Women's Crossroads

There were two big pieces of good news this past weekend on the international women's front: one, Jamaica elected its first-ever female prime minister, Portia Simpson-Miller, and two, American journalist Jill Carroll was freed after four months of captivity in Baghdad.

Blogging on the Pan Collective: Caribbean Life, Mikaila wrote:

"This Thursday, Jamaicans will be inaugurating our first ever female Prime Minister- the Honorable Portia Simpson Miller. In the same vein as Liberia and Chile, they have decided that “Since men have gotten us into this mess, let’s see if a woman can get us out of it.” Now, Jamaica is an interesting climate of matrifocality and chauvinism, which means that while more women than men earn the money that supports the households, most men still feel comfortable expecting their every desire and opinion to be taken as law. So, are Jamaican men scared about this shift in power? Yes… but they are more than kind of intrigued by this female politician that is known to be Bible-quoting, baby-kissing, and just the right amount of feisty. In many ways, it is her matronly persona that won over even the most sexist of men, who will always have a soft space in their heart for their mamas."

Will it be possible for Jamaican women, and all of us "mamas" to play on that "soft space" in our sons' hearts to make them less sexist--with their wives and daughters as well as their mothers? It remains to be seen.

As for Jill Carroll, hers is a remarkable story in many ways. It turns out that Jill was just a freelancer for the Christian Science Monitor, and as such was largely on her own in Iraq, without the usual cortege of body guards, drivers and interpreters that routinely accompany more established journalists in Baghdad. Living on a shoe-string, paying her own expenses, she daringly donned a headscarf and Iraqi dress and ventured into the streets in search of the real story of the American invasion of Iraq.

In an article for the American Journalism Review, published in the February/March 2005 issue, Carroll spoke coolly of freelancers' awareness of the dangers of their mission in Iraq.

"Iraq became terrifyingly dangerous almost overnight last spring. Everything changed during the U.S. Marines' siege of Fallujah the first week of April 2004 and the simultaneous Shiite uprising led by firebrand cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. It wasn't safe for foreigners to walk the streets, and car bombs became an almost daily occurrence.
"The anger and violence have only gotten worse since then, and a new terror has been added: kidnapping.
"Some 200 foreigners, several freelance journalists among them, have been kidnapped in Iraq since insurgents adopted the tactic last April."

Carroll could not have known when she wrote those words that she would soon take her place among the ranks of disappeared journalists in Baghdad. But she was well aware of the dangers, and she took the calculated risk of staying on and going about her business as a freelancer.

"In a place where keeping a low profile is the best way to stay alive," she wrote, "the small operations of a freelancer seem safer than those of big media organizations, which rent houses replete with armed guards and a stream of foreigners coming and going." Competent in Arabic, Carroll was driven by "the sense that I could do more good in the Middle East than in the U.S.," and she "moved to Jordan six months before the war to learn as much about the region as possible before the fighting began.

"All I ever wanted to be was a foreign correspondent," Carroll said, "so when I was laid off from my reporting assistant job at the Wall Street Journal in August 2002, it seemed the right time to try to make it happen. There was bound to be plenty of parachute journalism once the war started, and I didn't want to be a part of that."

The Iraq War has seen perhaps the highest numbers of female journalists ever in the field under such dangerous conditions, and they have taken their share of hits. Sheila Gibbons reported in Women's ENews in January that "Carroll was the 35th media worker to have been kidnapped in Iraq since the start of the war," and "the latest in a series of abductions of female journalists. Florence Aubenas, a veteran reporter for the French daily Liberation, was kidnapped in January 2005 and released last summer. Giuliana Sgrena, a reporter for Italy's Il Manifesto, was abducted in February 2005 and released a month later. She was wounded by U.S. troops as she was being driven to freedom. The body of Iraqi journalist Raeda Mohammed Wageh Wazzan was found on Feb. 25, 2005 in Mosul five days after she was kidnapped by masked men. She had been shot in the head."

In politics, in journalism, in the military, and in so many other high-profile professions, women are moving out front and center and accepting the risks of visibility as necessary to the successful performance of their chosen careers. No doubt they carry their fears with them, but they remain undaunted in the pursuit of their dreams. All Jill Carroll ever wanted was to be a foreign correspondent--and by george, she has made her dream come true.