BOOK SIGNING: Valerie Hudson, co-author of

Happy women may equal world peace

Who: Valerie Hudson, co-author of “Sex and World Peace”

What: Reception, lecture and book signing

When: Wednesday at 6 p.m.

Where: University Center Theatre, University of Memphis

Valerie Hudson, an expert on international security and foreign policy analysis and co-author of the book “Sex and World Peace,” connects the success of a country with the happiness of its women.

“This book is about the many ways in which the security of states is predicated upon the security of women,” Hudson said.

Hudson is one of four authors involved in the publication of the book and one of 11 board members dedicated to the project of revealing violence against women.

“Sex and World Peace” mentions three important “wounds,” as Hudson put it, that women experience: a lack of physical security and integrity, inequity in family and personal status law favoring men, and a lack of parity in the councils of human decision-making from the household to the international level.

“We know that when a state is in a tumult, such as in the [Democratic Republic of the] Congo, women suffer. But we have not examined as closely the idea that national security is undermined by women's insecurity,” Hudson said.

One country that experiences these issues is Iran, rated by the World Health Organization as the third highest country of death by suicide — 70 percent of whom are women.

According to Article 18 of the passport law in Iran, married women require their husband's permission to apply for a passport.

The Law of Hodoud states that the penalty of fornication is flogging — 100 strokes with a whip — for unmarried or women offenders.

Article 1133 of the Civil Code states that a woman cannot leave her home without her husband's permission, “even to attend her father's funeral.”

While Iran is a country that could be considered “in a tumult” by Hudson's terms, the United States is not.

According to an article from CNN, a record 20 women will hold U.S. Senate seats next year, and 55 percent of President Barack Obama's votes were from women.

“I wrote this book as a follow-up to the book I co-authored with Andrea den Boer called ‘Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia's Surplus Male Population,' which examined how the national security of India and China specifically are undermined by the culling of girls from the birth populations in those countries,” Hudson said.

Hudson, along with her co-authors and seven others, make up the board of a website called the WomanStatsProject, which “is the largest compilation of information about the situation of women in the world available anywhere,” Hudson said.

Hudson will visit the University Center at the University of Memphis on Wednesday at 6 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.

“We like to think of women as being half of humankind, but they aren't anymore. Women are now less than half of humanity, and that is not by natural causes but by man-made causes based on the devaluation of women's lives,” Hudson said.