Ms. JD Celebrates Education and Empowerment
By Kelly Tanner (New York)
As the light faded outside the offices which overlooked the Statue of Liberty last week, a team of professionals gathered at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP to celebrate women’s successes. The event honored Ms. JD’s New York City chapter and its new Global Education Fund, founded last year to assist women in developing countries in becoming lawyers.
In its first year, the Fund highlighted their support of two women, Joaninne Nanyange and Monica Athieno, as they attended law school in Uganda. In a video comprised of interviews over Skype, the women described the challenges they overcame and their single-minded devotion to achieving their goal of making a life for themselves in law. Nanyange hopes to leverage her hard-won education to become a human-rights activist, while Athieno wants to become a judge.
In a country where only 45% of women have access to any type of schooling, and men are more than twice as likely to have an opportunity to attend any type of higher education, these successes change the landscape of a developing nation like Uganda.
Changing Impressions
Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, author of The Dressmaker of Khair Khana, a “true story of this unlikely entrepreneur who mobilized her community under the Taliban,” was the keynote speaker and discussed her experiences finding the stories of women during wartime that make up her book. Tzemach Lemmon feels strongly that more attention must be paid to women entrepreneurs in war-torn nations.
She said:
“Almost no one thinks about these women, because when we think of war stories, we think of men who go off and fight with guns. Almost never do we stop to think of the women who make sure that there is a community to go back to when the fighting is over.”
Tzemach Lemmon flew to Afghanistan to meet one such woman who credited the Taliban with her entry into the business world, the only avenue open to her to be a breadwinner during an oppressive regime. Her ability to create a successful dressmaking business, to learn the craft and grow her network while trying to work within the increasingly tight restrictions on women created by the Taliban, changed Tzemach Lemmon’s impressions of such women.
She said, “We are used to seeing women as victims of war to be pitied, rather than survivors of war to be respected. For me, it’s been really a journey to bring this story to readers, because I think, even as a woman reporter, you feel as though you almost have to apologize for writing stories about women. These are seen as…the soft stories. They’re not seen as the main event, when it comes to war. Yet…the work they do is really, really hard.”
Education is Key to Empowerment
Education, Ms. JD believes, is the key to empowering women to enter the worlds of business and law and change the face of developing countries.
Celebrating those successes, as Tzemach Lemmon has done through her book and journalism, may draw further attention and support to the cause. As she says, “This is one small part of evening out the ledger.”
