The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World

But no matter what the original focus, when women get information, tools, funding, and a sense of our power, women lift off and take the group where they want it to go.

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, ga

“What do you know now in a deeper way than you knew it before?” I love this question because it honors how we learn and grow. Wisdom isn’t about accumulating more facts; it’s about understanding big truths in a deeper way.

It’s a delicate thing to initiate change in a traditional culture. It has to be done with the utmost care and respect. Transparency is crucial. Grievances must be heard. Failures must be acknowledged. Local people have to lead. Shared goals have to be emphasized. Messages have to appeal to people’s experience.

If you rigidly divide the duties, then you’re cutting back on what you share, and that can hurt the partnership. Instead, you can push for a flow where you share everything in different degrees. You develop a partnership that is whole and complementary with a natural hierarchy based on talent and experience, where each can teach and learn, lead and

The judge who convicted Margaret Sanger said that women did not have “the right to copulate with a feeling of security that there will be no resulting conception.” Really? Why? That judge, who sentenced Sanger to thirty days in a workhouse, was expressing the widespread view that a woman’s sexual activity was immoral if it was separated from her fu

The best way to fight back is to speak up—to say openly the very thing that others stigmatize. It’s a direct attack on the self-censorship that stigma needs to survive.

They believed that many newborn deaths could be prevented with practices that cost little or nothing and could be done by the community: immediate breastfeeding, keeping the baby warm, cutting the cord with sterilized tools.

An abusive culture, to me, is any culture that needs to single out and exclude a group. It’s always a less productive culture because the organization’s energy is diverted from lifting people up to keeping people down.