Author: Valerie M Hudson and Patricia Leidl
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Rating: WORTHY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!
Professor Valerie M. Hudson holds the George HW Bush Chair at The Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, and has written several books. Patricia Leidl is a Vancouver-based international communications advisor who has worked with USAID.
I recommend reading his. I’d call for it to be required reading except for the fact that it’s written more as an academic paper than it is for popular reading, and it’s really quite long (430 pages, although that’s reduced to 308 pages when notes, prefaces, forewords, etc (which I didn’t read, as is my ‘doctrine’!) are excluded. Also, it's very densely-packed with information. For me this wasn’t a problem because I enjoyed reading this and educating myself. For others it might feel rather more like cramming for finals than reading for some other purpose!
Let me start with a disturbing revelation: “The United States is also one of only three nations worldwide that has not legislated any paid maternity leave whatsoever, the others being Papua New Guinea and Swaziland.”. I can’t say anything about Swaziland, but I know that Papua New Guinea has a rape problem of terrifying proportions, which I shall get back to later. Note that another perspective substitutes Oman for Swaziland (I don;t know which is right, but it doesn't make it any better for the US! US, Papua New Guinea, Oman are only nations without paid maternity leave - UN. Indeed, the US is hardly family friendly: The U.S. ranks last in every measure when it comes to family policy, in 10 charts
So this is what women in the 'land of opportunity' are up against. As the book blurb says, “Hillary Rodham Clinton is the first Secretary of State to declare the subjugation of women worldwide a serious threat to U.S. national security.” This is what the Hillary Doctrine refers to, and what this book investigates, looking at both the positive and the negative perspectives. How much more of a threat to security is it when those subjugated women are resident in and citizens of the USA itself? The conclusions may well disturb you as they disturbed me. The book references Hillary Clinton's speech at the Fourth World Conference on Women, organized by the United Nations, in 1995 in Beijing. It's well worth the listening, although I felt that the book over-dramatized it somewhat.
This books asks many disturbing questions which need to continue to be asked until we get useful answers. One of them is: “Does the insecurity of women make nations less secure? How has the doctrine changed the foreign policy of the United States and altered its relationship with other countries, such as China and Mexico?” It incorporates views from a wide assortment of people, both favorable and not, and considers studies conducted in nations from Afghanistan to Yemen. It also considers how the US actively undermines its own gender policy with its own agenda policy.
Clinton, the most widely-traveled of all US Secretaries of State, who was a republican before she switched sides many, many years back, has pretty much been a lifelong advocate on women’s issues, and never so strongly as when she became SoS (for women!) for four years under the Obama administration. “I believe that the rights of women and girls is the unfinished business of the 21st century. We see women and girls across the world who are oppressed and violated and demeaned and degraded and denied so much of what they are entitled to as our fellow human beings.” This is what she told Newsweek magazine.
After Beijing, Alyse Nelson, president of Vital Voices Global Partnership said, “What Mrs. Clinton so clearly realized in Beijing was that she had a voice and she had power, and she could use that voice to help those who had no power.” There are far too many women in this world without power, without equal rights, without food in their bellies, or clothes on their backs (or too many clothes covering them up and hiding them from sight), and without even a basic education in their brains.
Curiously, Clinton herself has had something to say about Papua New Guinea: One of her highest priorities was “…enabling more women to have access to their rights, to take their position in society” and after a short visit there, she announced her intention to have a trusted aid follow up in that nation where almost incredibly, some 55% of women have experienced forced sex.
I highly recommend this book, sad as it made me to read it because of the god-awfully distressing facts that it piled up inescapably.
