I, along with so many others, was saddened to learn about the passing of activist, author, and 39th President of the U.S. Jimmy Carter, who died on December 29 at the age of 100.
Since leaving the White House in 1981, Carter had been one of our most active presidents. In 1982, he and his wife Rosalynn Carter founded The Carter Center, dedicated to advancing peace and health worldwide. President Carter authored 32 books, and in 2002 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his "decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights and to promote economic and social development." For over four decades, he continued a life of charitable work and public service, working with Habitat for Humanity building homes for those in need, as well as working for peace and diplomacy around the world.
What was perhaps less well known about President Carter was his additional dedication to what at one point he called "the most serious and unaddressed worldwide challenge" of our time: the global discrimination and abuse of women and girls. He even delivered a TEDTalk “Why I believe the mistreatment of women is the number one human rights abuse” in 2015.
I had the honor of interviewing the tireless human rights activist and humanitarian two times in the course of my career. The most recent was several years ago about his book A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power. The book reflected his wisdom and perspective having traveled to over 145 countries and been a firsthand witness to a system of discrimination that extends to every nation in which women and girls are routinely deprived of education, healthcare and equal opportunity, "owned" by men, forced to suffer servitude and child marriage, subjected to female genital mutilation or trapped in cycles of poverty, war and violence.
I also interviewed President Carter about his involvement in a group called The Elders, who describe themselves as "an independent group of eminent global leaders, brought together by Nelson Mandela, working together for peace, justice, human rights and a sustainable planet." The Elders had just announced their Equality for Women & Girls initiative, which included calling for "an end to the use of religious and traditional practices to justify and entrench discrimination against women and girls."
As a woman and a longtime activist for gender equality, I was so heartened and moved by the passion of our former President to take on this often neglected issue with such fervor, commitment and comprehensiveness. In many ways, Carter was ahead of his time and represents an important and growing trend of men advocating against violence against women and supporting women's equality—a long overdue recognition that these are not "women's issues" but crucial human issues that affect and impact us all.
As people around the world mourn his passing, I wanted to share excerpts from my conversation with the wise and inspiring President Carter. My hope is that, with all the serious issues and injustices we face in the world, we can all honor his legacy by following his powerful example of being an empathetic, courageous and active champion in addressing the suffering of others and finding our own ways to take action to create positive change in the world.
Marianne Schnall: What inspired you to write your book A Call to Action?
President Jimmy Carter: We've had programs in 79 countries, and a lot of them have been in the third world, in the most poverty-stricken countries and villages on Earth. And we have increasingly seen the abuse of girls and women in the local families, on the farms, and depriving them of adequate food and health care and education. And we've seen the horrible murder of little girl babies at birth and the abortion of girl fetuses. So The Carter Center started concentrating on the abuse of girls and women, and we have just seen how terrible the problem is, much more than I ever had dreamed. So I decided to write a book and try to bring these abuses of women and girls to the attention of the public.
Schnall: What do you see as some of the most serious problems and issues that women around the world currently face?
Carter: The most horrible is the one I just mentioned to you. We lost maybe 40 million people in World War II, and we've lost four times that many in this generation to the murder of little girl babies by their parents. That is the most horrendous of all.
The second one is international human trafficking or slavery, which far exceeds whatever it ever was in the nineteenth century out of Africa. And this occurs in our country as well. We have a tremendous problem in this country of trafficking or human slavery. And this is worldwide.
Another thing is the gross abuse of girls on campuses of our great universities, including the most distinguished ones of all. And these are basically unpunished because the college administrators, the presidents and deans, don't want to bring discredit to their campus by having a girl take legal action that would publicize the rape. So what happens is, the boys who are inclined toward rape, when they get on the campus, they very quickly realize they can do it with impunity. So about half of the total rapes on campuses now are done by serial rapists, but they are never punished.
And you may have heard about the abuse of a midshipman at a naval academy, where three football players raped this female midshipman. She went through 21 hours of horrendous cross examination in public, and then they were all found innocent, by the way, so that sends a signal throughout the U.S. military that it's a mistake for a girl to report it.
So these are the kinds of things that go on, not only in the rich world like ours, but also multiply greatly when you get to a country that might resort to honor killing of girls because when they are raped it is a disgrace to the family, or to other matters of that kind.
Schnall: What do you see as the roots of the problem in terms of starting to address it?
Carter: There are two generic foundations for it. One is religion. If a husband is inclined to abuse his wife or if an employer is inclined to pay its female employees less than a man, at least indirectly or subtly, they derive their conviction that it's not really a bad thing by the fact that a woman is treated as an inferior person in the great religions. For instance, the Catholic Church doesn't permit a woman to be a priest or a deacon. And in the Southern Baptist division, where I was loyal for seventy years, a woman is deprived of those two opportunities. So when men in secular life, who might be religious or not, see women being treated as secondary in the eyes of God, they assume that it's okay for them to do it.
And the other thing is the excessive commitment to violence in this country. We have been involved in more wars, on a bilateral basis, since the United Nations was formed than any other country by far. And we also have the only policy in North America or NATO in the advanced world of executing people for crimes. We still have the death penalty in this country and nowhere else that we know about in this world. We have about seven and a half times as many prisoners in jail right now in America as we had when I was a Governor. And we have people in prison in the United States now for life who have never committed a crime of violence. So the excessive resort to violence of all kinds, plus misinterpretation of biblical scriptures are two of the generic causes.
Schnall: I wrote a book, What Will It Take to Make a Woman President? Conversations About Women, Leadership and Power, which was inspired by my 8-year-old daughter asking me why there had never been a woman president. As we’re talking about people in positions of leadership, obviously the numbers of women are so low. Why do you think there are so few women in leadership positions and what do you think we can do to change that inequity?
Carter: The United States is exceptionally culpable. I think we rank about 60th in the world in the percentage of women who occupy political offices at all levels, at the local, state and national level. And on the overall ranking of women compared to men, according to the World Economic Forum, the United States ranks 23rd in the world. So 22 other countries have a better record on giving women equal rights than men. When I became President, only three percent of the members of Congress were women. That's now been increased, but we still rank below the world average. [Note: Since the time of this interview, the U.S. has fallen to rank 73rd in the world for percentage of women in national parliaments according to Inter-Parliamentary Union and 43rd in the world for global gender gap according to the World Economic Forum.]
Schnall: A lot of times this all gets incorrectly framed as "women's issues." How do you see the status of women as interconnected with other problems that the world faces?
Carter: There is a pretty good correlation between the overall economic well-being of a country and how they treat their women with the right to education, for instance, or the right to jobs. We do fairly well with that in the United States. But women still get [a smaller percentage] of the pay of an average man, and if you look at the Fortune 500 companies, only about two dozen of them have women CEOs. And at that high level, women get less pay than men. So we still have a long way to go to correct it, and I think the only way for it, or any realm of abuse, to be corrected is for it to be highly publicized—by me, by you and by others who are aware of the problem. [Note: Since the time of this interview, the number of women CEOs in Fortune 500 companies has risen to 52.]
Schnall: How can people get involved? What encouragement and advice would you offer to people in helping create change?
Carter: If you read the final chapter of my book, there are 23 specific things that I recommend that a reader of the book can do. We can support the State Department in its promulgation every year of the incidences of sexual slavery around the world. We can encourage our churches to treat women as equal in the eyes of God. We can get activists to speak out. We can get college presidents either to take action against rapists on their campus or encourage the US Department of Education to enforce Title IX. Title IX used to just be designed for sports, but if the university doesn't correct the abuse of girls, the United States government can withhold grants, even for research.
Schnall: Why are you personally so passionate about this issue?
Carter: Because I think it's perhaps the most important single issue that I have ever addressed, certainly since I left the White House. Keeping my country at peace and promoting human rights around the world was important when I was president, but nothing has ever affected me more or convinced me more that the abuse is horrendous, and that very few people are doing anything about it, and that maybe my voice can convince people to join with us, join with The Carter Center, join with each other, and let's correct some of these most horrendous abuses.
For more tributes and to learn about Jimmy Carter’s life and work, visit the official tribute website at www.jimmycartertribute.org.
This article appeared at ForbesWomen.
This interview was conducted in 2014 and has been condensed for brevity and clarity.
You can listen to Marianne's full conversation with Jimmy Carter on her podcast ShiftMakers.
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Marianne Schnall is a widely-published interviewer and journalist and author of What Will It Take to Make a Woman President?, Leading the Way, and Dare to Be You: Inspirational Advice for Girls. She is also the founder of Feminist.com and What Will It Take Movements and the host of the podcast ShiftMakers.
You can find out more about her work and writings at www.marianneschnall.com.