How you can help save the world by helping women

Do-It-Yourself Foreign Aid
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF and SHERYL WUDUNN

People always ask us: How can I help the world’s needy? How can I give in a way that will benefit a real person and won’t just finance corruption or an aid bureaucracy? There are innumerable answers to those questions, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that many of them involve women. From among the examples in our book “Half the Sky,” here are a handful:

Choose a woman to lend to on kiva.org. The minimum amount is $25, and you can choose from people all over the world. The money will be used to support a business and will be paid back. Or go to http://www.globalgiving.com, find a woman abroad whose cause you identify with and make a small gift. On GlobalGiving, for example, we have supported a program to prevent runaway girls from being trafficked into brothels.

Sponsor a girl abroad through one of the many child-sponsorship organizations. We do so through Plan USA (http://www.planusa.org), but there are many other great ones, including Women for Women International (http://www.womenforwomen.org).

Become an advocate for change by joining the CARE Action Network at http://www.care.org. CARE is now focused on assisting women and girls for the pragmatic reason that that is where it can get the best results. The network helps people speak out and educate policy makers about global poverty.

Find a cause that resonates with you, learn more about it and adopt it. For example, we send checks to support an extraordinary Somali woman, Edna Adan (see above), who has invested her savings and her soul in her own maternity hospital in Somaliland (http://www.ednahospital.org). Even school kids can make a difference. Jordana Confino, an eighth grader in Westfield, N.J., started an initiative with friends to help girls go to school in poor countries. The effort grew to become Girls Learn International (http://www.girlslearn.org), which now pairs American middle schools and high schools with needy classrooms in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

An expanded list of organizations that specialize in supporting women in developing countries is available here.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/magazine/23Women-sidebar-t.html?_r=1&scp=3&sq=%22women%20for%20women%20international%22&st=cse

were marked by education of and expanded rights for women. That's true from Egypt through Greece, Rome, and the Islamic countries.

The human race can't progress away from poverty and ignorance until its women are allowed to.

Damn right - 100% agreement from me on that!

They should do as we say, not as we do.

It's voluntary of course but since I found out about Kiva through DU, I thought I should be a part of the team.

http://www.kiva.org/community/viewTeam?team_id=3013

I already have made 9 loans.

I've heard about Kiva before, on Oprah Winfrey's website--I assumed that her company had the resources to thoroughly check it out, so I felt safe donating. It's great to see it again here.

...ASAP.

London: Routledge, 2007. X, 206 S. $120.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-415-25014-6; $32.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-415-25015-3; (cloth), ISBN 978-0-203-08949-1.

Reviewed by Michelle Tusan
Published on H-Soz-u-Kult (May, 2009)

Claire Midgley has written a useful and well-argued study that traces the imperial origins of British feminism. Although imperial history has been the fashion in British feminist studies for over fifteen years, Feminism and Empire is the first book to connect these two fields in a study of the early nineteenth century. Midgley who is perhaps best known for her work on women and the anti-slavery movement is well-positioned to explore feminist connections between colony and metropole and makes a convincing case for the significance of imperialism in shaping the practice and ideology of the early feminist movement.

The rise of the second British Empire, according to Midgley, played an integral role in defining the course and content of contemporary arguments in support of and against the feminist movement. Between the period of the American Revolution in the late eighteenth century and the rise of organized feminism in the mid-nineteenth century women understood the British Empire as a place where women could assert their “moral power” as reformers without straying too far from the British domestic ideal of separate spheres (p. 40). The British Empire thus provided a crucial space for women to exercise authority over reform campaigns, educational schemes and consumer boycott movements.

The first substantive chapter, “The Woman Question in Imperial Britain,” offers an analysis of a constellation of both familiar and lesser known early nineteenth-century texts in order to establish the intellectual foundations of the emergent relationship between feminism and empire. Using the Enlightenment as a starting point, Midgley reads radicals like Mary Wollstonecraft against more conservative reformers like Hannah More in order to understand how white British feminist invented a colonial other in order to constitute an activist political subjectivity for British feminists. Numerous scholars have demonstrated the important role played by Protestant Evangelicalism, Quakerism and Unitarianism in shaping early feminism. Others have emphasized the significance of radicals like Wollstonecraft as an intellectual foremother of the movement. Midgley artfully places both of these radical and conservative discourses into conversation with one another in the service of her larger argument.

The remaining chapters explore four emblematic arenas of nineteenth century women’s public activism. Studies of anti-slavery crusades, the campaign to end sati in India, missionary activity and female emigration each receive separate treatment. Here the public discourse that surrounded these worlds of women’s activism is explored in light of institution building by those who participated in reform efforts. These narratives when taken together repeat a familiar argument to historians of late nineteenth-century feminism: the British Empire provided new opportunities for middle-class women to shape their own political identities. Midgley’s evidence suggests, however, that this process happened much earlier than most historians have assumed. In “Can Women be Missionaries?: Imperial Philanthropy, Female Agency and Feminism” Midgley reads little utilized sources on early nineteenth century missionary women to prove that women’s active involvement in the missionary movement was not an advent of the late nineteenth century. Missionary wives along with single women played an activist role in shaping debates and building support for missionary work in the British Empire. Here Midgley convincing makes the case again for the effect of this activism on the feminist movement at home.

http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.php?id=24978

http://www.smi.uib.no/seminars/Pensum/Abu-Lughod.pdf (warning: PDF)

This is how the West liberates women in poor countries: http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=102887§ionid=3510203

This is what the universal sisterhood looks like:

This is American "sexuality":