Published in 2012
384 pages
Minky Worden is an American human rights advocate and author who is Director of Global Initiatives for Human Rights Watch.
Worden joined Human Rights Watch in 1998. Before that, she lived and worked in Hong Kong as an adviser to Democratic Party chairman Martin Lee and worked at the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. as a speechwriter for the U.S. Attorney General and in the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys.
Worden is editor of China’s Great Leap: The Beijing Games and Olympian Human Rights Challenges (2008) and Unfinished Revolution; Voices from the Global Fight for Women’s Rights (2012) and co-editor with Kenneth Roth and Amy Bernstein of Torture: Does It Make Us Safer? Is It Ever OK?: A Human Rights Perspective (2005).
A native of Tennessee, Worden is a graduate of Vanderbilt University. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and an elected member of the Overseas Press Club’s Board of Governors. She speaks Cantonese and German.
What is this book about?
It’s a time of change in the world, with dictators toppling and new opportunities rising, but any revolution that doesn’t create equality for women will be incomplete. The time has come to realize the full potential of half the world’s population. —Christiane Amanpour, from the foreword
The Unfinished Revolution tells the story of the global struggle to secure basic rights for women and girls, including in the Middle East where the Arab Spring raised high hopes, but the political revolutions are so far insufficient to guarantee progress. Around the world, women and girls are trafficked into forced labor and sex slavery, trapped in conflict zones where rape is a weapon of war, prevented from attending school, and kept from making deeply personal choices in their private lives, such as whom and when to marry. In many countries, women are second-class citizens by law. In others, religion and traditions block freedoms such as the right to work, study or access health care. Even in the United States, women who are victims of sexual violence often do not see their attackers brought to justice.
More than 30 writers—Nobel Prize laureates, leading activists, top policymakers, and former victims—have contributed to this anthology. Drawing from their rich personal experiences, they tackle some of the toughest questions and offer bold new approaches to problems affecting hundreds of millions of women. This volume is indispensable reading, providing thoughtful analysis from a never-before assembled group of advocates. It shows that the fight for women’s equality is far from over. As Leymah Gbowee, 2011 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate says, Women are not free anywhere in this world until all women in the world are free.
