Uprising: A New Age Is Dawning for Every Mother's Daughter
If there’s any confusion about the status of women’s rights, author, journalist, and women’s rights activist Armstrong has an update. The war has only just begun on diverse fronts the world over. In kitchens, schools, and communities spanning the planet from Africa to Afghanistan, Senegal to Syria, women are fighting the good fight just to gain recognition as humans worthy of human rights. Armstrong describes a scattering of actions including, but not limited to, lawsuits and public protests that challenge the misogyny embedded in just about every religion and culture. These small but significant victories over inhuman practices ranging from marital rape to female genital mutilation to denied education, when combined with burgeoning women’s international advocacy groups, chip away at centuries’ old patterns of abuse. Armstrong touches briefly on how and when such systemic sexism began, but, of course, no one knows why. This is as much a rallying cry as a record of the modest but significant strides of brave women wresting power that is rightly theirs from the grip of institutionalized chauvinism. --Donna Chavez