Read Half The Sky Now – Join Female Abolitionist Movement of 21st Century

Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, authors of Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide deserve a Pulitzer Prize.

I’ll go further and suggest that they should receive The Nobel Peace Prize for the work that culminated in Half The Sky and the work I pray comes out of it.

Are you like me? Do you ever utter this prayer?

God, what about your precious daughters? More honestly it comes out like this, “God, what are you doing to your daughters?” and What are you letting your sons do to your daughters? Why would you let your sons do this?

I utter it generally when faced with the realities of girls and women around the world that blow my mind.

I uttered this prayer and felt like weeping on nearly every page of this brilliant and profound work.

Quickly, just a few realities that should blow your mind too:

* There are more literal slaves now – today, in 2010, the 21st Century – than there were during the height of the slave trade in the 1800s. Even after the statistics are averaged for population growth. Instead of being racially motivated, in 2010 the slavery is gender-specific. It is women and girls who are enslaved. The difference between the slaves of the 1800s or The Old Testament is that at least those tribes had an abolitionist movement. An abolitionist movement for women and girls has yet to gather steam. Half the Sky is a call to an Abolitionist Movement for Females around the globe. Please, let it move you.

* Women now own just 1% of the land on Earth.

* While Liberal Americans will fight for the right of women to have abortions and Conservative Americans will fiercely oppose the word even be uttered – the stark and shameful reality is that neither group talks much about maternal health of these women. In fact, Maternal Mortality is a far bigger problem. “Maternal deaths in developing countries are often the ultimate tragic outcome of the cumulative denial of women’s human rights,” noted the journal Clinical Obstetrics and Gynecology. “Women are not dying because of untreatable diseases. They are dying because societies have yet to make the decision that their lives are worth saving.”

* If you took all the holocausts and wars of the 20th Century and added those deaths up it is still fewer people than the women who have been discriminated to death during the same time period. More women were killed, for being female. In beatings by their husbands, in sex trafficking, the rape and slaughter of racial cleansing, in honor killings, maternal mortality, unsafe abortions, intentional withholding of medicine, and lack of education.

* Of the 115 million children who have dropped out of elementary school, 57% are girls. In South and East Asia, two-thirds are girls.

* Countries that repress women also tend to be backward economically, adding to the frustrations that nurture terrorism. Young men in these countries grow up in an all-male environment, in a testosterone-saturated world that has the ethos of a high school boys’ locker room. Organizations made up disproportionately of young men – whether they be gangs or boys’ schools or prisons or military units – are often particularly violent. We suspect the same can be true of entire countries.

I’m not finished talking about this. I likely never will be.

Apathy is poison to the human soul. Now I know and I can’t unknow. I pray you’ll read the book so the same will be true for you.

I predict Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide will have a profound impact on my work here on The Girl Revolution.

The best thing about the book are the real, tangible and achievable solutions provided. The authors have taken great care to explore how to realistically solve and fix the myriad of problems. My two hands can only do so much . . . but the imagination and the pen are the most powerful weapons on earth and I have adequately mastered these them enough to shift some perceptions. All repression, oppression, violence, rape, murder, war, spiritual manipulation and evil on the planet Earth begins first with a thought. Some of it begins with people’s incorrect thinking about gender. They begin with many of the thoughts the authors write about in this book, “Men have a right to rule over women, rape women, beat their wives, sell their daughters, have sex with girls who look too sexy, withhold medicine. Women and girls must submit to their husbands, cover themselves, subjugate themselves to humiliation.”

No. No they don’t.

Change people’s thinking and you change everything. That’s my aim. That’s my intention here on The Girl Revolution – it always has been – to change people’s thinking about girls.

Join The Girl Revolution Tribe for this Abolitionist Movement of the 21st Century and the global fight against Terrorism. Fan The Girl Revolution on Facebook, sign up for the Inspirational Words (you won’t be bombarded by email I promise), or sign up for the RSS feed or follow me on Twitter.

Love,

Tracee Sioux, Abolitionist.

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