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Jimmy Carter's final fight: Women's rights
Story highlights
Jimmy Carter issues a "call to action" for people to improve women's rights
He says U.S. hasn't done enough on the issue, rips misinterpretation of religious texts
Women's rights activists say they're committed to push for change worldwide
AtlantaCNN
—
Jimmy Carter has seen a lot in his 90 years.
As a son of the South, a governor and president, and as a man who spent decades tackling problems head-on, he knows the world is not perfect. It has too many people without a voice and without hope, too many examples of suffering and injustice.
There are so many wrongs to right. Yet among them, Carter is putting one ahead of all others: Violence and injustice against girls and women.
“This is going to be the highest priority for the rest of my life,” he said this week.
He’s doing it at the urging of wife, Rosalynn, and for his daughter, three granddaughters and five great-granddaughters. He says he wants them to have the same opportunities and security that men do.
He’s doing it for the more than 200 schoolgirls abducted by the Islamist extremist group Boko Haram in Nigeria, for those who have become ISIS militants’ sex slaves and for girls everywhere who can’t go to school. He’s doing it for the estimated 160 million babies aborted or killed at birth in Asia in recent decades because they were not boys. He’s doing it for American college co-eds and women in the military who suffer rape and see the men responsible walk free.
Carter also is doing it because of women he has met from places like Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. Some can’t go home due to the taboos and dangers facing them in male-dominated societies. Others go anyway, risking their lives.
“They’re the heroes,” the former President says. “And they inspire me.”
Scores of these “heroes” shared stories and brainstormed solutions this week at the Carter Center, the President’s namesake humanitarian and advocacy organization. The issues ranged widely, from income inequality to so-called “honor killings.” Yet the attendees were united in a belief that women should be on par with men, echoing Carter in his latest book titled, “A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence and Power.”
He is making this the fight of his life, urging the conference attendees to be unrelenting.
“Let’s not abandon this,” he said.
‘Death is mercy, compared to the alternatives’
Roughly half the world’s population is male, the other half female.
Within families worldwide, women take on leadership roles all the time. But it’s a different story if you break down the roster of U.S. or world political leaders, or if you look at the business landscape – only about 5% of Fortune 500 CEOs are women. And this is not to mention the higher likelihood of females to be sexually abused, turned into sex slaves, subjugated or otherwise mistreated.
“The more (the Carter Center was) involved in 80 different countries around the world, the more we saw clearly the most serious and unaddressed human rights abuse on Earth is among women and girls,” Carter told CNN this week. “It’s much worse than I ever dreamed it was.”
Some women endure physical abuse and personal humiliation because they don’t see a way out.
Dalia Abd El-Hameed, from the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, said she was inspired to take action during the Arab Spring. She saw Egypt’s revolution as “a window to do something different,” namely to create a better and more just society.
She learned how activists’ dreams don’t always become realities, though. Sexual violence against women actually worsened after the fall of longtime President Hosni Mubarak and is now “reaching unprecedented levels,” according to El-Hameed.
Yet she’s still fighting.
“People are not being silenced,” El-Hameed said. “It’s a time of social uprising in the whole world. We are not alone in this.”
Dalia Abd El-Hameed heads the gender rights program at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights.
Greg Botelho/CNN
Manal Omar, from the United States Institute of Peace, knows about the global push for change from her work in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and around the Middle East. Yes, women know they put their health and safety on the line by speaking out, but they do it anyway.
“Death is not the worst thing that can happen,” Omar said, comparing it to sexual assault, physical abuse, psychological degradation and the loss of face and hope. “Death is mercy, compared to the alternatives.”
Rationalizing through religion
It’s one thing to challenge a boyfriend, husband or some other man, but to challenge God?
That’s one justification some men cite for their higher standing over women, basing their views on their interpretation of holy books. Groups like ISIS and Boko Haram have used this rationale to horrific ends, claiming women are inferior and effectively property under their strict interpretation of Sharia law.
Often, those who have defied this thinking have paid for it. The most well-known example may be Malala Yousafzai, now living in Britain after being shot by the Taliban for touting girls’ education rights from her home in Pakistan’s Swat Valley. More than 200 Nigerian girls were kidnapped by Boko Haram because they dared to go to school. And ISIS went so far as to print a pamphlet trying to justify its enslaving and having sex with “unbelieving” women and girls.
As senior Carter Center adviser Karin Ryan says, “the extremists are very loud.” That doesn’t make them right, with more and more people making it their mission to prove such treatment is antithetical to Islam.
In Ghana, banners with pictures of Carter and the chief national imam – who attended the Carter Center conference in Atlanta – adorn cars, doors and more to get this message across, with the imam committing one Friday sermon each year to promoting women’s rights. In Libya, the Noor Campaign cited the Quran in radio ads, billboards and face-to-face conversations about women’s security. There is also a push to give women more opportunity to learn about their religion, rather than limiting such study to men.
“We need to … have knowledge,” said Penda Mbow, a professor in Dakar, Senegal. “I have had death threats, but that has never stopped me.”
Efforts by Muslims to point out the Quran and the Prophet Mohammad’s stance on gender equality are one of “the brightest developments” in recent years, Carter said.
He’s seen less positive movement among some Christians who cite the Bible when reasoning women are “not as worthy in God’s eyes,” he said.
Such views can trickle down, from rationalizing violence against women to men dominating church scholarship and leadership. Only a small fraction of leading evangelical theologians and pastors are women, says Mimi Haddad of Christians for Biblical Equality, a nonprofit group that bases its arguments for equal treatment of men and women on the Bible.
And women can’t become Roman Catholic priests, though Carter said Pope Francis wrote him that “his opinion was that, in the future years, women’s roles within the church would be greatly improved.”
“But still, there is a very great reluctance among some Protestants, like Southern Baptists, among others, (to) treat women equally in the eyes of God,” said Carter, a longtime Sunday school teacher at a Baptist church in Plains, Georgia. “And that sends a signal that it is OK to discriminate against girls and women.”
Carter: U.S. hasn’t ‘done nearly enough’
What’s needed on all fronts, conference attendees said, is leadership. And officials in the United States are not doing a good job providing it, according to the former President.
“The United States is the leading country on Earth,” Carter said. “And we haven’t done nearly enough.”
Some 150 years since the end of the Civil War, an estimated 60,000 people are effectively enslaved in the United States, according to the Global Slavery Index – with Carter noting they are disproportionately female. There’s also domestic violence, recently highlighted in the saga over the NFL’s Ray Rice. And, of course, there are alarming statistics about sexual violence – including a Department of Justice-funded study that found one in five women are sexually assaulted in college, many of them by serial rapists.
“Patience is overrated,” said Ruth Messinger, president of the American Jewish World Service humanitarian agency and one those pushing U.S. policymakers to act. “We need to all think big.”
For all the talk of equal rights, Carter said some men “are very reluctant to give up their power and … privileged positions in society.”
“They say that it’s the right thing to do,” he said of gender equality. “But when it comes down to (doing things like) voting in the Congress or taking action in their place of employment, they say, ‘Well, let’s cheat women a bit longer. We can get away with it.’”
The power dynamic
That’s because the quest for power – whether building or holding it – and quest for equality don’t always jive. Men long have been in control in most societies, and many aren’t eager to give that up, whether to women or other men.
In part, it’s physical: Some men assault women and hold them down because they can. If they swapped body sizes, who’s to think that would still hold true?
Plus, men typically lead armed conflicts as national leaders, generals and soldiers. Especially in Africa and the Middle East, there is no shortage of war nowadays.
Alaa Murabit, 24, is a doctor and women's rights activist in Libya.
Greg Botelho/CNN
According to Alaa Murabit, a 24-year-old pediatrician and founder of The Voice of Libyan Women: “Women’s rights end when the war begins.”
Murabit grew up in Saskatoon, Canada, in a religious family of five brothers and five sisters, each of whom was treated equally in their parent’s eyes, she said. She graduated high school at age 15 and moved to the Libyan city of Zawia for medical school when Moammar Gadhafi was still in power, a time when she said “rights as a whole were not respected for anyone.”
An armed uprising ended Gadhafi’s reign, and since then, Murabit said, “the treatment (of women) has gotten significantly worse” amid the “power vacuum being filled by unsavory groups.”
And yet Murabit, an Ashoka Fellow and member of the U.N. Women Civil Society Advisory Group, is still pushing to be heard. A proud “interrupter,” she frequently traveled 25 miles to Tripoli to get in front of power brokers, most of whom were men.
“They don’t have a lot of women (at) the table,” Murabit said. “They only meet with the men with the guns.”
Still, no one denies men can be part of the solution.
Timothy Njoya is a former Presbyterian minister and head of the Men for the Equality of Men and Women. His mother was the first in her Kenyan village to be educated and not to be circumcised; Njoya’s own four daughters, each of whom has a Ph.D., followed their grandmother’s lead.
Among other things, his organization has boys do chores like cooking, cleaning and farming. The idea is to make them respect the hard, important work traditionally done by women, and respect women more in the process.
“It’s not punitive, but transformative,” Njoya told CNN. “I call it human rights masculinity.”
For ‘your children and your children’s children’
While some go through life without really knowing someone of a different skin color, religion or ethnicity, nearly all of them will know someone of the opposite gender. That’s why the issue of women’s rights can’t be avoided. And for many men and women, it’s personal.
“Anybody that has a daughter or granddaughter knows how precious that person can be,” Carter said. “… And anybody who is interested in the future of (their) country or city that if they deprive half of their own citizens of an equal right to an education or an honest job, then their whole community is going to suffer.”
There are signs of progress, like the prominent global role played by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Christine Lagarde leadership of the IMF and Yousafzai becoming the youngest Nobel Peace Prize winner. But for every two steps forward, it seems, there’s at least one step back, as evidenced by recent atrocities against women by Islamic extremists.
“Women cannot wait for change,” said Bolanle Makanju, the founder of a faith-based organization in Nigeria. “We’ve waited for centuries and centuries. We’ve got to push for it.”
It’s not just women. Carter is proud to be part of the fight. And, for all his nine decades on Earth, he seems to have the energy, capacity and motivation to do what he can to make a difference.
“That’s your children and your children’s children,” he said, arguing that everyone should be similarly compelled. “And action needs to be taken.”
Photos: Jimmy Carter's legacy, in photos
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Jimmy Carter, the 39th President of the United States, speaks in Elk City, Oklahoma, in 1979. Learn more about Carter's legacy with CNN Films' "Jimmy Carter: Rock and Roll President" on January 3 at 9 p.m. ET/PT.
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Carter, 6, poses with his sister Gloria in their hometown of Plains, Georgia, in 1931.
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Carter graduated from the US Naval Academy on June 5, 1946, after completing the accelerated wartime program.
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Carter shovels peanuts in the 1970s. Carter was the son of a peanut farmer, and he took over the family business in 1953 before his political career took off.
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Carter gets a haircut during his first year as governor of Georgia. He was inaugurated on January 12, 1971.
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After becoming the Democratic Party's presidential nominee in 1976, Carter raises hands with running mate Walter Mondale at the Democratic National Convention in New York. Standing to Carter's right is his wife, Rosalynn, and their daughter, Amy. Carter ran as a Washington outsider and someone who promised to shake up government.
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Carter and US President Gerald Ford debate domestic policy at the Walnut Street Theater in Philadelphia in September 1976. It was the first of three Ford-Carter presidential debates.
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Carter embraces his wife after receiving news of his election victory on November 2, 1976. Carter received 297 electoral votes, while Ford received 241.
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Chief Justice Warren Burger swears Carter into office on January 20, 1977, while Rosalynn Carter looks on.
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Carter, second from left, and his brother Billy, left, visit Georgia's St. Simons Island in 1977.
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Carter delivers his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress in January 1978. "Government cannot solve our problems," he said. Anti-government sentiment at the time was brought on by economic pessimism along with the end of the Vietnam War and the unraveling of the Watergate saga.
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Three days before his birthday in 1978, Carter blows out candles on a birthday cake presented to him at a fundraiser for the Democratic National Committee.
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Carter jogs on the South Lawn of the White House in December 1978.
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Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, right, listens to Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin on September 6, 1978, at the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland. With Carter's help, terms of a peace accord were negotiated at Camp David. A formal treaty was signed in Washington on March 26, 1979, ending 31 years of war between Egypt and Israel. It was one of the highlights of Carter's presidency.
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Outgoing President Carter, left, sits with President-elect Ronald Reagan en route to Reagan's inauguration in January 1981.
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Before departing for Georgia following Reagan's inauguration, Carter holds his crying daughter as his wife blows a kiss at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland.
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The Carters wear glittering garlands and a turban given to them by Pakistani tribesmen at the Pakistan-Afghanistan border in November 1986. They also received a pair of rams.
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Carter addresses a United Nations interfaith service at New York's Trinity Church in September 1991. His speech was entitled "The Present Role of the United Nations in a Changing World."
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From left, former President George H.W. Bush, President Bill Clinton, Carter and Vice President Al Gore attend the Presidents' Summit for America's Future in Philadelphia in 1997. They helped clean up local neighborhoods as part of the effort to encourage volunteer service.
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Clinton presented Carter with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, on August 9, 1999. Carter was recognized for his diplomatic achievements and humanitarian efforts.
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Carter works at a construction site sponsored by the Jimmy Carter Work Project in Asan, South Korea, on August 6, 2001. The Carters have been involved with the nonprofit Habitat for Humanity since 1984.
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Cuban President Fidel Castro calls for time as Carter prepares to throw the first pitch at a baseball game in Havana, Cuba, in May 2002.
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Students at the University of Havana listen to Carter outline his vision for improved relations between the United States and Cuba on May 14, 2002. The speech was broadcast live and uncensored on Cuban state television.
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Carter is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway, in December 2002. He was recognized for his many years of public service, and in his acceptance speech he urged others to work for peace.
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Carter adjusts his headphones at a news conference in Caracas, Venezuela, in January 2003. He proposed a referendum on Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's presidency or an amendment to the constitution as a way to end the political crisis in the South American nation.
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Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean speaks beside Carter during a campaign stop in Plains, Georgia, in January 2004.
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Rosalynn Carter smashes a bottle of champagne against the sail of the USS Jimmy Carter during the submarine's christening ceremony in Connecticut on June 5, 2004.
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The Carters wave to the audience at the Democratic National Convention in Boston in 2004.
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Carter checks his notes while observing a polling station in Maputo, Mozambique, in December 2004. Since 1989, the Carter Center has been observing elections around the world to determine their legitimacy. The nonprofit organization was founded by Carter and his wife to advance human rights across the globe.
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In February 2007, Carter speaks to children in Ghana on the seriousness of eradicating guinea worm disease.
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The Carters arrive for President Barack Obama's inauguration in January 2009.
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Carter testifies in May 2009 during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on energy independence and security.
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Hamas leader Ismail Haniya speaks in June 2009 during a joint news conference with Carter in Gaza. Carter denounced the deprivations facing Palestinians in Gaza as unique in history, asserting that they are being treated "like animals."
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Carter walks out of the Hall of Remembrance at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem in August 2009. The Elders, an independent council of retired world figures, kicked off a visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories in a bid to encourage Middle East peace efforts.
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Carter delivers a speech in Seoul, South Korea, after receiving an honorary doctorate degree from Korea University in March 2010. During a four-day visit to South Korea, Carter urged direct talks with North Korea, saying a failure to negotiate nuclear disarmament might lead to a "catastrophic" war.
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Carter greets South African leader Nelson Mandela in Johannesburg in May 2010.
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Carter hugs Aijalon Mahli Gomes at Boston's Logan International Airport in August 2010. Carter negotiated Gomes' release after he was held in North Korea for crossing into the country illegally in January 2010.
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Carter and other former Presidents, including Clinton and both George Bushes, attend the Points of Light Institute Tribute to Former President George H.W. Bush in March 2011.
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Cuban President Raul Castro greets Carter and his wife at the Revolution Palace in Havana on March 30, 2011. Carter was the first former US President to visit Cuba since the 1959 revolution.
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In April 2011, Carter addresses students at the Pyongyang University of Foreign Studies in Pyongyang, North Korea.
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As part of the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates, Carter answers a question during a panel discussion at the University of Illinois in Chicago in April 2012.
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Carter was interviewed for "The Presidents' Gatekeepers" project at the Carter Center, Atlanta, Georgia, in September 2011.
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From left, President Obama, Carter, first lady Michelle Obama and Clinton wave from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 2013. It was the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, which is best remembered for Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech.
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Carter talks with reporters in Chicago at a signing for his book "A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence and Power" in March 2014. In the book, Carter argues that the abuse and subjugation of women and girls is one of the biggest challenges the world faces.
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Carter teaches Sunday School on Easter Sunday 2014 at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia. Carter teaches Sunday School at the church several times a year.
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Carter signs his book "A Full Life: Reflections At Ninety" in Pasadena, California, in July 2015.
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Carter talks about his cancer diagnosis during a news conference at the Carter Center in Atlanta in August 2015. Carter announced that his cancer was on four small spots on his brain and that he would immediately begin radiation treatment. In December 2015, Carter announced that he was cancer-free.
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Carter delivers a lecture on the eradication of guinea worm disease at the House of Lords in London in February 2016.
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Carter and his wife arrive for the inauguration of Donald Trump in January 2017.
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Carter helps build stairs for a home during a Habitat for Humanity project in Edmonton, Alberta, in July 2017. A couple days later, while working on another house in Canada, Carter became dehydrated and was taken to a hospital as a precaution.
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Carter, center, speaks along side former US Presidents George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama as they attend the Hurricane Relief concert in College Station, Texas, in October 2017.
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Carter holds up a copy of his new book "Faith: A Journey For All" at a book-signing event in New York in March 2018.
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Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, speak with Atlanta Falcons head coach Dan Quinn prior to an NFL game in September 2018.
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Former US President George W. Bush greets Carter and other former presidents during the state funeral for his father in December 2018.
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Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter bow their heads in prayer at a church in Plains, Georgia, in June 2019. It was less than a month after the former president fell and broke his hip.
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Carter fell and hit his head in early October 2019 while getting ready for church, requiring 14 stitches above his brow. But he didn't let that stop him from heading to Nashville that afternoon for a week of building houses with Habitat for Humanity.
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Carter teaches Sunday school at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia, in November 2019.