About eighteen months before I started writing this book I had an epiphany of sorts about the status of the world’s women. I’d been covering conflict in various parts of the world for twenty-five years, almost always from the point of view of what happens to women and girls. Now I sensed something was shifting. I couldn’t put my finger on it at first, but I knew whatever this shift was, it was benefiting women. Players who normally shrugged their shoulders about women’s issues were suddenly paying attention. Women who’d seen their lot in life as preordained began to say, “Not anymore.”
For the next year I posed questions I hadn’t thought to ask before, gathered data that made me certain this inkling I had was valid. But to actually come out and suggest that women are the way forward, that many of the planet’s ills, such as poverty and endemic conflict, can be improved by women, that after all the years of oppression and abuse, times were changing, that women were throwing off the shackles that bound them to second-class citizenship and owning their own voices and spaces? Well, that was a leap in thinking that I needed to test.
I decided to try my thesis out on an audience in Oakville, Ontario, when my friend Bonnie Jackson asked me to address her “Bloomsbury Group” at their monthly meeting. This collection of intellectuals would no doubt let me know if I was on track. When I finished speaking, they voiced their surprise and approval with hearty applause. Soon afterwards, I had lunch with Marion Garner, the publisher of Vintage Canada, who is always on the lookout for fresh ideas. I told her about the speech, and she said, “This is a book. Get going.”
Then Paul Kennedy, the brilliant host of CBC Radio’s Ideas suggested I do a version of the story—describing women as “the New Revolutionaries”—for his program. And I was at last under way.
So the first person I have to thank is Marion, for believing in this concept, and then Paul for road-testing it. Random House Canada’s publisher/vice-president and master craftswoman/editor Anne Collins took the book project to the finish line, with her usual tenacious grasp of the material and attention to detail, and kept my feet to the fire until the manuscript was what we had both imagined. The copy editor, Alison Reid, did an exceptional job, for which I am truly grateful. And the designer, Leah Springate, came up with a sensational cover. Deirdre Molina, senior managing editor, and Frances Bedford, publicist extraordinaire, are also valued members of my team at Random House.
My lifelong friend Donald A. Thompson gets credit for suggesting the title, Ascent of Women. He came up with it while we were beached on a sandbar recovering from a canoe-tipping (mine not his) on the rapids of the Nepiseguit River in New Brunswick.
But most of all, I owe this work to the women and girls around the world who helped me to create it. The women who gave me shelter in places from which local fundamentalists preferred to banish me. The ones who stuffed bread into my pocket to feed me on my journey out of a country that had basically imprisoned them. The many who suffer at the hands of so-called religious men, yet were willing to share their stories despite the threat of retaliation. And those who had the courage to talk about the cultural contradictions in their lives and what they were doing to change them. Women who have been heroes of mine in Asia, Africa and the Americas shaped my thinking about the tipping point that women are reaching. What’s more, they encouraged me to write this book. And to the girls who filled my journey with laughter and inspiration, who shed such a clear honest light on the situation they are in and shared their energy and enthusiasm for change—thank you, I cherished our time together. To all the mothers and daughters who opened their worlds to me, I offer my heartfelt thanks and, I hope we meet again.
And of course I owe enormous gratitude to my family and Jonathan Chilvers, who put up with the antics of an author with a deadline, and to my agent, Hilary McMahon: I celebrate the publication of this book and the role you played in getting us all to this place.