Slavery: Worse for Women Today Than in 1800s

Being a female slave 200 years ago was about as much fun as being a nudist septic tank cleaner for a digestive disease treatment center. In other words, crappy.  They were legally owned by another person, frequently raped, physically abused, torn apart from their families, and forced to work exhausting hours for no pay.  And yet, according to Pulitzer Prize winner Nicholas Kristof's new book Half the Sky, women have it way worse today.

The fact that women make up the large majority of human trafficking victims in the world today is not the only thing making life rough on them.  Girls are more likely to remain uneducated than boys, and thus more likely to live in poverty.  Women are raped, forced and duped into abusive relationships, killed during childbirth and from HIV/AIDS, as well as sold as slaves into prostitution and forced labor.  But despite all that, are women really worse off today than 200 years ago? 

I put together some of the pros and cons of being a woman in the 19th Century and being a woman today.  Here's what I came up with.   

Despite the obvious benefits Hugh Jackman brings to the collective lives of women, I think it might be a toss up.  And that's pretty sad, considering how much society as a whole has progressed since it was legal for one human being to own another.  In the old system of slavery, it was Africans, African-Americans, and other dark-skinned people who were enslaved because of the color of their skin.  Today, it's women and girls who are enslaved and oppressed because of their gender.  Can that really be called progress? No.