Sally Armstrong shows women on the rise around the globe

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      It was an assignment in Sarajevo in 1992 that first prompted Sally Armstrong to write stories about women in conflict zones around the world.

      While in Bosnia, the journalist began to hear rumours that women were being gathered up and taken to “rape camps”. Armstrong, who was the editor-in-chief of Homemakers at the time, sent the information to a news agency in Canada, hoping they would produce the story more quickly than the three-month turnaround typical for the magazine.

      Seven weeks later, after a short blurb about the issue appeared in Newsweek, she called up the editor of the news agency in Canada and asked what had happened to the story.

      “He was nervous.…he said, ‘Sally, I was really busy and I was on deadline and, you know, I forgot,'" she recounted in a phone interview with the Georgia Straight.

      “Two days later I was on a plane, and I went and I did that story,” she added. “And I decided then that if no one wanted to do these stories, I was going to do them, because they’re really important stories.”

      After two decades of writing about women in places like Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Swaziland, Armstrong says something has changed. In her new book, Ascent of Women (Random House Canada), Armstrong argues that “the earth is shifting”.

      “From Kabul and Cairo to Cape Town and New York, women are claiming their space at home, at work and in the public square,” she writes. “They are propelling changes so immense they’re likely to affect intractable issues such as poverty, interstate conflict, culture and religion, and the power brokers are finally listening.”

      She began to witness the change about three years ago, in developments such as a court case in Kenya where, she noted, 160 girls between the ages of three and 17 sued their government "for failing to protect them from being raped".

      “That would never have happened before,” she stated.

      The Canadian author has also observed change in Afghanistan over the years she has spent covering the country. She has seen women go back to work, and girls go back to school. Organizations like Young Women for Change have been founded, and women are asking men to join their rights movement. But in her view, the biggest shift has been the realization on the part of Afghan women that other people don’t live the same way.

      “They’re asking really important questions like 'Why do we live this way?' And in starting to talk like this…you have an increase in education, and even though not everyone is getting it, the attitude around education spreads,” she said. “People are talking about it.”

      Armstrong noted that in Afghanistan, women refer to illiteracy as “being blind”.

      “I say, 'Why do you call it being blind?' And this women said, ‘Oh, I couldn’t read, so I couldn’t see what was going on,'” Armstrong recalled. “I thought in fewer than a dozen words, this woman totally got it. And that’s what the thugs in power do—they keep the people illiterate so no one can see what’s going on. That’s changing—it’s changing very, very rapidly.”

      While Armstrong has an optimistic outlook, her book also details heartbreaking stories of trauma experienced by women throughout the world, such as a grandmother in Swaziland who is looking after her grandchildren after their mother died of AIDS, or a 10-year-old girl in Congo who was gang-raped and talks about being afraid of the monsters outside.

      “These are very scarring stories, to tell you the truth—they play on the back of my eyelids,” she admitted.

      “But I don’t lose hope,” she added. “I think it’s because…they just seem to have the tenacity and the wit to find their way out of it, and I always believe they will.”

      In fact, although they’ve experienced severe trauma, Armstrong refers to the women not as victims, but as "victors”.

      “They’re saying, ‘I’m sharing my story with you because you have to tell the other women that they need to be our voice,'” she said. “Or ‘I’m sharing my story with you because, look, I survived, and I’m going to bring my sisters with me.'”

      Armstrong acknowledged that shocking incidents of sexual violence have occurred just in the last six months, such as a fatal gang rape on a bus in India.

      But in the author’s view, the aftermath of that incident has “ripped the lid off 50 years of secrecy”.

      “Here we’re cheering about the fastest growing democracy, and the hottest economy, that’s treating half their population horribly,” she said. “And now it’s out. Someone lifted the curtain, and the secret’s out, and now the women are marching.

      “I think people tried speaking out before,” she added. “I don’t think women kept their mouth shut…but they never got traction.”

      In her book, Armstrong notes that the taboo of speaking out about sexual violence has been so prevalent historically that only recently have accounts been published documenting sexual violence decades ago.

      She credits author Danielle McGuire for bringing to light the fact that iconic civil-rights activist Rosa Parks had been an anti-rape activist for 10 years prior to her famous bus boycott. Another book, by Sonja Hedgepeth and Rochelle Saidel, has documented sexual violence against Jewish women during the Holocaust.

      In the author's view, these kinds of books are a signal that the taboo is lifting.

      “We want to get the facts," she said.

      Since Armstrong’s own book went to press, she says she has observed major actions take place, led by women activists around the world.

      “It’s almost like a virus—people are picking it up,” she said. “I see it everywhere I go, I see this change lifting off."

      The shift is also evident in the level of interest the media are now paying to international news about women.

      “I used to have to really push to get these stories in—even as editor-in-chief I had to fight to get these stories in the magazine,” she said. “But now, everybody wants these stories.”

      She cited the level of attention that has been paid internationally to Malala Yousafzai, a 15-year-old women’s-rights and education activist in Pakistan, to whom Armstrong’s book is dedicated.

      “Her story never would have made the media two years ago,” she said. “But Malala’s story went around the world. It went into every newspaper. And what’s more, no one will let it go. This to me is the hardest evidence of the change that I’m talking about in the book.”

      Sally Armstrong will speak about Ascent of Women at St. Andrew’s–Wesley Church at 7:30 p.m. today (March 25), in an event presented by the Vancouver Writers Fest and Random House Canada.

      Comments

      1 Comments

      geralda boulden

      Jul 19, 2013 at 3:59pm

      To Sally Armstrong:
      I have just seen your interviews with Steve Pakin. I would like to contact you about some Muslim women I have met at University of Waterloo. Can you tell me how I should do that? I look forward to reading your
      latest book. Best Wishes. Geralda