CW: Discussions of gender-based and sexual violence, sex trafficking, pregnancy, and death.
The book that made me is perhaps not a traditional choice. I have always loved reading and would allocate hours every evening to library books, picking them from a pile next to my bed. Often, they were too advanced for me. As most Gen Z women can attest, my worldview was shaped disproportionately by Jacqueline Wilson’s morose yet entrancing story of female hardship, the Girls in Love series. My enduring memory of them consists of Nadine’s email boyfriend being a weird old perv, a world away from the rural, comfortable, safe bedroom in which it was consumed.
So, as I started to become more interested in geography, it felt natural to explore the topic of women’s rights and experiences further. Despite calling myself a feminist, I don’t think I truly grasped what that meant until I read Half the Sky (2009) by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. And, as I picked it up again for this article, it pitted my morals and desires to “change the world” against my critical, perhaps jaded, geography brain.
I was first introduced to Half the Sky during the initial lockdown in 2020. We were told to read a photocopied chapter on maternal mortality as part of our A Level geography human rights topic. At the risk of sounding insincere, but not really caring if I do, the chapter changed my life. It introduced me to the horrific reality that, until then, I was privileged enough to never consider – that a woman dies every minute due to childbirth. I couldn’t believe that this had never crossed my radar before. But as I started Chapter 7 of Half the Sky, and read how Prudence, a pregnant 24-year-old Cameroonian woman and mother of three, had almost been killed by a birth attendant who jumped on her stomach to induce labour, I was transfixed. Kristof and WuDunn, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists and a married couple, cited the indifference towards such widespread “women’s issues” as their motivation to write Half the Sky. And when I got my hands on my geography teacher’s copy of the book, I understood why it was so needed.
The first page of Half the Sky is dedicated to ‘all those on the front lines around the globe, saving the world, one woman at a time’. Back in 2020, this seemed like a noble aim, but now the words make me grimace. Do women really need ‘saving’? Having studied colonialism repeatedly, it is hard for me to ignore the race, class, and gender dynamics which Kristof and WuDunn disregard. I digress.
The introduction outlines the 3 abuses which the book is structured around: sex trafficking and forced prostitution, gender-based violence, and maternal mortality. For instance, chapter 1 contests the association of sex work with freedom in the western world, with vivid descriptions of how traffickers and brothel owners in countries including Cambodia and India “break” girls to make them appealing to customers. The perception that this is inevitable for lower class girls naturally made me both sad and furious.
Now, however, I feel some frustration towards Nick Kristof. Upon first reading, Half the Sky felt empowering and different to anything I had read before, even though it was over a decade since its publication. Reading it for the fourth time, something else emerged. I still massively admire and respect Kristof, but his inclusion of photographs taken of victims of trafficking and gender-based crime feels a bit… well…. ‘Nat Geo’.
This alludes to the famous photography of the National Geographic magazine which is often taken without consent and whose financial rewards are rarely invested into the marginalised communities it exploits. I do not accuse Kristof of this, but I can no longer see these images without my face distorting (particularly as many US schools study the book, exposing a new generation to ethically questionable journalism).
I don’t want to spend this article slating the authors, for they have done outstanding work in promoting voices that would otherwise not be heard. Instead, I will highlight some moments in the book that shocked me. The bottom of page 54 makes a startling revelation regarding Akku Yadav, a man who systematically assaulted the Dalits (formerly “untouchables”) of Kasturba Nagar. It reads: ‘One woman went to the police to report that she had been gang-raped by Akku Yadav and his thugs; the police responded by gang-raping her themselves’. I recall my jaw physically dropping at this very moment, for violence on this scale was incomprehensible to me.
Another such moment came only 13 pages later, with Kenyan women who run for political office facing such a serious threat of sexual violence that they routinely ‘wear multiple sets of tights to deter, complicate, and delay any rape’. I froze at page 76’s unmasking of how ‘women perpetrators were involved, along with men, in one quarter of the gang rapes in the Sierra Leone Civil War’, capturing and restraining women in an obscene team-building exercise. Even years later, these facts don’t get any easier to comprehend.
But Half the Sky is a tale of hope amongst despair, and it places particular emphasis on the value of educating women and girls. Mukhtar – a rape victim from southern Punjab who later started a school in her village – is clear in her belief that spreading education mitigates against the attitudes that lead to sexual violence.
Despite the fact that my feelings towards the authors and the world have changed over the past few years, my obsession with education has not. I guess this is rooted in the evenings spent leafing through borrowed books, a habit that was revived in the bathtub during the pandemic. Months after my first reading of Half the Sky, the same geography teacher who introduced me to it asked if I had considered applying to Oxford. When writing my personal statement, the book instantly came to mind, as it did when I heard about the fall of Kabul in Summer 2021, and when studying feminist geographies at university for the first time later that year. The women’s stories of bravery will never leave me – a testament to Kristof and WuDunn’s storytelling, and a rare find amongst non-fiction writers.
So, although we can question whether Kristof and WuDunn were the best people to write this book, and whether their continued encouragement of young people to volunteer in developing countries is unwise, the message that the oppression of women is invisible has never been more important. As women across the world grasp the magnitude of the reversal of Roe v Wade, we can turn to Kristof and WuDunn’s masterpiece to understand such things as the ‘God gulf’ and ‘gag rules’ for NGOs funding abortions. But the book is also a manifesto for change. Although I prize my critical eye, I remain as convinced as ever that we have the tools to fight patriarchal oppression, and as angry as when the injustice of Nadine’s online “boyfriend” was revealed.