Across much of the developing world, by the time she is 12, a girl is tending house, cooking, cleaning. She eats what's left after the men and boys have eaten; she is less likely to be vaccinated, to see a doctor, to attend school.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the challenges faced by girls in developing countries, where they often lack access to basic rights and education.
Nancy Gibbs emphasizes the harsh realities many girls in the developing world face, where traditional gender roles compel them to take on household responsibilities at a young age. This early onset of domestic duties often hampers their access to essential services like healthcare and education, leading to a cycle of disadvantage that affects their future opportunities and health.
In practice
In a speech addressing gender equality, one might use this quote to highlight the importance of education for girls.
Americans sometimes ask what the government does and where their tax money goes. Among other things, it pays for all kinds of invisible but essential safety nets and life belts and guardrails that are useless right up until the day they are priceless.
Most professional women I know - myself included - long since gave up looking for a rulebook or a roadmap; we make it up as we go along. Every day presents a new choice, a new challenge, which makes long-term career planning seem like an especially abstract exercise.
Virtues, like viruses, have their seasons of contagion. When catastrophe strikes, generosity spikes like a fever. Courage spreads in the face of tyranny.
Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth were slaves by birth, freedom fighters by temperament.
The battles after the wars are over can be the toughest; there's no longer the public interest that accompanies, for good and for ill, the start of combat.
Girls grow up scarred by caution and enter adulthood eager to shake free of their parents' worst nightmares. They still know to be wary of strangers. What they don't know is whether they have more to fear from their friends.
The thing I loved the most - and still love the most about teaching - is that you can connect with an individual or a group, and see that individual or group exceed their limits.
A book is like a single tree in a forest, in that it exists in conjunction with and because of a great many others around it.
Reading is important. Books are important. Librarians are important. (Also, libraries are not child-care facilities, but sometimes feral children raise themselves among the stacks.)
In the real world, the smartest people are people who make mistakes and learn. In school, the smartest people don't make mistakes.
Clever, but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers - not the defined.
Teaching at best beckons us to morality, but it is not in itself efficacious. Teaching is like a mirror. It can show you if your face is dirty, but it the mirror will not wash your face.
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