Empowered women, it turns out, are the catalysts for abolishing poverty and spurring a community’s or nation’s economic development.

Half the Sky, the book by NY Times Reporter Nicholas Kristoff and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, lays out examples and data to compellingly support the truth of this powerful “woman effect.”
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For years, books, papers, and studies have pointed to this same critical point….that empowering women is good for us. Think of the work of the Heifer Foundation and its loans of the means to make a decent living to women in poor, developing countries, or the micro-loan system developed by Nobel Prize Winner, Muhammad Yunis, in which roughly 96% of loans were made to women.

Another Nail in the “Man-the-Warrior” Coffin
By Judith Hand.
AFWW has closely followed the evolution of thought about whether humans have always made war, or whether war is a fairly recent, and nasty, invention, the result of hunter-gatherer males being put into the strange new environment of settled living.

From early speculation in “Women, Power, and the Biology of Peace” (2003) about a possible nonviolent and women-centered Minoan civilization and the physical similarities humans share with bonobos, such as hidden ovulation, continuous sexual receptivity, and frontal sexual intercourse, to more recent essays, Dr. Hand, and AFWW, has been inclined to say it’s possible, perhaps even likely, that we have not always made war!