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

by Jimmy Carter

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781476773964
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	03/10/2015
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	407,420
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.38(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Jimmy Carter was the thirty-ninth President of the United States, serving from 1977 to 1981. In 1982, he and his wife founded The Carter Center, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the lives of people around the world. Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. He is the author of thirty books, including A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety; A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power; An Hour Before Daylight: Memoirs of a Rural Boyhood; and Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

1 My Childhood 7

2 Commitment to Peace and Women's Rights 13

3 The Bible and Gender Equality 19

4 Full Prisons and Legal Killing 32

5 Sexual Assault and Rape 41

6 Violence and War 52

7 Observations as a Traveler 60

8 Women and the Carter Center 71

9 Learning from Human Rights Heroes 89

10 The Genocide of Girls 114

11 Rape 118

12 Slavery and Prostitution 125

13 Spouse Abuse 142

14 "Honor" Killings 150

15 Genital Cutting 154

16 Child Marriage and Dowry Deaths 158

17 Politics, Pay, and Maternal Health 163

18 The Road to Progress 176

Acknowledgments 199

Index 201

Editorial Reviews

A Call to Action reinforces [Carter’s] dedication to wiping out injustice—and his ability to move others to join his cause.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

A Call to Action ends with a list of recommendations to ameliorate the condition of women and girls worldwide, such as having more women in higher public office and involving religious scholars to give a more forward-looking interpretation to their faiths. It is this commitment to a progressive religious outlook that makes Carter almost a lone voice in U.S. politics.

Progressive.org

A tour de force of the global abuse and manipulation of women, including statistics that will stun most readers with details that cannot be ignored…The scope of the material is astounding…Mr. Carter's A Call to Action should not only be required reading in America, but should also serve as the template for a complete reinterpretation of the religious views behind our treatment of each other, to discover what he claims is the true meaning behind the miracle of creation.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

A Call to Action enhances [Carter’s] role as elder statesman and human rights warrior by focusing entirely on the enslavement, degradation, and torture that women endure around the world. . . . an important book that should serve as a reference guide and instructional manual for dealing with the atrocities against women.

The Daily Beast

When reading A Call to Action, I got the sense that this is a man who has spent nine decades advocating for women and will continue to do so until his last breath. He is a man on a mission, listing 23 challenges he and The Carter Center are determined to work on for the betterment of women. He demonstrates how he used his influence throughout his lifetime to push women’s rights forward . . . Carter’s book overwhelms as well as inspires.

Huffington Post

[Carter] wrote his book with deep knowledge, insight and compassion…Indeed, it is time to wake up.

Morning Call (PA)

Former President Jimmy Carter's call to action concerns the struggles faced by women around the world. Carter's narration in his signature Georgia drawl is slightly indistinct, which can make it a bit difficult to understand at times, but hearing his ideas in his own voice gives an additional dimension and authority to the work. Carter touches on discriminatory practices that have subjugated women, violence and abuse directed at women, and how religious texts are used to legitimize practices that keep women on a level unequal to that of men. His timely call for equal rights and opportunity for women is sure to raise consciousness on this global issue. S.E.G. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine

MAY 2014 - AudioFile

2014-03-08
The former president and indefatigable humanitarian writes again, this time linking worldly woes that "fall disproportionately on women and girls." Women suffer all sorts of indignities in the world: rape in war, sexual slavery, lower pay for equal or greater work than men, and endless other forms of abuse and discrimination. Carter's (NIV Lessons from Life Bible: Personal Reflections with Jimmy Carter, 2012, etc.) philanthropic institution/think tank, the Carter Center, now considers "the deprivation and abuse of women and girls" to be a greater overarching problem than economic disparity, though there are linkages. Further, writes the author, the problem is not merely restricted to the developing world. China, for instance, has made huge strides and is by some indexes more egalitarian in these matters than the United States, though, Carter adds judiciously, there remains the pesky problem of infanticide and abortion to cull females in favor of male offspring. The gender-related problems the author identifies are so broad and pervasive that they sometimes seem to have little in common other than that they adversely affect women. Carter's long list of solutions is common-sensical, if sure to tick off the patriarchy: Encourage activism that works toward equality, prosecute customers and not prostitutes, and so forth. Too often, the book seems a mashup of distantly related white papers, and it does not help that Carter binds them with folksy memoir-izing ("I was always reluctant to let other young men know that I was a virgin, feeling that it was somehow a reflection on my manhood. I have come to realize that societal standards—at least in the Western world—are much different from what I knew as a youth, but there is still a sharp difference between those that apply to boys and those that apply to girls." The overall effect is one of well-meaning but fuzzy prescription, less rigorous than this difficult subject requires.

Kirkus Reviews