Many women throughout the world appreciated Jimmy Carter’s ‘progressive pro-women’ programs, if stopping poverty for children is progressive how can you say it’s bad?
—
In his decades after leaving the White House, Jimmy Carter made the rights and safety of women and girls a central focus of his humanitarian work, especially from the 2000s onward.
He and Rosalynn Carter founded the Carter Center in 1982. Over time the organization developed programs promoting women’s leadership in peacebuilding, combating sexual exploitation and trafficking, strengthening civil-society groups that advance gender equality, and improving women’s access to information and public life in dozens of countries. Carter later said the Center’s priorities had been reoriented around this issue.
In 2014 he published A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power. In it he argued that discrimination and violence against women and girls—female genital mutilation, honor killings, sex-selective abortion, child marriage, trafficking, rape as a weapon of war, and unequal pay—constituted the most serious and neglected human-rights crisis in the world. He blamed much of the problem on religious leaders’ misuse of scripture across faiths and called on male religious authorities to change course. He convened interfaith leaders at the Carter Center and wrote to Pope Francis on the subject. In 2015 he stated that fighting this injustice would be “the highest priority for the rest of my life.” He also gave a widely noted TED Women talk that year.
In 2000, at age 76, he formally severed his long affiliation with the Southern Baptist Convention after it adopted positions that wives must be submissive and that women could not serve as pastors. He remained a member of his local church in Plains, Georgia, which later appointed a woman pastor.
He continued volunteering with Habitat for Humanity into his 90s, helping build or repair thousands of homes that housed families, including many headed by women. That work was part of a broader humanitarian record rather than a women-specific program.
Carter framed these later efforts as an extension of the human-rights principles he had long championed, now applied most urgently to the status of women and girls.