Tina Brown's Excellent Adventure and Post-Feminist Summit

Tina Brown's Post-Feminist Summit — The American Magazine

By Christina Hoff Sommers Thursday, March 24, 2011

Tina Brown has given Western feminism something it has lacked since the 1970s: a contemporary purpose worthy of its illustrious past.

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 (contender for dumbest of the month), 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.

Added zzzzzzzz

Two Somalian women stole the show. Dr. Hawa Abdi, a sixty-three-year-old doctor and lawyer, was introduced as “equal parts Mother Teresa and Rambo.” She founded a hospital and refugee camp in rural Somalia that has attracted nearly 100,000 men, women, and children. Under her leadership, the settlement has evolved into a model civil society. Tribalism and wife abuse are endemic to Somalia, but not in Abdi’s village. No one is allowed to talk about tribes, and any man suspected of beating his wife is put on trial by a small group of women. If guilty, he is sent to a makeshift jail until he repents. Abdi’s Somalia is the antithesis of the lawless, woman-destroying, pirate-infested hell we read about in the news.

The other Somalian woman was the renowned Ayaan Hirsi Ali, my friend and colleague at the American Enterprise Institute. Superficially, the two women are worlds apart. Abdi is a practicing Muslim who wears traditional Somali garb; Ayaan is a self-described infidel in Jimmy Choos. But both are devoted to transforming the concept of male honor: to require protecting, respecting, and educating women rather than subjugating, intimidating, and harming them. Ayaan urged a rapt audience of philanthropists, political leaders, and human-rights activists not to abandon hard-pressed Muslim women in the name of multiculturalism.

[Read more including the usual run-on nonsense from H. Clinton at the above link.]