«I JUST READ EVERYTHING»

Tina Brown, editor of Newsweek and The Daily Beast, held her second annual “Women in the World” conference earlier this month at the Millennial Hotel in New York City. When I told a writer friend I was attending and urged her to come along, she e-mailed back, “zzzzzzz.”I knew what she was thinking. Women’s conferences are usually tedious affairs, organized by women’s studies professors and Title IX lobbyists and filled with complaint, victim-talk, and “anger issues.” But this one was different. Its subject was not the travails of middle-class American women, but rather the genuine hardships and dangers faced by women in Muslim and other cultures in the developing world. Not a single representative from the National Organization for Women or the American Association of University Women was in evidence. The panels were moderated by well-known journalists—Christiane Amanpour, Charlie Rose, Leslie Stahl, and Barbara Walters. Several prominent American women served on panels, including Kirsten Gillibrand, Melinda Gates, Cheryl Mills, Amy Chua, and Diane Von Furstenberg. But the stars of the summit were activists from the poorest regions of the world. And the spirit was not self-pitying and anti-male but self-confident and serious.

-Christina Hoff Sommers
March 21 2011