Women do hold up “half the sky”.

This ancient Chinese proverb was captured in the title of Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s book and its truth reverberated in my soul.  Their book opened my eyes to many injustices, specifically to women happening across the globe and in our own backyard.  The International Justice Mission works tirelessly to end slavery and human trafficking in many countries including Kenya, the Philippines, and Turkey.  Edna Adan turned her life savings into a modern hospital in Somaliland, the only one of its kind in her country.  They combat the effects of female genital mutilation (FGM), surgically repair fistulas (devastating complication from prolonged labor), deliver babies with the lowest maternal mortality rate, and train midwives and nurses to go out and do the same.  And in America black women are three times more likely to have a preterm birth (less than 36 weeks gestation) than a white woman, the highest associated risk factor with infant mortality rate (death under one year old).  No single reason for this devastating statistic has emerged even though very smart people are investigating and researching reasons for this phenomenon.

The quote from Half the Sky that has stayed with me is “If there is to be a successful movement on behalf of women in poor countries, it will have to bridge the God Gulf. Secular bleeding hearts and religious bleeding hearts will have to forge a common cause. That’s what happened two centuries ago in the abolitionist movement, when liberal deists and conservative evangelicals joined forces to overthrow slavery.”

I clearly needed to brush up on my abolitionist movement history, because the fact that these two groups had joined forces EVER gave me hope.  Would you like to know who LED the charge?  It was women.

In the early 1830s, a small group of black and white American women came together to fight against slavery.  As you can imagine, they were met with great opposition and even when violence threatened their meetings, they carried on.

Margaret Hope Bacon wrote, “We must meet together, to strengthen ourselves to discharge our duty as the mothers of the next generation-as the wives and sisters of this. We cannot descend to bandy words with those who have no just sense of their own duty or of ours. . This is a crisis which demands of us not only mint, and annise and cummin, but also judgement, mercy and faith; and God being our helper, none of these shall be required in vain of our hands. Our sons shall not blush for those who bore them.”  More information on their little movement can be found in a book aptly named, the Abolitionist Sisterhood.

Maybe that’s one way we come together, across racial, cultural, and religious gulfs, to fight the injustices of the world.  We come together on mission.  We come together because of the things we agree on-slavery, human trafficking, and babies dying too soon-are unjust. Do we agree on that?