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    A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power
    A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power
    A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power
    Ebook278 pages3 hours

    A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power

    By Jimmy Carter

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    In the highly acclaimed bestselling A Call to Action, President Jimmy Carter addresses the world’s most serious, pervasive, and ignored violation of basic human rights: the ongoing discrimination and violence against women and girls.

    President Carter was encouraged to write this book by a wide coalition of leaders of all faiths. His urgent report covers a system of discrimination that extends to every nation. Women are deprived of equal opportunity in wealthier nations and “owned” by men in others, forced to suffer servitude, child marriage, and genital cutting. The most vulnerable and their children are trapped in war and violence.

    A Call to Action addresses the suffering inflicted upon women by a false interpretation of carefully selected religious texts and a growing tolerance of violence and warfare. Key verses are often omitted or quoted out of context by male religious leaders to exalt the status of men and exclude women. And in nations that accept or even glorify violence, this perceived inequality becomes the basis for abuse.

    Carter draws upon his own experiences and the testimony of courageous women from all regions and all major religions to demonstrate that women around the world, more than half of all human beings, are being denied equal rights. This is an informed and passionate charge about a devastating effect on economic prosperity and unconscionable human suffering. It affects us all.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster
    Release dateMar 25, 2014
    ISBN9781476773971
    Author

    Jimmy Carter

    Jimmy Carter was the 39th President of the United States, author of numerous books, teacher at Emory University, founder of the Carter Center, and the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Carter worked with Emory University to establish the Carter Center, a nongovernmental, nonprofit organization advances human rights and alleviates human suffering in seventy-five countries worldwide. Carter is the only U.S. President to receive the Nobel Peace Prize after leaving office.    

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    Reviews for A Call to Action

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    • 3/5
      It's not like I don't agree with the premise of the book or its goals because, well, duh. But this felt like a thin exploration of too many topics punctuated by a few too many "I did/we did" declarations. Has the heart and is harmless enough, but I was hoping for more. I guess the important thing is the work The Carter Center is doing to help, not how I feel about President Carter's book.
    • 5/5
      An excellent book with a much needed message. Jimmy Carter has long been a strong proponent of women's rights, as well as human rights in general. In this book he not only makes the case for the kinds of changes that need to happen in the world, he also recounts the extensive advocacy work that has been carried out by the Carter Center. This shoud be read by everyone.
    • 3/5
      Carter tackles the global issues of abuse and discrimination against girls and women, what he reasonably describes as the most serious human rights problem the world faces today. Carter explores such issues as political and economic inequality, domestic violence, sexual slavery, and "gendercide." He is particularly effective in taking relgious hypocrites to task for manipulating scared texts to justify the subjugation of women. An ambitious, compassionate, and earnest call to action.
    • 4/5
      A Call to Action : Women, Religion, Violence, and Power discusses the discrimination of women worldwide in practically nearly every aspect of life. Some of the topics less familiar to women in the United States include killing of female babies, marriage of young children and death of females because of inadequate dowries, and genital mutilation. It was amazing to me to learn that worldwide the leading causes of female deaths are: HIV/AIDS, malaria, TB, and childbirth! (World Health Organization statistic, p. 173). Although Carter talks about a lot of organizations dealing with various issues, he emphasizes the work of the Carter Center which he and his wife Rosalynn founded and are active in. The book contains many statistics and numerous acronyms; although the term for the acronym is generally spelled out the first time it is mentioned in the text, later only the acronym is used. Quotes from leaders, male and female, are interspersed in the text. Carter appears to self-congratulate himself many times. For this book featuring discrimination about women, why did Jimmy Carter instead of Rosalynn write it?
    • 3/5
      I was disappointed in Jimmy Carter’s A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence and Power. I was hoping for a more energetic and passionate plea. I really think it would have been better if a woman who had experienced the injustices had written it. Religion has been used to reinforce cultural ideas that women are inferior. That is personal to me. It brings back a memory of sitting my dorm room reading The Feminine Mystique by Betty Freidan. I was engrossed in the book. Sometimes I felt so angry, sometimes so hopeless. A fellow student walked by me in the hall, she popped in to see what I was reading. She said, “You don’t believe that stuff, do you?”A week later she invited me to a church service. I knew it was a mistake as soon as I saw the title of the sermon, “Women as Helpmates to Men”. I had been tricked. There she sat, beaming at me. On that moment I began to trust women less. Jimmy Carter was called upon to write this book but I believe that it would have been so much powerful if he had let women tell their own story. Let them tell about what it is like to be raped and knowing that is she goes to court, it will be a prosecution of her, not the rapist. Let women tell what it feels like to interview for a job along with four other women, all very qualified and have it go to the one male who was not qualified. Let women speak out who have been cut in order because it was tradition. Let women who have been enslaved tell their own story of knowing that their body did not belong to themselves but to their owner. Let a woman who was spared from dying from being thrown away tell their feelings about being discarded and not valued.There is a list of 23 proposals in the back of the book, most of which I agree with. I agree with the main theme of this book, it is just that I think it could have been told better.I would recommend this book to anyone who is not aware of the many injustices against women but I would also strongly encourage more reading of the harmful experiences of women in their own words.I received this book as a win from FirstReads but that in no way influenced my thoughts or feelings in this review.
    • 4/5
      I admired Carter’s presidency, particularly his deep commitment to human rights as a cornerstone of foreign affairs policy. In my view, his reputation as a “weak” executive entirely misses the mark. I appreciated his avoidance of conveying overly simplistic messages about complex national and world affairs; this, though, allowed his detractors to suggest he was irresolute. Many will disagree with me but, while there is much about American values that is superior in the world, I think there is, since Carter, a tone of arrogance that does not serve well our moral standing among nations. Carter was one of the few (if only) leaders to demonstrate a bit of humility in regards to our relations with the world. He is a principled man who invests his energy and influence into practical actions that have improved the lot of people across the globe. He has had a laudable career of public service since the end of his presidency. He founded the Carter Center that has undertaken a wide variety of projects across the world, many related to efforts to eradicate diseases, to monitoring elections in nascent democracies, and advancing human rights. In this book, Carter addresses issues of abuse and oppression of women. His description of the causes of attitudes about women and the degrading, demeaning and harmful treatment of them is frank and disturbing. One cause of such treatment, he holds, is the misinterpretation and misapplication of scripture by segments of the major faiths of the world. He says such use of scripture is selective and wrong-headed, stemming largely from eons of male domination in many cultures. A man of great faith himself, he describes his alienation from the Southern Baptist Conference as the denomination came to increasingly exclude women from positions of authority in church affairs. He recounts his efforts as president and later to convey to world religious leaders how their doctrinal positions can create harm to women; one example is his frank discussion with Pope John Paul about the ramifications of the Catholic church’s position on contraception.Carter says that since the end of his presidency incarceration in the US has increased massively, including sharp growth in the number of women in American prisons, many jailed for non-violent crimes. He decries the increasingly retributive focus of the criminal justice system and the much-diminished use of prison as opportunity for rehabilitation. America, of course, stands out among practically all nations in the percentage of its population that is incarcerated and is the only western nation that still employs the death penalty.Women are also systematically excluded or limited by cultural norms from access to the political process and to education. Many countries far exceed the US in the percentage of women who hold elected office, and the presence of women in legislative bodies in our country is still quite small. Remarkably, some developing nations have a much better record here than does our own. Often girls are denied access to education in comparison to boys as girls are viewed as important to family maintenance or more valuable as marriage prospects.Girls in many parts of the world are denied the right to select their own husbands; a significant number obliged as children to enter into marriages arranged by their families, often for financial reasons. Much worse still is the existence in many countries (principally Islamic) of so-called “honor” killings where males family members can kill a girl for violating cultural mores regarding sexual behavior, including (fantastically) situations where the girl was raped.Slavery continues to flourish across the world, including in America, where girls are sold into bondage often involving forced prostitution. He cites cases in Atlanta to show that this is not limited to third world nations. Carter also reviews the effect of the AIDS crisis on women, particularly in Africa, where in some nations the percentage of HIV-positive persons exceeds 25%. Some African leaders have responded to work by the Carter Center and others to adopt measures to lessen transmission risk, but some, including leaders in South Africa and Uganda have openly resisted measures that are proven to reduce incidence.Carter talks bluntly about the practice of genital cutting of girls in many nations, clearly a horrific abuse and a vivid example of how notions of male dominance has corrupted the behaviors of those who perpetuate such practices. There are several examples of how thoughtful advocacy has begun to turn the tide against genital cutting, but it is still widely done in many parts of the world.In light of what Carter has described as the state of women’s rights everywhere, there is much about which to be discouraged. Nonetheless, Carter’s focus is important for everyone to heed. He proposes action steps that would alleviate the abuses he reveals. It is probably increased public awareness and determination to speak out against abuse and subjugation that is the most valuable and impactful outcome of Carter’s book.I was able to see Carter and obtain signed copies of his book while in Raleigh. The experience (Secret Service, police and security measures) was an interesting one. One copy of the book was purchased for my niece, a college student majoring in women’s studies who has an intense interest in women’s rights, particularly those surrounding maternal health. Certainly, committed young persons such as she are our best hope for turning around the deplorable treatment of women in our country and elsewhere.

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    A Call to Action - Jimmy Carter

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