Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide - A Book Review By Karen Mains

Half the Sky is not recreational reading material. It is, however, a book that raises consciousness as to the condition of women the world over and asks for specific commitments to turn their oppression into opportunity.

"We became slave owners in the twenty-first century the old fashioned way: We paid cash in exchange for two slave girls and a couple of receipts," write Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the first married couple to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize in journalism. "The girls were then ours to do with as we liked."

So begins the chapter on child-sex trafficking titled "Rescuing Girls Is the Easy Part." The writers, along with an international agency, returned the young women to their families and discovered that the journey toward rehabilitation is a long, hard road.

Traveling around the world, from Thai brothels or to China, Asia, and the Middle East, Kristoff and WuDunn accumulated information on the causes of maternal mortality (some 536,000 women perish in pregnancy or childbirth per year—although the data collection is so shoddy, this a rough estimate), on the lack of medical care, on non-existing systems of education and on the constant presence of grinding poverty and malnutrition particularly assigned to the female half of the planet. The statistics themselves build a savage indictment against the brutal treatment of women worldwide.

Read More, Click HERE.