Over half of the book's front dust jacket is blue sky, but the women are actually at the bottom third of the front cover where fifteen squares each show a picture of a woman's face. None is a whole face; each picture shows only the top half of a face, all but one black or brown skinned, with dark eyes. The narrative mimics the cover in that snapshot stories leave us with a sense of half-seen faces, as we careen from one poor country to another. While the book attempts to highlight stories of women who have “turned oppression into opportunity,” its own narrative reveals how precarious these opportunities often are. An attentive reader might conclude that these women are being required to hold up far more than their share of sky and might concur with Chicken Little that the sky is indeed falling on their heads.

I will focus on one central tension prevalent both in this book and in development discourse more generally—a tension captured by two sentences on the inside dust jacket. The first refers to “our era's most pervasive human rights violation: the oppression of women and girls in the developing world.” The second says, “Throughout much of the world, the greatest unexploited economic resource is the female half of the population.” The book unabashedly asserts that women's greater exploitation as economic resources is central to their escaping their human rights violations.

On page xix, for example, we read that

Studies such as Mary Beth Mills' Thai Women in the Global Labor Force Footnote ¹ provide less rosy descriptions of the situations of these girls who now have “the freedom to move to the cities and take factory jobs.” These young women finance more than the education of siblings. They enable their rural families to purchase inputs required for cash cropping and provide cash for medical emergencies, family access to piped water, and access to consumer commodities like television. That they manage to save enough of their wages to meet these demands as well as to boost the national savings rate is due less to the size of their incomes than to the fact that they live together in cramped urban quarters and save their money to fulfill the weight of family obligations that do not weigh as heavily on their male siblings. They delay marriage and reduce child bearing because neither their working conditions nor their living conditions in the cities permit space for marriage and children. Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn fail to note that these women are employed for only a few years each, eventually replaced by a host of other young women trekking to the cities. Most women in Mill's study have no long-term option but to return to their villages and to count on marriage and their agrarian family economy to sustain them for the remainder of their lives. If such “opportunities” were those that awaited their own daughters, Western readers might wonder what the “double X solution” was a solution for.

Half the Sky is awash in quotes that affirm Third World women as economic resources. On page xx we read, “‘Investment in girls' education may well be the highest-return investment available in the developing world,’ Lawrence Summers wrote when he was chief economist of the World Bank.” And further, “‘Gender inequality hurts economic growth,’ Goldman Sachs concluded in a 2008 research report that emphasized how much developing countries could improve their economic performance by educating girls.” The authors sound excited that many in important quarters are now taking an interest in women's issues, especially in women's role as assets for economic development.

Feminists have shown that women have a long history of being strategically evoked in a variety of discourses that link women's emancipation to the well being of their colony, their nation, their culture, their religion, and the like. Calls for women's emancipation have historically served to justify the vaunted benefits of colonialism, the aspirations to modernity of nation states, and the safeguarding of patriarchal religious or cultural traditions. Economic development appears to be the latest incarnation of the greater good that is to be served by the emancipation of women.

The fashionableness of development rhetoric that justifies educating or providing employment to women on the grounds that that it benefits their families, their communities, and their nation suggests that showing the benefits to women alone is insufficient and needs buttressing by all these additional goods that will be secured by their emancipation. This problematic rhetoric is rendered all the odder by the book's comparisons of women's oppression to slavery and the Holocaust. Would readers not find it odd if calls to end slavery insisted abolition was good for development or if condemnations of the Holocaust insisted that genocide was bad for the economic prosperity of Germany?

The book suggests that support for women's importance as economic resources from Lawrence Summers, the World Bank, and Goldman Sachs is inspirational. I suspect I am not the only feminist who finds concern for poor women from the folks on this roster disturbing. Lawrence Summers sparked an uproar when, as president of Harvard, he stated that innate differences between men and women might be one reason why fewer women succeed in science and math careers. The World Bank is an institution centrally responsible for imposing structural adjustment policies on many poor countries, forcing them to cut funds used for education, public health, water, and sanitation, and safety net programs in order to repay their national debt. Numerous feminist critiques have shown that the impact of these cuts most brutally affects poor women in these impoverished countries. Goldman Sachs is the company Matt Taibi describes in “Inside the Great American Bubble Machine”Footnote ² as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Taibi argues persuasively that Goldman Sachs has engineered and profited off every economic recession and bubble since the Great Depression.

Women are apparently more than economic assets; they are political assets as well. The authors do not flinch at interest in women's issues emanating from what they call an “unlikely constituency: the military and counterterrorism agencies” (p. xxi). They explain,

I cannot resist the rudeness of asking how many Americans would find their hearts warmed by the thought that the education of their daughters was important because the military heads of a foreign power thought it would strengthen their military and foreign-policy objectives. If the education of poor women and girls is valued because it is a counterterrorism device that might work better than the dropping of bombs, and the empowerment of women is important because it might disempower terrorists, then the protection of the basic rights of poor women in poor countries is clearly in the grips of an insane utilitarianism with a giddying roster of greater goods that women's empowerment will allegedly bring about. The position accorded poor women in these discourses is very different indeed from those describing them as human subjects whose basic social entitlements and human rights are being compromised as a foreseeable and foreseen consequence of global economic and political arrangements.

Half the Sky offers little sustained analysis of what it would mean to recognize poor women in impoverished countries as rights-bearers, though it pervasively represents them as victims. They appear to be most victimized by local patriarchs, who subject them to rape, to pregnancies that result in maternal mortality, and to sexual trafficking, and who insist on spending sparse household cash on alcohol, tobacco, and sugar. While I have no objections to underscoring the brutalities inflicted by local patriarchy, I do have serious objections to what is left out of the causal picture. One is given very little sense of the vast global economic and political forces that impoverish these women's lives and cause them to attempt to survive in the middle of armed conflicts and economic chaos. The huge disparities of wealth between rich and poor nations and between the global affluent and the global poor appear to simply exist, without cause or explanation.

The authors' stress on the charitable activities of affluent well-intentioned Westerners as a central mode of securing the empowerment of poor Third World women is, arguably, at odds with the status of these women as rights-bearers. On page 45, the authors make the point that “even when a social problem is so vast as to be insoluble in its entirety, it is still worth mitigating,” and offer us an inspirational Hawaiian parable where a man goes out on the beach and sees it covered with starfish that have washed up in the tide. A little boy is picking them up and throwing them back in the water. “What are you doing, son?” the man asks. “You see how many starfish there are? You'll never make a difference.” The boy pauses thoughtfully, picks up another starfish, and throws it into the ocean, saying, “It sure made a difference to that one.”

The crashing metaphorical descent of women from “holding up half the sky” to lying helplessly washed ashore on a beach is striking. Few women would feel flattered by this image of themselves as stranded starfish, waiting for the rescuing hands of a little boy. If they surrendered to the metaphor, they might ask what exactly was going on with these tides that keep washing them up on this beach and might have a hunch that these tidal mechanisms are not lunar but of human making. Some suspicious starfish might even grimly wonder about the arrangements that have kept the man and boy safely wandering the beach. If women are rights-bearers with dignity and entitlements, their mass stranding must raise questions of justice and not merely generate appeals to charity.

The ubiquitous insistence that women's inclusion is “good for development” is not identical to showing that particular forms of development are good for women. Many of the “economic opportunities” the book celebrates, such as micro-credit, require shoeless women to boot-strap themselves to “success,” working harder and harder to compensate for the improvidence of men-folk, the impoverishment of nation states, the depredations of corporations, the vagaries of markets and the destabilizing neoliberal policies of international financial institutions. The book offers no analysis of these background conditions. It does not require us, the global affluent, to think about the corpulence of our consumption patterns and the precarious prospects of these others. Protecting the human rights of poor women in poor countries will take more than our browsing the aid organizations in the book's appendix and deciding between whether to help runaway girls in Mumbai or loan money to a woman furniture maker in Paraguay.