A fresh perspective on continued challenges to women’s lives.
A recent history of the women’s rights movements that have proliferated worldwide.
Vogelstein, a women’s rights lawyer and director of the Women and Foreign Policy Program at the Council on Foreign Relations, and her colleague Stone, a senior fellow at the CFR, offer an inspiring overview of burgeoning women’s movements in Brazil, China, Egypt, Tunisia, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Sweden. Social media platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp, and Twitter have proved indispensable to this powerful wave of activism, allowing women to share their experiences, support one another, and organize to address their concerns. Although sometimes inciting severe backlash for participants, the movements, the authors show, have generated positive results: More women have been elected to government, beneficial laws have been enacted and enforced, and policies have been reformed. For each country represented, the authors create vivid profiles of activists who have spoken out against cultural norms that discriminate against women and that condone abuse. In Latin America, for example, harassment and violence “are endemic to machismo culture, and Brazilian women are particularly at risk,” facing the highest incidence of femicide in the region. In China, although the constitution recognizes equal rights for women, with no specific legal prohibitions against sexual harassment and gender discrimination, women can face personal and professional retribution by protesting. In Egypt, feminist activism is suppressed by an authoritarian government, causing women to risk constant surveillance, house arrest, exile, or imprisonment if they dare to organize and speak out. In contrast, in nearby Tunisia, the nation’s constitution, ratified in 2014, contains provisions for guaranteeing women’s safety and equality. Even in a country as socially progressive as Sweden, “staggering numbers of women” have testified to sexual harassment and discrimination. The authors suggest an agenda for change that includes meaningful redress, legal reform, women’s equal representation in all areas, fair allocation of resources, and recalibration of the social norms that allowed abuse. #MeToo founder Tarana Burke provides the foreword.
A fresh perspective on continued challenges to women’s lives.Pub Date: July 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5417-5862-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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