Thursday, August 20, 2009

The Panacea

In the New York Times Sunday Magazine, the indefatigable Nicholas Kristof and company put in an extensive report on the new crusade for women's liberation.

"The world," says Mr. Kristof, "is awakening to a powerful truth. Women and girls aren’t the problem; they’re the solution." According to the article, addressing more resources toward freeing women from brutal oppression may be an effective way to solve other intractable, global problems, like poverty:

"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..."

No comments: