“If you want to lift up humanity, empower women. It is the most comprehensive, pervasive, high-leverage investment you can make in human beings.”
Melinda Gates, The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World
Some of the best books I’ve ever read have been at the recommendation of a friend. If you’re a book lover and you don’t have a book-loving friend to commiserate with, get one. Get a friend that picks up books you normally wouldn’t. I read Melinda Gates’ The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World because a friend (with whom I have what we call “a book club of two”) told me that she’d really enjoyed it. This probably isn’t something that would have caught my eye otherwise. I know who Bill and Melinda Gates are, obviously, but I’ve never felt much interest in them. And while I’m a feminist, sometimes books about feminism can feel ironically condescending.
The Moment of Lift was not, in my opinion, condescending. It’s a close look at the Gates’ charity work and how that work has evolved as their (and specifically Melinda’s) understanding of world issues has deepened.
Melinda Gates never sets herself up as someone who has all the answers. In fact, she quoted her mentor Hans Rosling as saying that rich Americans throwing money at problems just make things worse. In her book, she’s very cognizant of the fact that she and her husband have the responsibility to avoid having a negative impact on the world through their ignorance of the issues. It seems to me like she gets down into the nitty gritty of the data and is willing to learn from people who are more knowledgeable than she is. That is so crucial to good humanitarian work, and I was pleased to see her emphasis on it.
She (mostly) didn’t center herself. As I’ve been learning about activism and anti-racism, one thing that I’ve become the most aware of is something called the “White Savior Complex.” It’s basically the idea that white people, by virtue of their whiteness, assume that they have all of the answers and should be the heroes of every story. (For example, high school and college students who go on voluntourism trips to rural African villages to “help” when they don’t have any real, useful skills. But they take some pictures with some local children, talk about what a difference they made, and go home to the praise of their family and friends, having made little or no positive impact.) An Instagram account called @nowhitesaviors has really opened my eyes to how pervasive this is and has forced me to examine some of my own biases. But I digress. The point is that The Moment of Lift could have featured Melinda Gates as a white savior, but I think that she does a decent job of putting the focus on the people who are on the ground doing the actual work in the cities and villages she writes about. She celebrates their ideas and their successes, noting that in some cases they were doing work she didn’t realize needed to be done, but was so much more effective than the work she and her husband had planned to fund. Gates paints herself as the person who bankrolls their good ideas and watches them work miracles, not the one who personally saves the day.
I was impressed by how Gates shared her feelings about family planning and how she struggled to reconcile her beliefs about birth control with her Catholic faith. It humanized her. Instead of reading about someone who never doubted or wavered, I was reading about someone who was grappling with difficult questions, had to make tough choices, and had to deal with the consequences of her choices.
I also appreciated the fact that Gates took the opportunity to mention the impact of relationships with other women. The way she talked about her friends echoed my own feelings for my gal pals. I, like Gates, have been befriended and blessed by some truly amazing women, and it was wonderful to see someone like Melinda Gates open up about how meaningful those relationships have been for her.
If you’re at all interested in humanitarian work, you should run a bookstore, library, or electronic device and get this book. If you’re interested in learning how to better support and empower women, do likewise. If you’re looking for a biography or memoir of Melinda Gates, that’s not really what this is. It’s more of a reflection on past work and a call to action. If that sounds like something you’d be interested in reading about, give this book a try.
Happy Reading!
