Earlier in the book, I told you I made a special trip to Sweden to have my last talk with Hans Rosling. In this final chapter, I want to tell you what he said.
It was 2016, and Hans was ill with cancer. He didn’t have long to live, and he was working on a book that would be finished by his son and daughter-in-law after he died. I traveled to his home in southern Sweden, and Hans and his wife, Agneta, invited me to sit down and have breakfast with them in their kitchen. Hans and I knew it was the last time we’d see each other.
He had a lecture prepared for me, as he always did. It was a lecture he had given to me before—but if you’re not repeating yourself by the end of your life, you haven’t yet figured out what’s true. Hans knew what was true, and he wanted to give me the lesson of his life one last time.
He pulled out a piece of paper, placed it on the table between our plates, and said, “Melinda, if you remember only one thing I’ve told you, remember that you have to go to the people on the margins.” He took out a pen and sketched two roads running perpendicular and intersecting in the middle of the paper. Then he drew a river that ran through the point where the two roads met, and he said, “If you live near the crossroads or if you live near a river, you’re going to be okay. But if you live on the margins”—and here he used his pen to mark the four corners of the page—“the world is going to forget about you.”
“Melinda,” he told me, “you can’t let the world forget about them.”
He was tearful when he told me this. It was the passion and obsession of his life, and he was asking me to carry it on.
The map Hans drew that day showed the geography of poverty. The extremely poor live far away from the flow of travel and trade that connects people to each other. But Hans would agree there is also a social geography of poverty. People might live in the middle of a large city but still be isolated from the flow of life. These people, too, live on the margins. I want to tell you about some women who live on the outermost margins—groups of sex workers in India who proved that when women organize, they can soar over every barrier described in this book. They can move the river and make it flow through them.
In 2001, when Jenn was 4 and Rory was 1, I took my first foundation trip to Asia. Rory was too young to ask questions, but Jenn wanted to know everything. “Mommy’s going to be away for a week,” I said. Then I stopped talking because I didn’t know what to say to a 4-year-old about poverty and disease. After thinking for a moment, I told her about one part of the trip: I was going to visit children who didn’t have homes and couldn’t get medicine when they were sick. “What does that mean, they don’t have homes?” she asked. I did my best to give her an answer that wouldn’t be jarring, and then I went to my room to pack.
A few minutes later, she came running toward me carrying a bundle of blankets. “What’s all this for?” I asked. “These are my special blankets,” Jenn said. “I thought you could take them in case the kids don’t have blankets.” I thanked her profusely, and we both packed her blankets in my suitcase. Every time I called home from the trip, Jenn would ask, “Have you seen the kids yet? Do they like my blankets? Are you going to leave them there?”
I did leave them there, but I came back from that trip with more than I went with—especially more humility. I met a woman in Thailand who shook my world. She had a doctorate from Johns Hopkins and was a specialist in HIV epidemics. She spent several days touring villages with me, talking about what could be done to slow the spread of HIV. It was the number one global health emergency at the time, and health officials were predicting terrifying outbreaks, including tens of millions of new cases of HIV infection in India alone. I was a beginner in global health back then, just learning about the issues. Bill and I knew we had to take some action on AIDS, but we didn’t know what. I was taking this trip to help us find out.
On my last day there, I was on a boat crossing a river near the borders with Laos and Burma, and my new friend said to me, “So now that you’ve been here a few days, if you were a woman and you were born here, what would you do to keep your children alive? What lengths would you go to?”
I was startled by the question, so I stalled for a minute and tried to put myself in that scene. Okay, well, I would get a job. But I’m not educated. I can’t even read. But I would teach myself to read. But with what books? And I’m not going to get a job because there are no jobs. I’m in a remote region. I was trying to come up with an answer when she interrupted my thinking and said, “Do you know what I would do?” I said, “No. What would you do?” She answered, “Well, I’ve lived here for two years now. I know the options. I would be a sex worker. It would be the only way I could put food on the table.”
It was a shocking thing to say. But after taking the whole trip in and reflecting for a while, it struck me that saying the opposite thing would have been even more shocking. If you say, “Oh, I would never do that,” then you’re saying you’d let your kids die—that you wouldn’t do everything in your power to help them live. And you’re saying something else, too. You’re saying, “I’m above these people.” She had worked with sex workers on other health crises, so her question to me had an edge to it, implied but still powerful: “How can you partner with them if you think you’re above them?”
Two years after I returned from that trip, our foundation launched an HIV prevention program for India that relied on the leadership of sex workers. We called it Avahan, a Sanskrit word for “call to action.” It was a high-stakes bet, not just because so many lives were at risk but because we didn’t really know what we were doing. No one did. The world had never seen anything like this: a country with more than a billion people facing a deadly epidemic whose defeat would have to involve an extensive partnership with the most despised group in a deeply caste-conscious society. Ordinarily, we would launch a smaller program and build it up, but there wasn’t time; we had to scale it up at the start. It became one of the largest HIV prevention projects in the world, with the goal of turning back the epidemic all across India.
Sex workers had to play a central role in the project because sex work was one of the critical pathways for the disease. If one person with HIV gave the infection to a sex worker, she could spread it to hundreds of customers, often truckers, who could in turn infect their wives, who might then pass the infection to their children during pregnancy, birth, or breastfeeding. If, however, sex workers were able to negotiate condom use with their clients, the sex workers’ risk of becoming infected would plunge, and so would their risk of passing it on. That was the strategy—decrease the instances of unprotected sex between sex workers and their clients. But this ran into the challenge that can defeat even a great strategy: How can people be persuaded to drop one behavior and take up another? This is where Avahan turned into one of the most surprising and inspiring stories I’ve heard—and one of the most important lessons of my life.
In January of 2004, when Avahan was less than a year old, I made my second trip to India. It was a trip with my closest women friends, members of my spirituality group. We wanted to visit places for prayer and meditation and see religious sites, and we also wanted to learn about the services available to the poor and play a brief role in that if we could.
When we were there, staying in Calcutta, we got up in the morning before the sun rose and walked across the city to the Missionaries of Charity’s motherhouse, where Mother Teresa started her work. At the motherhouse, there is a chapel where the nuns meet for prayer every morning, so we decided, though we’re not all Catholics, that we would go to the chapel for Mass. On the way there, we had to step over homeless people sleeping on the sidewalk. It was morally wrenching. These are people that Mother Teresa would have stopped to help.
In the chapel, we met people from all over the world who came to volunteer for the day in one of Mother’s homes. After Mass, we walked to the orphanage, where we were given a tour. My friends then stayed there to help the staff, and I left to meet with a group of sex workers to talk about HIV prevention.
At least I thought that’s what we were going to talk about. The women I met wanted to talk to me about stigma, about how hard their lives were. And they wanted to talk about their children. I had a conversation with a woman named Gita who told me that her son, then in ninth grade, was on track for college. And she clenched her fists for emphasis when she told me that her daughter was doing well in school and was not going to become a sex worker. Gita and so many other women in the group made it clear that they were in sex work to provide for their families. They couldn’t find another way, but they were determined that their daughters wouldn’t be forced into the same choice.
Beyond our conversations, what struck me most about Gita and the other women I met was how much they wanted to touch and be touched. Nobody in the community touches a sex worker except to have sex with her. No matter what caste they’re from, sex workers are untouchable. For them, touching is acceptance. So when we hugged, they held on. I’ve seen this again and again when I’ve met with sex workers of all genders. We talk and take a photo and hug—and they won’t let go. If I turn to greet someone else, they hold on to my shirt or keep a hand on my shoulder. In the beginning I found it awkward. After a while, though, I melted into it. If they want to embrace a bit longer, I’m all in.
So I gave lots of hugs, and I listened to stories—harsh tales of rape and abuse, and hopeful stories about children. As our time together came to an end, the women said they wanted a group photograph, so we linked our arms and took a picture (which would appear in the next day’s paper). I found that moment very emotional, and I was already on the edge. Then a few of the women started singing the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome” in Bengali-accented English, and I started to cry. I tried to hide it because I didn’t know how they would interpret my tears. For me, the contrast between their determination and their dire circumstances was both inspiring and heartbreaking.
These women were our partners. They were the frontline defenders against AIDS in India, and we still didn’t fully understand how brutal their lives were. They faced constant violence from their lovers, from their clients, who were themselves poor and marginalized, and from the police, who would harass them, arrest them, rob them, and rape them.
The brutality of their lives was a revelation even to our staff in India. In one case, members of our team met with four or five sex workers to have tea and conversation in a restaurant. Later that day, the sex workers were arrested because they had gathered together in a public place.
Shortly after that, one Avahan worker drove out to a coastal road near the Bay of Bengal where the truckers stop, so he could learn about the lives of sex workers there. He met with a group of women for a few hours—sitting on a mat, drinking tea, and asking about the program, what helped, what more was needed. When the meeting was over and people were saying their good-byes, one of the sex workers started crying. Our team member was afraid he’d said something insensitive, so he asked one of the other women, “Did I do something wrong?” She said, “No, it’s nothing.” When he pleaded for an answer, the woman said, “She was crying because you, a respectable man, had come to meet her and talk to her politely as opposed to paying her for sex, and she thought it was such an honor that someone would come just to have tea with her.”
Another story came from a partner of ours, a woman who was very devoted to improving the lives of sex workers in her area. She told us she was once at the bedside of a sex worker who was dying of AIDS, and the sex worker said, “Would you please fulfill my last wish?” “I’ll do whatever I can,” the woman replied. So the sex worker asked, “Can I call you Aai?” Aai in Marathi means “mother.” That was her only wish, to call this loving woman there at her deathbed “mother.” That’s how hard their lives are.
We hadn’t taken the realities of sex workers’ lives into account when we designed the Avahan program. We didn’t think we had to. We wanted sex workers to insist on condom use with their clients, get treated for STDs, and get tested for HIV—and we thought it was enough to tell them about the benefits and ask them to do it. But it wasn’t working, and we couldn’t understand why. We had never imagined that something might be more important to them than preventing HIV.
“We don’t need your help with condoms,” they said, almost laughing. “We’ll teach you about condoms. We need help preventing violence.”
“But that’s not what we do,” our people said. And the sex workers answered, “Well, then you don’t have anything interesting to tell us, because that’s what we need.”
So our team held debates about what to do. Some said, “Either we rethink our approach or we shut this down.” Others said, “No, this is mission creep—we have no expertise in this area, and we shouldn’t get involved.”
Eventually, our team met again with the sex workers and listened intently as they talked about their lives, and the sex workers emphasized two things: One, preventing violence is their first and most urgent concern; two, fear of violence keeps them from using condoms.
Clients would beat up the women if they insisted on condoms. The police would beat them up if they were carrying condoms—because it proved they were sex workers. So to avoid getting beaten up, they wouldn’t carry condoms. Finally we saw the connection between preventing violence and preventing HIV. The sex workers couldn’t address the long-term threat of dying from AIDS unless they could address the near-term threat of being beaten, robbed, and raped.
So instead of saying, “It’s beyond our mandate,” we said, “We want to help protect you from violence. How can we do that?”
They said, “Today or tomorrow, one of us is going to get raped or beaten up by the police. It happens all the time. If we can get a dozen women to come running whenever this happens, the police will stop doing it.” So our team and the sex workers set up a system. If a woman is attacked by the police, she dials a three-digit code, the code rings on a central phone, and twelve to fifteen women come to the police station yelling and shouting. And they come with a pro bono lawyer and a media person. If a dozen women show up shouting, “We want her out now or there’s going to be a story in the news tomorrow!” the police will back down. They will say, “We didn’t know. We’re sorry.”
That was the plan, and that’s what the sex workers did. They set up a speed-dial network, and when it was triggered, the women came running. It worked brilliantly. One sex worker reported that she had been beaten up and raped in a police station a year before. After the new system was in place, she went back to the same police station and the policeman offered her a chair and a cup of tea. Once word of this program got out, sex workers in the next town came and said, “We want to join that violence prevention program, not the HIV thing,” and soon the program spread all over India.
Why was this approach so effective? Ashok Alexander, then head of our India office, put it bluntly, “Every man who’s a bully is scared of a group of women.”
We thought we were running an HIV prevention program, but we had stumbled onto something more effective and pervasive—the power of women coming together, finding their voices, and speaking up for their rights. We had begun funding women’s empowerment.
Empowerment starts with getting together—and it doesn’t matter how humble the gathering place is. The scene of empowerment for Avahan was community centers—often just small, one-room structures built of cinder blocks where the women could meet and talk. Remember, these women had no place to gather. If they met in public, the police would round them up and put them in jail. So when our team redesigned the program around violence prevention, they began to rent space and encourage the women to come and talk. The community centers became the place they could get services. They could get condoms. They could meet each other. They could take a nap. They weren’t allowed to stay overnight, but in daytime hours, many of them would lie on the floor and sleep as their kids ran around. In some places, the team put in a beauty parlor or a space for playing board games. The centers became the place where things happened. And the idea came from the women themselves.
The opening of the first drop-in center was “the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” according to an early Avahan team member. Five women walked in, afraid they were going to be drugged and have their kidneys harvested. That was the rumor. Instead they were welcomed and told, “Just talk to each other. Drink three cups of chai and then leave.” That’s how empowerment began at Avahan—people on the outermost margins of society, excluded by everyone, coming together to talk, drink tea, and lift each other up.
Bill and I knew about the program’s shift to violence prevention, but we were in the dark about the community centers, and this still makes me laugh. Ashok would come meet with us in Seattle and give us reports, but we didn’t get the full story until Bill and I went to India together in 2005. Ashok was briefing us, explaining what we were about to see, and he started talking about these community centers, tiny spaces where sex workers could gather and talk. I remember saying to Bill after the briefing, “Did you know we were funding community centers?” He said, “No, did you know we were funding community centers?”
We had given Ashok the money, and he’s a smart businessperson, so he set a strategy and tacked against it. He did everything he said he was going to do, and some things he never mentioned. And thank goodness for that, because the honest and embarrassing truth is that if he had come and presented the idea of community centers to us at the foundation, I think we would have said no. We would have seen it as too remote from our mission, which was to work on innovations and depend on others to get them out. Helping distribute condoms was already a big step away from our self-image as innovators who counted on others for delivery, but to work on violence prevention through empowerment nurtured in community centers—that would have been too radical for us, at least until we saw their value on that trip to India.
On that visit, Bill and I met with a group of sex workers. There is a photo of that event hanging prominently at the foundation office—Bill and I sitting cross-legged on the ground taking our place in the circle. At the start of our meeting, I asked one of the women, “Please tell us your story.” She told us about her life. Then another woman told us how she got involved in sex work. Then a third woman shared a story that brought silence to the room, broken only by the sounds of sobbing. She told us she was a mom, she had a daughter, the father was not in the picture, and she had turned to sex work because she had no other options for income. She was making every sacrifice to create a better life for her daughter, who had lots of friends and was doing well in school. The mother had constantly worried, though, that as her daughter got older, she might find out how her mom made money. One day, exactly as the mother feared, her daughter’s classmate announced to everyone at school that the girl’s mother was a sex worker, and her friends began mocking her viciously and continuously in the cruelest ways. A few days later, the mother came home and found her daughter dead, hanging from a rope.
I shot a look at Bill. He was in tears. So was I, and so was everyone else in the room—especially the women whose wounds were opened up by this story. These women were in agony, but they were also full of empathy, and that eased their isolation. By coming together and sharing their stories, they gained a sense of belonging, and the sense of belonging gave them a feeling of self-worth, and the feeling of self-worth gave them the courage to band together and demand their rights. They were no longer outsiders; they were insiders. They had a family and a home. And slowly they began to dispel the illusion that society imposes on the disempowered: that because they are denied their rights, they have no rights; that because no one listens to them, they are not speaking the truth.
Brené Brown says that the original definition of courage is to let ourselves be seen. And I think one of the purest ways to let ourselves be seen is to ask for what we want—especially when no one wants us to have it. I just fall silent before that kind of courage. These women found that courage with the help of each other.
The impact of Avahan grew way beyond the accomplishments of that first group of women, and the story was not just about how inclusion and community empowered a group of outcasts. It was about what those outcasts did for their country. I’ll give you two examples.
First, many years ago, about the same time that Bill and I made this trip to India, we were exploring different approaches to fighting AIDS, and we got super excited about a new possibility—that the drugs effective in treating AIDS could also work in preventing AIDS. We helped fund drug trials to test the idea, and the trials came back with spectacular findings: Oral prevention drugs can cut the risk of getting HIV through sex by more than 90 percent. The AIDS community’s highest hopes were fulfilled. Then they were dashed.
The approach required healthy people to take pills every day, and the at-risk groups just didn’t do it. Getting people to take up any new health behavior, no matter how effective, is frustratingly difficult. People have to be engaged, informed, and highly motivated. Tragically, AIDS activists and funders and governments and health workers just could not get people to take the drugs. Only two groups, worldwide, were an exception: gay white men in the United States … and women sex workers in India.
A study showed that 94 percent of Indian sex workers took the drugs faithfully and continuously. That level of compliance is unheard of in global health—and the study attributes it to the strong networks created by the women in Avahan.
That’s the first example. Here’s the second. In 2011, the British medical journal The Lancet published an article showing that the intensity of the Avahan work correlated with lower HIV prevalence in a number of India’s most populous states. In the years since, it’s been well documented that sex workers’ insistence on condom use with their clients kept the epidemic from breaking more widely into the population. These empowered women became indispensable partners in a national plan that saved millions of lives.
In a country where no one would touch them, these women touched each other, and in that small society of acceptance, they began to discover and recover their dignity, and from their dignity came the will to demand their rights, and in asserting their rights, they were able to protect their lives and save their country from catastrophe.
More than ten years after Avahan led me on a path of women’s empowerment, I was in New York City moderating a panel on women’s social movements. One of my guests was the amazing Leymah Gbowee, who shared the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize with Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Tawakkol Karman. Leymah was recognized, along with Ellen, for launching a women’s peace movement that helped bring an end to the Liberian civil war.
Sometimes when I’m in the middle of the work—even when I think I know what I’m doing—I find that I really don’t have a deep understanding of the forces at play until after the action is over. Then, sometimes years later, I look back and say, “Oh!! I get it.” That’s what Leymah offered me that day—not just an understanding of her peace movement, but how its principles helped explain the success of Avahan and so much more.
Leymah told us that she was living in her country as a 17-year-old when the first of two civil wars broke out there. After the end of the first war and before the start of the second, she studied peace activism and trauma healing and came to believe that “if any changes were to be made in society, it had to be by the mothers.”
She was invited to Ghana to attend the first-ever meeting of the Women in Peacebuilding Network, which included women from nearly every West African nation. Leymah was named coordinator of the Liberian Women’s initiative, and after the second civil war broke out, she began working around the clock for peace. One night, after again falling asleep in her office, she awoke from a dream where she’d been told, “Gather the women and pray for peace.”
She went to the mosques on Friday, the markets on Saturday, and the churches on Sunday to recruit women for peace. She gathered thousands of Muslim and Christian women, led demonstrations and sit-ins, defied orders to disperse, and eventually was invited to make the case for peace to Liberian president Charles Taylor, with thousands of women demonstrating outside the presidential mansion. She won a grudging promise from Taylor to hold peace talks with the rebels in Accra, Ghana.
To keep up the pressure, Leymah and thousands of other women went to Accra and demonstrated outside the hotel that was hosting the talks. When progress stalled, Leymah led dozens of women inside the hotel, and more women kept coming until there were two hundred. They all sat down in front of the entrance to the meeting hall and sent a message to the mediator that the men would not be allowed to leave until they had a peace agreement.
The mediator, former Nigerian president Abdusalami Abubakar, gave his support to the women and allowed them to maintain their presence and their pressure right outside the hall. The activists were given credit for changing the atmosphere of the peace talks from “circuslike to somber,” and within weeks, the parties had an agreement and the war was officially over.
Two years later, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was elected president of Liberia, becoming the first woman elected head of state in Africa.
Many years later, when Leymah sat down with me in New York, I asked her why her movement was so effective. She said, “We women in these communities are the nurturers of society. And it was upon us to change it.”
By 2003, she said, Liberia “had gone through over fourteen warring factions and made more than thirteen peace agreements. We said to ourselves, ‘The men have done the same thing over and over. We have to bring some sense to the process. Instead of starting a women’s warring faction, let’s start a women’s peace movement.’”
Then she told us an astonishing story about what that meant.
“There was one Muslim woman who had lost her daughter in the war,” Leymah said. “She was part of our movement. She was feeding a fighter who had multiple gunshot wounds when he recognized her and said, ‘Sit me up.’ So she sat him up and he asked her, ‘Where’s your daughter?’ She said, ‘Oh, she died.’ The fighter said, ‘I know.’ She said, ‘How did you know?’ He said, ‘Because I killed her.’
“When she came back to the office, crying, we asked her, ‘Did you stop feeding him?’ and she said, ‘No. Isn’t that what peace means? Besides, I knew at that moment that I could come back to my sisters and we could cry together.’”
How did the women’s movement succeed in bringing peace while the men’s warring factions could not? Leymah’s story says it all. When the women were wounded, they were able to absorb their pain without passing it on. But when the men were wounded, they needed to make someone pay. That’s what fed the cycle of war.
I am not saying that women alone have the power of peacemaking and men alone are the cause of war. Absolutely not. I am saying that, in this case, the women were able to absorb their pain without passing it on and the men were not—until they were prevailed upon by the women! When the women found their voice, the men found their power to make peace. Each found the traditional attributes of the other inside themselves. The men were able to do something the women had done—agree not to retaliate—and the women were able to do something the men had done, which is to assert their views about how society should be run. Bringing these two qualities together is what brought peace.
Many successful social movements are driven by the same combination—strong activism and the ability to take pain without passing it on. Anyone who can combine those two finds a voice with moral force.
Leymah’s friend who came back to cry with her sisters, and all the women who ever accepted their pain without passing it on, were not just sharing their grief but finding their voice—because their voice is buried underneath their grief. If we can face our pain, we can find our voice. And it is so much easier to face our pain and find our voice together.
When women are trapped in abuse and isolated from other women, we can’t be a force against violence because we have no voice. But when women gather with one another, include one another, tell our stories to one another, share our grief with one another, we find our voice with one another. We create a new culture—not one that was imposed on us, but one we build with our own voices and values.
The first time I suspected a link between feeling our grief and finding our voice, I thought, No way. If you need to feel your grief to find your voice, then why do people who can’t take pain without passing it on have such loud voices? Then it dawned on me: There is a big difference between a loud voice and a strong voice. The loud voice of a man who has no inner life and is a stranger to his own grief is never a voice for justice; it’s a voice for self-interest, dominance, or vengeance. Strong male voices for freedom and dignity come from men like Gandhi, King, and Mandela who mastered their pain, gave up on vengeance, and preached forgiveness.
Nelson Mandela was once asked if he was still angry at his captors after he was released from prison, and he answered yes, he was still angry for a time, but he realized that if he stayed angry, he would still be a prisoner—and he wanted to be free.
When I think of the men who abuse women and girls, I don’t want to forgive them. It feels like that would be letting them get away with it. And I don’t want to let them get away with anything. I fully support taking all possible steps to protect the innocent, including capturing perpetrators and meting out justice. But justice does not mean vengeance.
Desmond Tutu, who as chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission kept South Africa from exploding in vengeance in the post-apartheid era, offers this path around revenge: “When I am hurt, when I am in pain, when I am angry with someone for what they have done to me, I know the only way to end these feelings is to accept them.”
Dorothy Day, the Catholic social activist who used nonviolent action to serve the poor and homeless, said the greatest challenge is “how to bring about a revolution of the heart.” The lesson I’ve learned from women in social movements all over the world is that to bring about a revolution of the heart, you have to let your heart break. Letting your heart break means sinking into the pain that’s underneath the anger. This is how I make sense of the scriptural instruction “Resist not evil.” I don’t take this to mean “Make way for evil in the world.” I think it means “Don’t resist the feeling; accept the suffering.” If you don’t accept the suffering, hurt can turn to hatred. This is what the life of Christ means to me. The high priests wanted to break him. They did everything they could to hurt him and humiliate him. And they failed. His ability to absorb pain was beyond their ability to inflict it, so he could answer their hatred with love.
This, to me, is the model for all nonviolent social movements, religious based or not. The most radical approach to resistance is acceptance—and acceptance does not mean accepting the world as it is. It means accepting our pain as it is. If we refuse to accept our pain, then we’re just trying to make ourselves feel better—and when our hidden motive is to make ourselves feel better, there is no limit to the damage we can do in the name of justice. Great leaders never combine a call for justice with a cry for vengeance. Leaders who can master their pain have taken self-interest off their agenda, so their voice rings with moral power. They are no longer speaking their truth. They are speaking truth.
The power of letting your heart break is not just something to admire in others. All of us have to let our hearts break; it’s the price of being present to someone who is suffering. More than a decade ago, I was in South Africa with a highly respected medical doctor from the US. We went to a township near Johannesburg to visit the home of a man who was dying of AIDS. Our host was clearly tired and in pain, but he was graciously telling us his story when the doctor stood up and left. He made excuses, but I knew why he left, and I’m afraid the dying man did, too. The doctor, who had mostly focused on research, couldn’t bear to see the tragic reality of this man’s life. And if you can’t bear the pain of your neighbor’s suffering, then in one way or another, you’re going to push that person to the margins.
Every society says its outsiders are the problem. But the outsiders are not the problem; the urge to create outsiders is the problem. Overcoming that urge is our greatest challenge and our greatest promise. It will take courage and insight, because the people we push to the margins are the ones who trigger in us the feelings we’re afraid of.
Isolating others to ease our fears is a deep urge inside all of us. How do we turn it around?
If there is a point of unity across humanity, it’s that all of us have been outsiders at some time in our lives—even if only as kids on the playground. And none of us liked it. We tasted it just enough to be terrified by it. In spite of that experience, though, many of us don’t have any idea what it feels like to be wholly excluded.
That’s why I was so taken by a passage in my mom’s favorite book, Life of the Beloved, by Henri Nouwen. Nouwen was a Catholic priest with the mind of a genius and the heart of a saint. He taught at Notre Dame, Harvard, and Yale but lived the last years of his life in a home for people with disabilities, where his ministry included helping a severely disabled member with his morning routine.
In Life of the Beloved, Nouwen writes: “In my own community, with many severely handicapped men and women, the greatest source of suffering is not the handicap itself, but the accompanying feelings of being useless, worthless, unappreciated, and unloved. It is much easier to accept the inability to speak, walk, or feed oneself than it is to accept the inability to be of special value to another person. We human beings can suffer immense deprivations with great steadfastness, but when we sense that we no longer have anything to offer to anyone, we quickly lose our grip on life.”
We all want to have something to offer. This is how we belong. It’s how we feel included. So if we want to include everyone, then we have to help everyone develop their talents and use their gifts for the good of the community. That’s what inclusion means—everyone is a contributor. And if they need help to become a contributor, then we should help them, because they are full members in a community that supports everyone.
Every issue in this book is a door women must walk through, or a wall we must break through, to become full contributors—the right to decide whether and when to have children, to marry or not marry, to seek opportunity, attend a university, control our income, manage our time, pursue our goals, and advance in the workplace—any workplace. For the sake of women trapped in poverty and for women at every level of society who are excluded or intimidated by powerful men, women need to meet, talk, organize, and lead—so we can break down the walls and open the doors for everyone.
I’ve been involved in women’s groups my whole life, though sometimes I didn’t recognize it until later. My all-girls high school was one large women’s group. In college and graduate school, I sought out the women I admired, especially when there were few of us. As an adult, I nurtured connections with women in every realm of life—professional, personal, spiritual. I have always had many important male friends, and they’ve been indispensable to my happiness. But it’s my women friends I come back to, especially in groups, when I’m facing my fears and need friends to help me through; they’ve walked beside me on every path of growth I took. I believe women’s groups are essential for each of us individually but also for society generally—because progress depends on inclusion, and inclusion begins with women.
I’m not saying we should include women and girls as opposed to men and boys, but along with them and on behalf of them. This is not about bringing women in and leaving others out. It’s about bringing women in as a way to bring everyone in.
Women must leave the margins and take our place—not above men or below them, but beside them—at the center of society, adding our voices and making the decisions we are qualified and entitled to make.
There will be plenty of resistance, but lasting progress will not come from a power struggle; it will come from a moral appeal. As we bring gender bias out from behind its disguises, more and more men and women will see bias where they hadn’t suspected it and will stand against it. That’s how we change the norms that hide the biases we were blind to. We see them, and we end them.
It’s not easy to transform a culture built on exclusion. It’s hard to cooperate with people who want to dominate. But we don’t have a choice. We can’t just make the insiders into the new outsiders and call it change. We have to include everyone, even those who want to exclude us. It’s the only way to build the world we want to live in. Others have used their power to push people out. We have to use our power to bring people in. We can’t just add one more warring faction. We have to end factions. It’s the only way we become whole.