Photo: Peter Bregg

Photo Avril Benoit

Sally Armstrong is sometimes called “the war correspondent for the world’s women.” She’s also known as “La Talibanista.” She’s a journalist who covers zones of conflict. Her beat is to find out what happens to women and girls.

 

An award winning author, journalist and human rights activist, she was the 2019 Massey Lecturer. She is a four-time winner of the Amnesty International Canada Media Award.  She holds ten honorary doctorate degrees and is an officer of the Order of Canada. Armstrong was the first journalist to bring the story of the women of Afghanistan to the world and is relentless when it comes to exposing the abuse of women whether on an American university campus or a village in a war zone.

Michele Landsberg, author of Writing the Revolution describes her this way:  “Striding into Taliban-held Afghanistan with a chador over her six-foot frame, playing high-fives with a traumatized child rape survivor in the Congolese jungle, marching with the defiant grandmothers in Swaziland, she explores the darkest reaches of women’s experience and brings back astonishing news of hope, challenge and change. From Tahrir Square to LA, Armstrong discovers that the sisters are doing it for themselves—and revolutionizing the world.” Michele Landsberg, author of Writing the Revolution

2022 Rebel by Rahaf Mohammed as told to Sally Armstrong was published in
March in countries around the world. It’s the story of a courageous young
woman from Saudi Arabia who planned and executed an amazing escape from an abusive family. It’s an inside look at what it’s like to be female in Saudi Arabia.

In her 2019 CBC Massey Lectures, award-winning author, journalist, and human rights activist Sally Armstrong illustrates how the status of the female half of humanity is crucial to our collective surviving and thriving. Drawing on anthropology, social science, literature, politics, and economics, she examines the many beginnings of the role of women in society, and the evolutionary revisions over millennia in the realms of sex, religion, custom, culture, politics, and economics. What ultimately comes to light is that gender inequality comes at too high a cost to us all.

Ascent of Women (American title UPRISING: A New Age is Dawning for Every Mother’s Daughter)

The earth is shifting under the status of women. That shift is altering intractable files such as poverty and conflict. And it’s improving the economy. Meet the extraordinary heroes – Malala Yousafzai, Sima Samar, Eve Ensler, Geena Davis who are driving change where no one believed it could happen.

Veiled Threat: The Hidden Power of the Women of Afghanistan

Veiled Threat begins on September 27, 1996, the day the Taliban seized power and put women under house arrest. It introduces the reader to the Afghan women who describe their rapid fire descent into the dark ages under the Taliban and the cloak and dagger covert action they took to subvert the hateful edicts of the rulers.

The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor

At the age of 20 in the year 1775, Charlotte Taylor ran away from her aristocratic family in England with her lover who was the family’s black butler. Ten days after arriving in Jamaica her lover died of Yellow Fever. Based in a true story this book chronicles the life of a woman who defied the odds and survived the weather, the want and the chicanery that stalked her.

Bitter Roots, Tender Shoots: The Uncertain Fate of Afghanistan’s Women

If Veiled Threat was about what happened to the women of Afghanistan during the Taliban rule, Bitter Roots is about what happened after the Taliban were overthrown. It takes on the tapestry of unspoken truths and unravels the threads that are strangling Afghanistan’s attempts to join the 21st Century.

Sally speaks to audiences as varied as corporate conventions, not-for-profit fundraisers, women leadership events, and highschool students seeking a better understanding of current affairs. Her audiences range from 2000 to 50. She’s a passionate speaker, and a great story teller with 20 years of experience.

For example she gave the Lindsay Breed lecture at the Harvard Medical School in 2014, and she was the keynote speaker at the Women In Leadership Development Conference for Sears in Chicago in 2014, and at the Impacts 100 event in Vero Beach, Florida, in 2015., and recently at the VIGOD Memorial Human Rights Lecture in New Brunswick, in 2016.

 

Photo by The Globe & Mail