Reviews for Women of Vision: Their Psychology, Circumstances, and Success

The average rating for Women of Vision: Their Psychology, Circumstances, and Success based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-08-10 00:00:00 Otto Maan The author is teaching American-style journalism to a class of Yemenite male and female reporters. She is trying to remember who the women are as she can only see their eyes. This one has bushy eyebrows, this one has glasses, this one ties her burkha at the back. She thinks burkas and niqabs aren't a bad thing, after all why should strange men not her husband be able to look at her face and body? Why does she not realise it's not just charms, or perhaps it's not charms at all, but the erasing of individuality, making all women look the same After the course finishes, the newspaper owner who brought her over, gives her a big goodbye party one evening. None of the women are there. They aren't allowed out that late. During the course they had to leave at 1pm or, if they had permission, 3pm, in order to make sure they were home at the designated time. This is the country of I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced where Nujood brought to the world's attention that the marriage age was 9 and Yemen changed it to 18. It is where the mullahs successfully argued that as Muhammed married a girl of 9 (she was actually 6, but did not go to live with her husband until she was 9) then the law was unIslamic and it was reversed. Efforts at modernising the state, which was the only socialist Muslim state in the world and is now working towards democracy, are one thing, but efforts at modernising the medieval, enslaved conditions under which women live is just a step too far for the country, for the men, the male politicians, to take. I'm having a problem reading the book. It's a good story, it's well-written but the more I read the more I don't like the author. I hate it when that happens. I always like to read memoirs where I really get involved with the author and want to know more about them.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-03-29 00:00:00 Rod Gautier The only redeeming anything to this book (because quality is not a word I would use for it) is that it is one person's picture of Yemenese culture, a culture I knew nothing about before reading it. However, being someone that has traveled quite a bit, I found her treatment of the culture and country shallow, especially for a reporter. I enjoyed when she spoke about the reporters at the newspaper, especially when she related her conversations with the women reporters and discussed how they came to work at the paper and the obstacles they dealt with just to be able to do so. However, even how the author described the reporters as "hers" - "my women", "my men," "my reporters" - just rubbed me the wrong way. It took me weeks to get through this book because I found the author to be self centered, U.S.-centric and condescending from the very start of the book. She constantly described herself as a saviour of the newspaper, and even if she helped put in place more productivity, her self agrandizement just wore on me the more I read. Every time I picked up the book it was like having a frustrating conversation with someone I would never be friends with. This feeling was doubly confirmed when I got to the end of the book to find out she had an affair with a married man and described it as though it were some glorious experience that should be encouraged or desired by all. For someone that claimed to never have wanted to hurt anyone through her choices in that experience, I'm sure the ex wife is now reading those chapters and completely disturbed with how easily her husband left her for another woman. Discretion is not something this author thought to use when it came to that chapter of her experience in Yemen.