MALALA YOUSAFZAI: A FORCE FOR GOOD IN THE WORLD

By DFID – UK Department for International Development – Malala Yousafzai: Education for girls, CC BY 2.0, Link

Malala Yousafzai is a Pakistani activist for female education and the rights of girls, as well as the youngest person ever to receive the Nobel prize. She was born in Mingora, Pakistan in the country’s Swat Valley in 1997. Her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, believed that she would one day become a politician, and would let her stay up late at night to discuss politics. She spoke about education rights for the first time at age 11, when her father took her to the local press club in Peshawar, on the topic, “How dare the Taliban take away my basic right to education?” At this time, the Taliban were frequently blowing up girls’ schools. When she heard that BBC Urdu news was looking for a schoolgirl to anonymously blog about her life and that the girl who had been about to do it had changed her mind due to her family’s fear of the Taliban, Malala, who was only in the seventh grade at the time, took on the task. BBC staff insisted she use a pseudonym: she was called “Gul Makai”, or “cornflower” in Urdu.

Malala hand-wrote notes which were then passed to a reporter to be scanned and sent to BBC Urdu by email. On January 3, 2009, her first post went up. Her descriptions continued to be published as military operations began, including the First Battle of Swat; eventually Malala’s school was shut down. By January 15th, the Taliban had issued an edict in Mingora that no girl was allowed to go to school – and by this point, they had already destroyed over one hundred girls’ schools. After the ban went into effect, they continued to destroy more schools. A few weeks later, girls were allowed to attend school, but only at coed schools; girls’ schools were still banned, and very few girls went back to school in the atmosphere of impending violence that hung over the area. On February 18th, local Taliban leader Maulana Fazlulla announced he would lift the ban on education of females, and girls would be able to attend school until March 17th, when exams were scheduled, but they would have to wear burqas.

After Malala finished her series of blog posts for the BBC on March 12th, 2009, a New York Times reporter asked her and her father if she could appear in a documentary. At this point, military actions and regional unrest forced the evacuation of Mingora, and Malala was sent to stay with country relatives. In late July, her family was reunited and allowed to return home, and after the documentary, Malala began to do some major media interviews. By the end of 2009, her identity as the BBC blogger had been revealed by journalists. She started receiving international recognition and was awarded a National Youth Peace Prize – a first-time award in Pakistan – by her country’s government. As things developed, she began to plan the Malala Education Foundation in 2012, whose purpose would be to help economically disadvantaged girls to be able to attend school. But in summer of that year, a group of Taliban leaders agreed to kill her – unanimously. As she rode the bus home in October, a masked gunman shot her; the
bullet passed through her head, neck, and shoulder, and wounded two other girls.
Malala barely survived, but was airlifted to a Peshawar hospital, where doctors removed the bullet from her head in five hours. She then received specialized treatment in Europe with the Pakistani government bearing the cost. Since her recovery, she has continued to speak out both for education for girls and for the rights of women in general. At age 17, she was the co-recipient of the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize for her work on behalf of children and young people, sharing the prize with Kailash Satyarthi, a children’s rights activist from India. Malala is the youngest Nobel laureate ever. That year she also received an honorary doctorate from University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

On her 18th birthday, she opened a school in Lebanon not far from the Syrian border for Syrian refugees, specifically teenage girls, funded by the nonprofit Malala Fund. She is continuing her schooling as well as her activism. Learn more about her work at https://www.malala.org/

This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Women by Becca Anderson, which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media.

ANITA HILL: WE ALWAYS BELIEVED YOU

By Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Nobody could have guessed that the televised Senate hearings on the nominations of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court would be the top-rated show of 1991. America’s collective mouth hung open in amazement at the brouhaha that brewed up around Judge Thomas’ worthiness based on the charges of sexual harassment by one Anita Hill. The hearings catapulted the issue of sexual harassment in the workplace into the most hotly debated and analyzed topic of the day, one that still  reverberates years later. Prior to Anita’s brave stand, sexual harassment was mainly swept under the industrial gray carpeting of most offices, but she singlehandedly forced it to the very center of the national agenda.

The nation and, indeed, the world, watched transfixed as the incredibly poised Anita revealed her experiences with Clarence Thomas as a coworker. With great dignity, she testified that Thomas kept after her to go out with him, referred to himself as “an individual who had a very large penis and…used a name…in pornographic material,” and asked her to see “this woman (who) has this kind of breasts that measure this size,” in a seemingly endless barrage of ludicrous and lugubrious insults to her as a fellow professional. Senate hearings, usually desert dry and devoid of tabloid titillation, suddenly featured long discussions including the terms “penis” and “pubic hair.”

The prelude to the media circus took place when the president announced his choice of “black Horatio Alger” Clarence Thomas as the Supreme Court replacement for the retiring Thurgood Marshall. Anita Hill, a law professor at the University of Oklahoma, contacted Harriet Grant, the Judiciary Committee’s nominations counsel. She told Grant that Thomas had harassed her in a sexual and inappropriate manner when she had worked as his assistant at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. She had, in fact, quit the EEOC because of his behavior and gone into academia. Grant cc’d the senatorial committee on the allegations, but the Senate whipped through the approval process with nary a word about Hill’s report and prepared to vote for confirmation of Thomas. Then journalist shero Nina Totenberg of National Public Radio and New York Newsday’s Timothy Phelps broke the story wide open to a shocked public. Seven women from the House of Representatives marched in protest to the Senate building, demanding of the sheepish Senate committee to know why the committee had ignored Hill’s complaint.

Nothing in Hill’s background could have prepared her for the media onslaught. Born in 1956 as the youngest of thirteen children, she was raised in rural Oklahoma in a deeply religious family. An outstanding student, she graduated as valedictorian of her integrated high school, earned top honors in college, and was one of only eleven black students out of a class of 160 at Yale University Law School.

Even through Anita Hill had been promised immunity and total confidentiality, she appeared before the committee in a special session before the scrutiny of the nation. The Judiciary Committee was dismissive, as only Old Boys can be, of Anita Hill and her testimony, even going so far as to ask her if she was taking her revenge as the “woman scorned,” and they suggested that she was a patsy for radical liberals and feminists. While Anita’s allegations were ultimately disregarded and Clarence Thomas was voted in, Anita’s grace under pressure won many admirers who protested the Thomas appointment. The controversy remained headline news for months; polls of public opinion showed Anita Hill gaining and Bush losing points as I Believe You Anita! bumper stickers appeared on thousands of cars across America. For her outspokenness, she was awarded the Ida B. Wells Award from the National Coalition of 100 Black Women and named one of Glamour’s Ten Women of the Year in 1991.
Anita Hill’s courage of conviction made her a shero of the late twentieth century. In her words, “I felt I had to tell the truth. I could not keep silent.”

“You just have to tell the truth and that’s the most anyone can expect from you and if you get that opportunity, you will have accomplished something.” — Anita Hill

This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Women by Becca Anderson, which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media.