Recommended Reading

If you haven’t already read the article from The New York Times magazine about the injustices suffered by women in the poorest countries of the world and the need for foreign aid directed to women, then I encourage you to read it now:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/magazine/23Women-t.html?em#

Written by New York Times Op-Ed columnist Nicholas Kristof and a former Times correspondent, Sheryl WuDunn, the essay is adapted from their book, Half Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide.

“In many poor countries, the greatest unexploited resource isn’t oil fields or veins of gold; it is the women and girls who aren’t educated and never become a major presence in the formal economy,” the authors write. “With education and with help starting businesses, impoverished women can earn money and support their countries as well as their families. They represent perhaps the best hope for fighting global poverty.”

Here are some facts from the essay:
• An obscure but meticulous demographic study that outlined a human rights violation that had claimed tens of thousands more lives… found that 39,000 baby girls died annually in China because parents didn’t give them the same medical care and attention that boys received — and that was just in the first year of life.
• In India, a “bride burning” takes place approximately once every two hours to punish a woman for an inadequate dowry or to eliminate her so a man can remarry…
• It appears that more girls and women are now missing from the planet, precisely because they are female, than men were killed on the battlefield in all the wars of the 20th century. The number of victims of this routine “gendercide” far exceeds the number of people who were slaughtered in all the genocides of the 20th century.
• In the West African country Niger, a woman stands a one-in-seven chance of dying in childbirth at some point in her life.

We should all be morally outraged, and we must support all that can eliminate oppression, inequity, marginalization, and violence. As educators, it is our duty to expose our students to such writing and encourage a dialogue about issues and solutions. Nurses are part of the solution.