“Women hold up half the sky. Or the world could not go on without them.”
This Chinese proverb is the idea on which Sheryl WuDunn and Nicholas Kristof’s book Half the Sky is based.
In her Guernica interview, Katherine Dykstra interviews WuDunn about parallels between sex slavery and the slavery of Africans in the 1780’s, how genital cutting can be eradicated as effectively as foot binding in China, cultural imperialism vs. outrage and the difficulty with getting people to care about women.
WuDunn also discusses the importance of sticking to factually accurate numbers, even if this means rounding down. “If the demographers say sixty million to 100 million women and girls are missing, we focus on the sixty million.” WuDunn says, “The sad thing is that you don’t need to exaggerate.”
Violence against women is so globally pervasive it isn’t even considered newsworthy anymore, yet it is the most crucial human rights problem of our time. Dykstra writes, “just as the stage was set for the abolition of slavery in the seventeen eighties, so too is it now set for the global emancipation of women.”
