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From the women displaced by Colombia’s drug war to the “Avon ladies” who sell contraception door to door in Pakistan, these are some of the women we’re praising today.
For International Women’s Day, we wanted to thank a whole bunch of women — the ordinary women taking up extraordinary fights for their rights, and the women who tell their stories.
This isn't a comprehensive list of all the great stories by women last year, or all the great stories about women's issues. But it's a great selection shared with us over the past couple weeks, and we're happy to share it with you.
These are stories about women fighting through challenges to earn an income for their families, rebuild their lives after violence, and care for their minds and bodies. Some of these will make you laugh and, some might make you cry, but they're beautiful portraits of the kinds of fights that are going on all over the world every day.
Mario Tama / Getty Images
Meet the warriors of Colombia’s City of Women.
On the downtrodden side of one of the country's most popular tourist attractions, women displaced by Colombia's drug war tried to rebuild their lives. They got a boost from Patricia Guerrero, an activist lawyer who opened their eyes to a new way of thinking. “I studied law, and immediately understood the discrimination in the justice system,” Guerrero told reporter Erica Hellerstein. “I was thinking…Why is the whole world controlling our lives?” One of the women in Guerrero's project told Hellerstein, “it was the first time that I heard that I had rights as a women and as a displaced person.”
John Vizcaino / Reuters
In India, women commit suicide at a rate higher than any other group of people in the country.
Nilanjana Bhowmick explains how exploitation meets gender discrimination, and the insurmountable pressure it puts on India's women.
Stringer / AFP / Getty Images
After a typhoon in the Philippines, many women were left with nothing — and some turned to the sex trade to put food on their table.
Aurora Almendral dove deeply into that story, uncovering “how women [were] selling their bodies to rebuild what the typhoon destroyed,” in an audio story for KCRW and GroundTruth.
Chris Mcgrath / Getty Images
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