It’s a fair guess that back in Dallas, young Melinda never considered she’d one day proudly pronounce herself an 'ardent feminist' or boldly and publicly oppose a core teaching of her church — on contraception — all while calling out that institution’s male hierarchy who once put and now keeps it in place. Yet in her potent and laudable book, The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World, that’s precisely what she does ... [Gates is] a keenly appealing narrator and in many ways the book is a graceful account of her own personal consciousness-raising as a woman.
... proclaims a present-tense optimism that I soon realized is neither naïve nor presumptuous ... To her enduring credit, The Moment of Lift humbly and pointedly interweaves her intentional experience of a world beyond affluence and gets to the point, the places in life where 'lift' happens. As she tells it with compelling candor, there are many points of engagement and numerous 'moments of lift' ... doesn’t claim to be a definitive guidebook for how to 'do good' in the world, nor is it a self-justifying 'warm fuzzy' outpouring of an entitled celeb whose name itself conveys power. If anything, readers will be struck by Gates’ humility and even vulnerability in the face of these remarkably resilient women who gave her unique, unvarnished opportunities to share the best and worst parts of their lives ... should be a must-read for anyone involved in volunteer or philanthropic work of any kind. It will clear the lens through which we see the entire human family.
What is the book trying to achieve? For much of The Moment of Lift it's impossible to tell. Gates goes long on heartwarming anecdotes, short on argument. She writes often about lifting women up, but it can be difficult to tell how she expects readers without tech fortunes to do so ... If Gates had fully owned her goal — writing a book that would strengthen some readers' abortion-rights convictions, and open other readers' minds to a women's rights argument — she would have turned her rhetorical question into a call for advocacy. Most readers don't have the ability to create change by sector, and creating change person by person goes only so far. Most people don't have foundations, but most people can advocate for egalitarian laws and support the candidates who will pass them. It's too bad Gates didn't focus on that kind of lift.
Before you dismiss this as another social justice do-gooder book by a wealthy white woman, don’t. Gates’ book is a smart, thoughtful and passionate look at the problems behind inequality among some of the most marginalized populations in the world.
[Gates] calls on us to care ... Her book is....a moral appeal, imploring each of us who reads it to look around – at our own families, our own workplaces, our own place in a gigantic, but highly connected, world – and get to work making it more equal.
[Gates'] is an ecumenical message made personal by the unexpectedly candid revelations she shares about her own life and marriage, motherhood and career. At a time when beneficial globalization is being threatened by nationalism, and women’s rights are in danger of being rolled back to nineteenth-century norms, Gates offers urgent reminders of why it’s necessary to help women everywhere achieve their full potential.
