By Amanda Jones

Afew years ago I began to imagine a coffee-table book that would also be a project and perhaps a movement dedicated to advancing the opportunities of women and young girls globally.

I came to have a passion about women’s issues — specifically girls and education through journalism. For many years I was a travel writer, and had been to every corner of the world, interviewing, and photographing women in all their glory, grit, and sometimes sorrow. I was also raising my own two girls. I’m always asked if there was a moment in my travels that made the difference for me, that made me want to do something about the suffering I saw. In fact, there was a moment.

About 17 years ago I was in Calcutta and I stepped over a dead child in the street. I stepped over the dead girl, got into the car with my driver, and drove off. Afterwards, I found myself outraged by my own acceptance of the situation. I had seen so much poverty that I was beginning to be numbed by its consequences. When had it become acceptable to step over dead children in the street? And what would it take to stop the cycle of poverty that made this event such a common occurrence in places such as India.

At the same time I had begun to think about the fact that in most of my travels I rarely encountered women anywhere who were not working in the villages. The girls were not present in the schools I visited, the women held the unpaid jobs working from sundown to sunup, and unless I sought them out, I did not meet women. They were invisible, other than as the worker bees.

I began to wonder what this meant for society, and what latent potential was being ignored in women. The journalist in me began to wade through UN documents that proved that educating girls was one of the best, if not the best, investment in sustainable development. Their slogan at the time was “educate a girl and you educate the future.” A girl with merely an elementary-school education has fewer children; those children are more likely to survive, they are better fed, in better health, and are more likely to be educated themselves. When women earn extra money, they spend it on food, clothing, medicine, and education for their family at a higher rate than men.

Most people, surprisingly, didn’t know these facts, and so I set out to generate media that would, in a creative way, tell the world how vital it is that we educate all children, but especially girls. And I went to work on a book.

I called the book and the project POTENTIA, which is the Latin word for power, capacity, authority, ability, and might. It also has a second meaning that alludes to a quality in the future which presently exists only as a seed. This was how I saw the untapped potential of women.

The book is a combination of statistics, essays, quotes, and fine art photographs by leading writers and artists like Isabel Allende, Michael Chabon, Viggo Mortensen, Mary Oliver, and Barbara Kingsolver. It will be out in 2009.

When I began work on this book, my mother sent me a handwritten essay I had done at age 11 in my native New Zealand. I had chosen to write about Emmeline Pankhurst, a flamboyant 19th-century British Suffragette whose 40-year struggle won the vote for British women. I suppose my mother sent it to me to remind me that I had always possessed a passion to recognize and prize the potential of women.

Years after we have the vote, many women have continued to disregard hurdles and improve their lot in life, so much so that some young women scoff that feminism is an outdated concept. I like to remind then that if it weren’t for those outdated feminists, women in the United States would be unable to open a bank account without a male guarantor. For those of us fortunate enough to live in a free society, feminism is now nothing more than having heightened expectations.

Here in the West, where many of us have been lulled into a sense of entitlement, even complacency, we cannot ignore the fact that 75 percent of those living in poverty are women and children. Outside the West the picture is far grimmer. In parts of the world women are forbidden to work, attend school, own property, or to leave the house unaccompanied by a man. In short, they have no civil liberties at all.

Over time, I have lost the blind outrage of my youth. Today I understand that the way to stimulate change is not just about making demands, but also by demonstrating how such change benefits everybody — women and men. Potentia is a book about women and our potential to change the world.

Amanda Jones is a journalist and photographer from New Zealand who now lives in California. She is the Founder/Creative Director of Potentia Media

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