goals and methodically pursue them. At first, this didn't make any sense to Tererai, for she was a married woman in her mid-twenties.
There are many metaphors for the role of foreign assistance. We like to think of aid as a kind of lubricant, a few drops of oil in the crankcase of the developing world, so that gears move freely again on their own. That is what Heifer International's help amounted to in this village: Tererai started gliding along freely on her own. After Jo Luck and her entourage disappeared, Tererai began to study frantically, while raising her five children. She went away to her mother's village to escape her husband's beatings. Painstakingly, with the help of friends, she wrote down her goals on a piece of paper: "One day I will go to the United States of America," she began, for goal one. She added that she would earn a college degree, a master's degree, and a PhD--all exquisitely absurd dreams for a married cattleherder in Zimbabwe who had less than one year's formal education. But Tererai took the piece of paper and folded it inside three layers of plastic to protect it, then placed it in an old can. She buried the can under a rock where she herded cattle.