Women may be the biggest hope for our future. “The Women’s Crusade” by Nicholas KristofNicholas D. Kristof has sent the same message for months now: The world is awakening to a powerful truth: Women and girls aren’t the problem; they’re the solution.

If we wanted to bestow honors on the world’s Smart Sensuality men, Kristof would rival Muhammad Yunus for the top spot. Thanks to Melinda Gates, Bill Gates is also on the short list. Simply stated the Smarty Pants Good Guys are getting serious about the world’s women.

Women and girls aren’t the world’s problem: they’re the solutionNicholas Kistof and his wife Sheryl WuDunn tell the whole world all the ways in which hold the hopes of tomorrow in their often pious hands, in their new book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide.

Kristof and WuDunn’s article The Women’s Crusade is part of a special this-weekend, Aug. 23 NYTimes issue Saving the World’s Women.

Read it and our ongoing coverage of saving, then unleashing, the world’s women in our ongoing coverage of this challenge, throughout Anne of Carversville.

You would never know it — with women being shuttered down in burqas, flogged for wearing pants, caned, mutiliated, and stoned to death — but tapping into the potential of the world’s women in the greatest hope we have for tomorrow, for ourselves and for our children.

Saving the world’s women goes hand in hand with saving the environment. Anne