Nussbaum on Kristof and WuDunn

by David Heim

For a weekday review of Half the Sky, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s book about how providing more opportunity and justice for women is the key to worldwide economic development, the New York Times called on the prolific University of Chicago philosopher Martha Nussbaum. It was an inspired idea, since Nussbaum has focused much of her career on issues of development and gender equality.

Nussbaum does not disappoint. While praising Kristof and WuDunn’s book, she disputes their suggestion that the Muslim world is especially hard on women. Nussbaum points out that it is non-Muslim Asian countries like China and South Korea that practice “the basic denial to girls of life itself” through infanticide, sex-selective abortion and discriminatory health care. The neglect of maternal health is greater in poor Christian countries than in Muslim countries, she notes, and forced prostitution—one of Kristof and WuDunn’s main concerns—is no more prevalent in Muslim countries than in non-Muslim ones. As sympathetic as Nussbaum is to the book, she refuses to let the authors get away with easy generalizations and stereotypes about a religion.

At a time when much of the media preoccupies itself with bogus stories about “death panels” in health care, it’s almost startling to see such high-level discussion taking place in a daily newspaper. It can be done.