In 1961, when Jane Benbow, then a 10th grader in East Bend, N.C., heard John F. Kennedy announce the Peace Corps program during his presidential campaign, she knew what she wanted to do when she grew up.
After a two-year stint in Liberia as one of the first Peace Corps teaching recruits, she returned to her home state in 1969, working with community-action and social-service programs. She received a master’s degree in community development in 1972, then held various administrative posts with the Department of Human Resources in Raleigh.
But one day near the end of 1984, Benbow awoke with an intense feeling of dissatisfaction with her ability to make a difference in the world. She realized that while scaling the career ladder, she had stopped listening to the voice deep inside herself that answered Kennedy’s call to action all those years ago.
“Here I was, 39 years old and, somewhat to my surprise, a confirmed bureaucrat,” Benbow recalls. “I couldn’t believe how far I’d strayed from my youthful ideals. I knew I didn’t want to end up in one of those corner offices with a view, hating my job but afraid to quit because I had too much invested in a retirement system.
“I had to get back in touch with my original desire to know and understand other cultures, to be involved with them from a different perspective.”
Two months of soul-searching led Benbow to resign, sell her house and “run off to graduate school, uncertain of what the future held but certain of the rightness of my decision.”
Her doctoral work at the University of Massachusetts Center for International Education in Amherst reinforced Benbow’s feeling that she had put her life back on track.
“For the first time, I encountered theory to help me conceptualize all the things I somehow knew or felt but could never before put into words,” she says of the non-traditional program that allowed her to combine classroom work with practical experience in India, Macedonia, Somalia, Tonga and Mali.
“Now I knew for sure I wasn’t crazy, that there were others who thought and felt the same way I did. So not only could I satisfy my overwhelming desire to work with people from different cultures, but I also had a way of understanding how to go about it.
“Running away from my old life blindly into the arms of a new one had paid off. Now the whole world was open to me, and I’d never have to be a bureaucrat again.”
Today, Benbow, 49, is director of worldwide women’s programs for CARE. As head of one of the world’s largest girls’ education initiatives, Benbow travels throughout the United States and overseas providing leadership, educational training, technical support and information to field staff.
This September, Benbow will be CARE’s delegate to the UN Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing.
Benbow believes her early life experiences qualify her to understand and fight to elevate the position of women and girls in the developing world, including the lack of opportunities for education.
Growing up in the 1950s in a tobacco-farming community of 450, Benbow, who had dyslexia, a then-undiagnosed condition, knew well the barriers to education girls faced and the inequalities they experienced.
“Boys were taught to manage tobacco farms, not just work on them,” she recalls. “Boys were more vocal than girls, were freer to explore and were encouraged more vigorously by the teachers in the small school I attended.
“Years of being labeled dumb and lazy persuaded me I had no right to expect more from life than being married to a tobacco farmer or working in a factory. Yet, in spite of being defined as different and less than, I knew deep down I was intelligent, was exhilarated by the process of learning and had this inexplicable desire to travel, even though I believed only rich folks left home to see the world.”
Her determination and will to learn despite obstacles enabled Benbow to complete high school and college, where her fascinatlon with education and travel deepened.
But in Liberia, Benbow again was considered different and inferior, this time by Peace Corps colleagues who judged her negatively based on her Southern accent.
“Ironically, because of my rural upbringing I was probably better prepared than most for the rigors of life in the developing world,” she observes. “It was another lesson to me about how social circumstances can deny your worth.”
Later, working through government ranks back home, Benbow discovered that men with similar job qualifications were promoted faster and earned more, for reasons she did not understand fully until she delved into feminism in graduate school at Goddard College, in Plainfield, Vt.
“These defining influences of being different, of being other than, of not being good enough, led me to realize many things determine your position in society,” Benbow says. “For example, a well-educated white woman may be in a better position than a poorly educated black man. But when you finally get to the bottom of the heap, you will always find women. If you get to the wrong tribe, the wrong ethnicity, the wrong social class, at rock bottom you still find women.
“If you really want to change that, the place to start is with women, with their understanding things don’t have to be that way. I believe those at the bottom have the ability to understand their lives are not the way they are because a higher power decreed it or because they don’t deserve more or aren’t of sufficient quality and substance.
“Through the educational process, they come to see they are where they are because of issues of power, culture and domination. And when they stop accepting themselves as unworthy, they start making changes. In fact, they are the only ones who can do so because the systems keeping them down are typically resistant to change. Much about improving the lot of women involves women themselves’ changing how men think about them and their roles.”
Benbow’s extensive experience with federal women in development programs in the U.S. and overseas over the last two decades convinced her of the critical need to promote quality education for girls everywhere, while haunting her about her own childhood struggle.
“When I walk into a dusty, crowded classroom in a poor country and see little girls sitting at the back, lacking the learning materials the boys have, being told they are dumb or useless, being ordered to keep quiet and not participate, I personally understand what they are suffering,” she says.
“That I was a victim of the circumstances I am now empowered to solve, inequality in education, helps me see and understand the reality of that inequality in an even more profound way.”
But rather than strict equality in education for girls and women, Benbow advocates a remedial form of education that emphasizes relevance, broadening girls’ experiences to their lives richer and more meaningful.
“In many developing countries, women may not need the same type of education as men because they play very different societal roles,” she says. “The only changes worth implementing are those people want for themselves. Education should simply show them there are alternatives to choose from.”
One of the most promising developments Benbow sees in her field work is what she calls “second-generation initiatives,” whereby educational programs affect women who then become committed to and involved with educating their daughters.
She describes a group of Malinese villagers who regularly attended evening literacy classes after drawing water and collecting firewood all day.
“One night, they explained two kinds of literacy to me,” she recalls. ” `Literacy for the head’ was book learning, whereas `literacy for the feet’ taught them how to get on a bus, took them to other villages and exposed them to other lifestyles.
“From that moment on, I had no doubt these women would insist on quality, relevant education for their daughters.”
Noting First Lady Hillary Clinton’s announcement at the Copenhagen Social Summit in March of a $100 million Girls’ Education Initiative, Benbow applauds her recognition of the importance of educational opportunity for girls and women.
A 1985 United Nations report showed women comprised one-half of the world’s population, did two-thirds of the world’s work, earned one-tenth of the world’s income and owned less than one-hundredth of the world’s property.
A 1993 follow-up report disclosed that 90 percent of the world’s children started school, but in many countries up to one-half dropped out in the first four years, two-thirds of them girls. And a 1994 Population Report from Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, in Bethesda, Md., estimated 65 percent of the 960 million illiterates worldwide are women.
Benbow underscores the need for granting girls and women equal access to education by stressing its reciprocal and positive effects on every other facet of human development.
“When you educate a woman, you educate a community and you educate the world,” she says. “When you educate people who come from a position of powerlessness, of discrimination, you educate people who want change.
“Yet while there are sound economic and social arguments for investing in girls’ and women’s education, those are not the compelling reasons. The real reason lies in its human impact.
“Through education, individuals can overcome disadvantages of race, class, gender and birthplace. Education is essential to the process of empowerment, through which people come to realize their place in the world doesn’t have to remain as it is, that they can change who they are and who they want to be, for the better.
“I know it’s possible because it has been true in my own life, and I believe girls and women all over the world deserve no less.”
For further information on CARE’s Girls’ Education Initiative, call 1-800-422-7385.
