Category: Ms. Magazine

Pink Sari Revolution

Post author By Gaiutra Bahadur
Post date August 14, 2013

Pink Sari Revolution, by Amana Fontanella-Khan, tells the story of the Gulabi Gang.

The gang’s story—of poverty-stricken, unlettered women standing up for themselves, struggling against centuries-old misogyny—inspires. “Hope is a very big thing,” one elderly member says. “Sampat gave it to us every time she came to the village.” Still, it needs to be asked how truly revolutionary the Gulabi Gang is—or can be—and the author doesn’t step back from storytelling to do so. In her account of a widow horrifically mistreated, then evicted, by her in-laws, she misses opportunities to explore the gang’s limits and thus risks overstating their impact. Read my review in the Summer 2013 Ms. Magazine.

The Cooked Seed

Post author By Gaiutra Bahadur
Post date July 6, 2013

The Cooked Seed traces Anchee Min’s evolution from a woman with shattered self-esteem to one with brass enough to have a child when she wanted, although her Chinese-immigrant partner didn’t, and then to divorce him and find love with an American, a Vietnam veteran. Like him, Min suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, and her prose bears the marks. Her book reads like the testimony of a woman who, in coping with haunting memories she’d rather suppress, swings between remembering too much and too little. Therefore, she simply tells it as it happened, in the order it happened, all of it. See my full review of the book in Ms. Magazine’s Spring issue.

ALL Articles Foreign Coverage Ms. Magazine Politics

“Should My People Need Me”

Post author By Gaiutra Bahadur
Post date February 20, 2012

My profile of Burmese dissident Aung San Suu Kyi runs on the cover of Ms. Magazine’s Winter 2012 issue. The woman who has long personified the fight for democracy and human rights in Burma has finally decided to engage with one of the world’s most repressive regimes. The Nobel Peace Prize laureate is running for a seat in a parliament created by the military junta that put her under house arrest for almost two decades, after stealing an election from her. Read about the challenges facing her as she attempts a shift from moral icon to politician. As she told Congressman Bill Richardson in 1994, “I look upon myself as a politician, and that isn’t a dirty word, is it, Congressman?”

Tags Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma, Gender

ALL Book Reviews Ms. Magazine

Dead Woman Talking

Post author By Gaiutra Bahadur
Post date November 12, 2009

Read my review of Till We Can Keep An Animal by Megan Voysey-Braig in the Fall 2009 issue of
Ms. Magazine.

Tags Books, Gender, South Africa

ALL Articles Foreign Coverage Migration Ms. Magazine

Survival Sex

Post author By Gaiutra Bahadur
Post date July 29, 2008

Sajida can’t talk openly about what war and displacement have forced her to do. She banters with male customers at the cafe where she works in Damascus, Syria. But the men want more from this 43-year old divorced mother of two, a refugee from Iraq. And she can’t refuse; her boss has seized her passport. “I am a slave in his hands,” Sajida says.

Continue reading my piece about Sajida and other Iraqi refugees forced into prostitution in Syria in Ms. Magazine’s Summer 2008 issue.

You can also listen to an interview about the article at 9 minutes past the hour on Doug Clifford’s Hour of Hope.

Tags Gender, Iraq War