All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [204]
One of the most thrilling aspects of my year at Harvard was reconnecting with some of the remarkable leaders I had met in my travels. Everybody in the world of development and human rights seems to pass through Harvard at one time or another. Mu Sochua, to whom I owe a debt of gratitude for trusting me enough at the very beginning of my international work to take me to the Svay Pak brothels in Cambodia, presented at Harvard for a week, and I was overjoyed to be reunited with her. I was able to invite sex slavery abolitionist Ruchira Gupta, with whom I had such a salient adventure in India, to be a guest lecturer in my “International Childhood: Human Rights and Globalization” class. She captivated students so viscerally and spoke so deftly from every angle of the debate that students followed her to her car and were still engaging her as she had to drive away to catch her flight. I was very proud when PSI president Karl Hofmann presented a seminar on what PSI is and how we work, and the impressed responses from my cohort. “Show-and-tell for the smart set,” quipped Dad.
It was meaningful to make the connections between what I had seen in the field and what I was learning in class and develop a new language to evaluate what I’d observed. For example, all over the world I’ve sat in slums with people selling little things—vegetables or crafts—set out on blankets in a market or in wheelbarrows on a sidewalk, or setting up a “beauty shop” in a field. I know from my studies that these enterprises occur within the informal economy, and I have studied the pioneering theories from the 1970s that first captured and described informality as well as the current prevailing debates. I have been in tiny apartments where I now realize the woman was a home-based industrial outworker, making piece-rate goods for a global value chain. I was now able to evaluate such exploitation from a variety of angles, including from her sometimes not being reimbursed for the materials she used, the lack of enforceable contract that meant sometimes the middleman didn’t even pay her for the finished work or when orders were canceled she lost the capital she’d invested, and the lack of occupational safety as she sometimes worked with toxic, hazardous materials in a small, unventilated space. With deeper study, it was easily confirmed that microfinance is valuable, but I learned that it is only one dimension of the financial services and instruments needed by the poor; they also need insurance options, to be able to save, to have more flexibility in the access and timing of their loans. I have learned about informal savings clubs, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, that are fascinating in their sophistication and ingenuity. I have learned more explicitly about legal empowerment issues, ranging from the need to access sidewalks for trade to legal recognition in bureaucracies. It may sound wonky, but these subjects are like homemade peach pie to me—I gobble them up.
It would be impossible to choose a favorite class, but if a measure is how fired up I was, it may have been Diane Rosenfeld’s “Gender Violence, Law and Social Justice” course. In my final paper, I was able to metabolize so many of my life experiences to propose a model that encourages women to engage in a feminist analysis of their own lives and, through strong female-to-female alliances, disrupt the virulent problem of gender inequality in their homes and communities. We can do this by the willingness to become aware, then accept, and finally take action to begin to heal from patriarchal wounding, and from increased personal empowerment commit to service work, addressing gender inequality at the grassroots level.
To suggest a solution, mindful of the many times I have witnessed the power of female-to-female alliances both in the global South and in my own life, I built upon Diane’s and Professor Richard Wrangham’s studies of the bonobos, those wonderful