The boys in the market heckled the women canvassing for support for the Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, candidate for President of Liberia in 2005. A woman could never be president, they said. "'You know what?' one of the undecided women said, looking at the boys in disgust. 'We will vote.'
And vote they did. Close to 80 percent of the Liberian women who flooded the polls during the country's postwar presidential election voted to usher a woman into power for the first time on a continent that for centuries had been the world's most patriarchal."
How did they do it and we couldn't, American women ask. Read on for more of the extraordinary story of how President Sirleaf transformed herself from an abused wife into a towering Presidential figure, and how Liberian women saw a woman as the only deliverance from the past of a horrific war, from the New York Times.