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The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World

by Melinda French Gates (Goodreads Author)

bookshelves: recommend-to-daughter, currently-reading, hated-it-for-good-reason

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S said: " This is my honest review, meant as a record to myself. I had no feelings about Melinda Gates prior to reading her book but now, I actually viscerally hate her now. Why? Because her book is preachy and her revelations about herself and Bill come off a This is my honest review, meant as a record to myself. I had no feelings about Melinda Gates prior to reading her book but now, I actually viscerally hate her now. Why? Because her book is preachy and her revelations about herself and Bill come off as condescending, humble-bragging. I didn't envy her before. I am looking inward to ask myself, am I envious of this woman who not only is married to the 2nd richest person on earth but has an ideal, equal marriage, lives in a house that her husband built too big and who gets to make a career of doing good works? I think more than envious, I'm angry with her. I find her distasteful as a person because she's clearly a perfectionist who can't say anything negative about herself or her husband. Not that I was looking for dirt on Bill! I just felt so disappointed by her tone and examples used to illustrate her points. The book could have been so much more.

This book failed me. The author comes from a perch of extreme privilege and only showed me that distance is greater than I even knew. She didn't even recruit me to her cause, which I believed in prior to reading the book. This work is a facts&figures (long form) advertisement for the Melinda & Bill Gates Foundation.

First, apart from the statistics, there is nothing new in what Melinda Gates is reporting in her book about why our world needs to empower women. Second, the way she tells her personal story feels white-washed to me. There is absolutely nothing truly "revealing" in her tale. Her personal telling of how she met and married Bill Gates is more instructive. It reads as a how-to find and marry a man who admired his mother, who was a leader, strong woman and taught him to value equality with women. The telling would have been much more valuable to me if Melinda had described how she had "changed Bill" into a man who valued her as an equal. As it is written, this book comes off as a humble brag about how lucky she is to have been in a position to be half of the Melinda AND Bill Gates Foundation, and how she has been viewing poverty, disease, and the denigration of women from her vantage point...we should all be grateful and appreciative, I guess. Even the chapter where she "admits she is private but is sharing one time when she and Bill disagreed about how she should write her own piece in their Newsletter is so cleaned up that there is no real story to learn from.

I have to say, that if this book were written by any other healthcare worker, it wouldn't sell. People are only reading it because Melinda Gates wrote it. I feel she squandered her opportunity to really help women, not only to learn about the plight of the treatment of child-brides/modern slavery, genital cutting, and the need for contraception education, but she could have told of her real struggles more fully so that women who have opportunities to go to college, study what they want, marry whom they want, can get usable pointers about how to negotiate equality with the men in their lives.

So, that is why I'm writing this 1 Star review. To say to my "daughters" and "sisters" that there is more to being a woman of privilege than to do good work and humble-brag about it. Use your privileges to become the woman you choose, and if you ever write your story, tell others honestly of your true struggles so that others can apply the lessons from your journey to bettering their own. ...more "

Dec 01, 2020 06:34PM · see review