As Gloria points out, despite all the debates about feminism in this country, men and women alike have both basically incorporated the movement's fundamental principals. "[W]e assume women should have equal educational and job opportunities, that women should be able to own property, not be property, and so forth," she writes. "We haven't attained full gender equality, but the values have become so much part of the culture that it is not fruitful to argue about feminism's viability, as some commenters here would like to do."

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In 2002 I hosted an Obesity and Poverty conference that was supposed to address contemporary global health crises in terms of class, and especially of the delegation of bad health to the poor and the socially marginal. A psychoanalyst came and talked passionately about middle class girls' body dysphoria (the opposite of euphoria) all over the globe and my first cranky thought was, oh, the anxieties about thinness amongst the middle class hold no candle to the global unhealth of the expanding working classes. Apparently, the middle-class gets to have mental health crises, while the poorer are just bad self-managers. But my second thought was that my own lack of respect for middle-class-white-women-studies was itself a kind of misogyny--not against all women, but some. When we learn compassion for some, we are also learning coldness towards others. When we say, as Michelle does, that people should aspire to "women's equality," what's the relation of the forms of equality we care about and the kinds of inequality with which we remain comfortable?

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First off, let me say how much I admire The Means of Reproduction, right down to the clever -- more than clever -- title. It brings together so many crucial strands of recent history and current international politics, and in such a confident, sure-footed way. Plus, it's so well written! It should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand our world, from the proliferation of NGOs to the outbreak of fundamentalism around the world, including here in the US.

The Means of Reproduction ought to change the conversation around women's rights. As others have said, atrocities against women and the persistent denial of women's rights reflect a fundamental belief that what happens to women, while sad or regrettable, just isn't that important. It doesn't turn larger wheels -- the means of production, for example, or the fate of nations. It's only recently that human-rights campaigners began to include women's rights in their mission and development experts began to see that the subjection of women -- child marriage, lack of control over fertility, maternal injury and mortality, illiteracy, lack of property rights, domestic violence and so on -- helps keep countries poor and populations ignorant, sickly and in turmoil.

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The death of feminism has been pronounced many times over the years by those who want it to be so. But to borrow a phrase from Maya Angelou, "Still we rise."

Recently I was on a talk show panel with three men, ages appearing to be 30-something to 50-something, each of whom said during the interview, "I'm a feminist, but..." I found that particularly amusing given that so many women say, "I'm not a feminist, but..." The serious bottom line, though, is that both men and women in this country have so incorporated the fundamental principles of feminism that we assume women should have equal educational and job opportunities, that women should be able to own property, not be property, and so forth. We haven't attained full gender equality, but the values have become so much part of the culture that it is not fruitful to argue about feminism's viability, as some commenters here would like to do.

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The turmoil over sex and gender in the developing world, and much of the West too, has a lot to do with the economic and social upheavals of the past century. Pastoralism and subsistence agriculture, and the gender roles that went with them, are unsustainable today, and so are the blue collar jobs that supported a certain family ideal in the West, in which women's lives, and often their fertility, were under men's control. While contemporary education, urban life, birth control, globalization and modern attitudes about women's empowerment have created new opportunities for some, the collapse of traditional economies in the South and the loss of masculine blue collar jobs in the US, have created poverty and social dislocation for many, many more. This poses challenges to the idea of masculinity itself, and makes it easy to mobilize weak-minded men to "put women in their place". This in turn creates opportunities for cynical leaders--from religious zealots who equate birth control with murder, to warlords who use mass rape for political purposes. In the angry minds of their followers, attacking women's rights--and even attacking women themselves--can seem like some kind of "justice."

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Deepali asked, "Why was the response to the Taliban's misogynist rule in the 1990s so slow to come by? Why has sex selection been allowed to take the proportions it has in India before anyone realizes that it is the symptom of a much larger problem? Why should a 16-year old German Afghan girl be yet another victim of an 'honor killing' (in Germany and not in Afghanistan) despite prior knowledge of her severe beatings at the hands of the family?"

I think the answer is depressingly obvious -- because these all seemed like "just" women's issues, and it is quite hard to get powerful forces exercised unless they think there is something beyond mere women at stake.

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First let me congratulate you, Michelle, on writing an excellent and important book. One reason it is important is that it is written by a young woman for a new generation that needs to know this history so that it can continue the slow progression toward greater justice for women in this world.

For me, much of the book was living history, but for those who are younger or were not directly involved in expanding the principles of reproductive self-determination in the U.S. and globally--whether the rationale du jour was population, women's health, or women's rights/feminism--you've documented critical events in the trajectory toward greater justice for women.

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It's interesting how the paranoia surrounding communism engineered just about every policy emanating from the west at the height of the cold war. The uninhibited use of the religious radical right amidst the mujahideen groups to combat communism has to a large extent defined the lives of women in Afghanistan today. As you rightly mention that the conflict between tradition and modernity are being fought on the terrain of women's bodies. A conflict situation only makes the circumstances even more precarious for women as they get caught in the cycle of violence both in the public and personal domains.

The controversial Afghan Shiite Personal law is a manifestation of the manner in which women's rights can so easily be used to pit against issues of culture and identity. It is a discourse that tends to be extremely tricky as it positions reproductive rights in the realm of a westernized agenda aimed at, primarily, challenging the value systems of more traditional societies. It is an argument that insidiously creeps into very damaging and intolerant religious politics in a multicultural context, especially in countries of South Asia to defeat the very purpose of women's rights and a women's agenda.

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My book, The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power and the Future of the World, is about the global battle over reproductive rights. Most people have no idea what I'm talking about when I say that, which is in part why I wrote it. All over the world, there are these huge and hugely consequential fights going on over abortion rights, contraception, population control and women's sexual autonomy more generally. There are big international networks on both sides - one of the alliances I find most fascinating, and most clarifying, is the one between conservative Christians and Muslims who've decided to work together against women's rights at the United Nations. It's not surprising that this stuff doesn't get covered much in the mainstream media -- the reproductive rights of women in poor countries is in some ways as marginal a topic as one can imagine. But there's so much at stake, and, if you look behind the stultifying patois of development bureaucracy and international law, the subject is actually packed with human drama and juicy philosophical dilemmas.

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