Jimmy Carter Was One of the World’s Leading Anti-Sexist Men

Former president used his global platform to speak out about men's violence against women, and urged religious leaders to do likewise

(President Jimmy Carter signing Equal Rights Amendment legislation in 1978)

By Jackson Katz

Among the many impressive and even stunning accomplishments over the course of his highly productive and consequential life, Jimmy Carter was also one of the world’s most prominent male supporters of gender equality.

The former American president, who died December 29 at 100 years old, used his global platform to advocate for women’s rights and speak out about men’s violence against women. He gave lectures and speeches, wrote articles and books, and delivered a famous TED talk on the topic.

Carter’s overall record as president (1977-1981) was decidedly mixed. He was never embraced by the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, who viewed him as too conservative on a number of key domestic and foreign policy issues. Meanwhile, since he lost to the cowboy-themed Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan in 1980 in an electoral college landslide, he has been relentlessly mocked in conservative media as a soft and feckless symbol of American weakness and decline.

But one aspect of his troubled (some say misunderstood) presidency that is often overlooked was that he unabashedly championed women’s leadership, including Black women’s. While feminist critics charged that he didn’t live up to his campaign promises, he did name more women to high-level positions than any of his predecessors.

According to the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, by the end of his term Carter had appointed more women and people of color to the federal judiciary than all previous presidents combined.

Carter was also a founding member of The Elders, an international group of former political leaders, peace activists, and human rights advocates who were convened by Nelson Mandela in 2007. Over the years The Elders have made promoting equality for women and girls a central commitment.

None of this was even mentioned in Carter’s page one obituary in The New York Times.

Throughout his long life, Carter was a devoutly religious evangelical Christian. He taught Sunday school almost to the end. But his Christianity differed radically from the mainstream of the white evangelical movement – especially his views about women. While right-wing Christians are anti-feminist and generally oppose advances in LGBTQ rights -- and overwhelmingly support the cartoonishly misogynous Donald Trump – Carter prioritized issues of gender and sexual justice.

In fact, as Kristin Kobes du Mez wrote in her invaluable 2020 book Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, white evangelicals considered Jimmy Carter a major disappointment as president. “They denounced him,” she wrote, for “siding with feminists and ‘wooing the homosexual vote.”

In 2000, Jimmy and his wife Rosalynn publicly severed ties to the Southern Baptist Convention after the religious body declared their opposition to women as pastors. Two years before, the Convention had called for wives to be submissive to their husbands. In a widely-circulated letter addressed to “My Fellow Baptist,” the former president wrote ''I have been disappointed and feel excluded by the adoption of policies and an increasingly rigid Southern Baptist Convention creed, including some provisions that violate the basic premises of my Christian faith.”

Carter’s profeminist commitments deepened over the decades of his post-presidency, as did his passion for pushing fellow religious believers to take on gender inequality directly. In 2008, he helped to craft and disseminate a statement by the Elders that exemplified the way in which he diplomatically and respectfully — but nonetheless firmly — pushed religious leaders of multiple faiths to embrace gender equality:

“The justification of discrimination against women and girls on grounds of religion or tradition, as if it were prescribed by a Higher Authority, is unacceptable. Having served as local, state, national, and world leaders, we understand why many public officials can be reluctant to question ancient religious and traditional premises -- an arena of great power and sensitivity. We are calling on all those with influence to challenge and change the harmful teachings and practices -- in religious and secular life -- that justify discrimination against women, and to acknowledge and emphasize the positive messages of equality and human dignity.”

Carter wrote a book in 2014 entitled A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power, in which he argued that gender inequality is the fundamental driver of the global crisis of men’s violence against women. This inequality is, in turn, undergirded by patriarchal beliefs in both wealthy and developing nations – including the influence of deeply conservative religious traditions.

In an interview with the feminist writer and activist Marianne Schnall, Carter said that sexist abuse was “perhaps the most important single issue that I have ever addressed, certainly since I left the White House.”

Throughout A Call to Action -- which he was urged to write by Rosalynn -- Carter featured insightful and inspiring pieces of wisdom about countering male dominance from women leaders around the world – from countries such as the U.S., India, Ghana, Iraq, Senegal, Egypt, and Malaysia.

Notably, he didn’t hesitate to point out the many ways in which men in every society perpetuate sexist traditions – including influential and powerful men. And while he could be critical of “good” men’s failure to act in the face of pervasive and ongoing misogynous abuse, he always held out hope that women and men, working together, could challenge and transform antiquated and harmful systems and practices.

Here are a few pertinent excerpts from A Call to Action:

On religious pretexts for sex discrimination:

“A system of discrimination…is based on the presumption that men and boys are superior to women and girls, and it is supported by some male religious leaders who distort the Holy Bible, the Koran, and other sacred texts to perpetuate their claim that females are, in some basic ways, inferior to them, unqualified to serve God on equal terms. Many men disagree but remain quiet in order to enjoy the benefits of their dominant status. This false premise provides a justification for sexual discrimination in almost every realm of secular and religious life. Some men even cite this premise to justify physical punishment of women and girls.”

On the universal benefits of women’s leadership:

“At the Carter Center...through our work with families in remote communities in more than seventy developing nations, we have learned about the vital role that liberated women can play in correcting the most serious problems that plague their relatives and neighbors. Almost everywhere, we find that women are relegated to secondary positions of influence and authority within a community but almost always do most of the work and prove to be the key participants in any successful project.”

“Though formerly excluded from positions of leadership or responsibility, dedicated and competent women have been the key to our success in every health project… a significant revelation of these programs has been that people who live with poverty and disease, with little self-respect or hope for a better future, can have their lives and attitudes transformed by tangible success brought about by their own efforts. They have demonstrated vividly that, despite their devastating poverty, they are just as intelligent, just as ambitious, just as hard working as people with much greater economic and educational resources. Like people everywhere, they seek to secure physical, emotional, and spiritual health for their families and their communities. And it is most often the women who lead in these initiatives.”

On the need to focus on the “demand” side of prostitution:

“(Siddharth Kara) concludes that the best way to combat the sex trade in young women and girls who have been seduced or abducted into forced prostitution is to concentrate on the male customers, who provide the enormous financial profits that keep the slave masters and brothel owners in business… the primary culprits are the men who buy sexual favors and the male pimps and brothel owners who control the women and garner most of the financial gains. Lax law enforcement, from top political officials to police on the street, is always a crucial element in the sex trade.

On cultural sensitivity:

“It is clear that more equal female involvement in community affairs is beneficial to all citizens but is best achieved by letting the local people -- both men and women -- make their own decisions. The experiences of the Carter Center and our African co-workers showed that there are ways to encourage these changes in social norms, but this work will require a lot of patience and a tremendous amount of humility and mutual respect.”

Carter’s 2015 TED talk was entitled “Why I Believe the Mistreatment of Women is the Number One Human Rights Abuse.” In the talk, Carter, who maintained a spirit of resilient idealism even after many decades of tireless globe-trotting activism, betrayed a sense of fatigue, if not outright fatalism, about the uphill struggle to engage and mobilize men in the fight to end men’s violence against women. He said that ending sexual exploitation was difficult because:

“…in general, men don't give a damn. That's true. The average man that might say, ‘I'm against the abuse of women and girls,’ quietly accepts the privileged position that we occupy. This is very similar to what I knew when I was a child, when separate but equal had existed. Racial discrimination, legally, had existed for 100 years, from 1865 at the end of the War Between the States, the Civil War, all the way up to the 1960s, when Lyndon Johnson got the bills passed for equal rights. But during that time, there were many white people that didn't think that racial discrimination was okay. But they stayed quiet, because they enjoyed the privileges of better jobs, unique access to jury duty, better schools, and everything else, and that's the same thing that exists today, because the average man really doesn't care. Even though they say, ‘I'm against discrimination against girls and women,’ they enjoy a privileged position. And it's very difficult to get the majority of men who control the university system, the majority of men that control the military system, the majority of men that control the governments of the world, and the majority of men that control the great religions.”

Jimmy Carter led by example. He used his extraordinary fame and global reputation as a human rights leader to provide a model of committed anti-sexist activism for men all over the world. At the end of his remarkable life, during an era of resurgent patriarchal backlash and misogyny in the U.S. and elsewhere, it’s time that his many male admirers move beyond praising him, and instead find ways to build upon his inspirational legacy.