Day Twenty - Equality

last night I went to book club where we discussed the book “Snow Flower and the Secret Fan” by Lisa See.

It’s a fascinating  and tragic book about women in 19th century  China.  This was and is a society that regards women as second class citizens.  To be born as a female and to give birth to one was a total disgrace.  Men completely dominated the society by using fear and violence to degrade the women so much that they ultimately submit to their will, and believe they are nothing.  Today I am grateful that I live in a society that for the most part this has been eradicated.   I have never been treated as a second class citizen.  I have never been made to feel like a worthless human merely because of  my gender.  I am grateful that I grew up in a house that valued women and engrained in me a sense of worth because I know that I am a daughter of my Heavenly Father.  I am grateful that I have a husband that treats me as an equal and builds me up, rather than tear me down.  So many women around the world even today, grow up in a brutal and violent world.  Girls in Africa are still suffering with the barbaric tradition of female circumcision.  Women in the middle east are walking ghosts under their berka.Woman in some parts of the world have been grotesquely mutilated with being burned or acid thrown in their face, for infractions as little as looking at the wrong man.  These crimes against woman are perpetrated by the very people who should love and protect them, their own families.  I know that the United States is not perfect.  I know that women all over this country are also barbarically ravaged both physically and emotionally by ignorant people.  So, today I am grateful that I am not one of them.