If Women Ruled the World: How to Create the World We Want to Live In

With women making up only 14 percent of Congress and eight women CEOs in the entire group of Fortune 500 companies, women's collective voices are clearly underrepresented. Nor are they proportionately present on the airwaves or the op-ed pages of the country's newspapers. This book helps right that imbalance by giving women a platform for voicing their opinions, priorities, hopes, and ideas for change. The book includes short experiences, stories, thoughts, and meditations written and shared by women around the world. Authors, celebrities, experts, and politicians are included, along with soccer moms and teenage girls, creating a work that is humorous, moving, questioning, opinionated, warm, and informative as it examines what women would choose if they had a chance to participate in ruling the world. Note: A portion of this book's royalties will be donated to the The White House Project.

Contributors include: Arianna Huffington, Barbara Ehrenreich, Lisa Loeb, Medea Benjamin (CODEPINK), Joan Blades (MoveOn.org), Ann Crittenden, Dolores Huerta, Kavita Nandini Ramdas, and Wendy Luhabe.

Naturally, the title drew me in. I voted for Hillary! I'd love to give a woman a shot and place all new cards on the table. Books that introduce you to possibilities and are fodder to make you, "Hmmm! Why not?" intrigue me. After all, how many conversations have actually started with the very title of this book? I enjoyed every essay, every thought and possibility behind them. This is a wonderful gift to a woman of any age, profession, or background and is a perfect conversation piece! Keep it on your coffe table!

Creation and destruction are two sides of the same coin, and isolating destruction and trying to understand it alone is like trying to understand the world by studying it only by night and not by day, or trying to understand electricity by only looking at the negative charges. This book is incredibly simplistic in its understanding of this principle, and I expect mainly attractive to people with hidden, or not-so-hidden prejudices like the author's. Destruction is a necessary forerunner to creation, and history clearly shows that it is the destructive who are ultimately creative. Imagine the planet had only been populated by women in the kind of misty, feminine utopia envisaged by the author. The number of wars would have been far less in their history, but it would have been a long, peaceful existence in the stone age. No creation or destruction to disturb the status quo, no wars, but rather worryingly, a life expectancy of around 30 that eliminated far more than if wars had continued non-stop but creativity in medical technology had been imported from somewhere else (like the planet where all the men were living).
The wars that have taken place on earth have taken around 100 million lives, a figure which when analysed alone is shocking at showing man's destructivity. But when we consider that man's creative genius in medicine and food technology alone has resulted in a population double what it would have been, we see that man's creativity has saved the lives of around 3 BILLION, an enormous figure that doesn't even come into discussion here, but which is in fact a vital issue. It is awful to discuss human lives so simply in terms of figures, but it's a fact worth keeping in mind for those who see the world through feminist-coloured spectacles, and refuse to consider that destruction is all men are capable of. The mistake in this book is that the author takes all the marvelous products of men's creativity as just having naturally sprung out of nothing, having naturally evolved, and now women can make use of these wonders. Well, eliminate every man-made or man-invented wonder from the author's life, and ask her if man's destructivity has had more of an effect on her comfortable life, or man's creativity. Kill half of her friends and family, tell her she has just a few years to live, and see how she would have liked life in such a feminist utopia, bereft of male creativity. If she would still hold the same views, and so would the positive reviewers of this book, if we removed half of all the people they love from their lives, then I fully respect her and their positions. Those who would miss these people, however, should consider that the world consists of both light and dark, and those who concentrate on one side only will remain in the dark as far as understanding goes, much like the author and her fans.
DON'T become one of the multitude currently trying to offload their mistaken purchase for a single cent. Few of them are succeeding, and then only to suckers more stupid than themselves. This book is only suitable for use as toilet paper.

A couple of essays are humorous, but most are either obvious (accept your body), or truly defy biology (men are not going to grow the brain wires needed to raise children the way women do, no matter how much we wish they would). Instead of teaching our daughters to wish evolution would speed up, we should be teaching them that if they don't want to raise children, DON'T GET PREGNANT. There are plenty of people in the world, we don't need anyone in particular to give birth, so don't if you don't want to spend time with your kids! Women have a hard time accepting reality-let's start there!

Though the title can be a little dismaying, I kind of like the contrary style. It softens a bit when you get past the cover, and what you're left with is a solid compilation of essays about humane values. It's not overtly religious, or abstract. I have a compilation myself, and I know what work it can be to succeed. I think Mrs. Ellison has. Also look into the late Katherine Martin's books "Women of..." for example, the solid book "Women of Courage."

Not only was I compelled to buy this book because of the luring title, I was totally captured by the few stories I allowed myself to read still in the bookstore. When I realized I'd been standing in the middle of the aisle for about twenty minutes, book in hand, I knew I had to bring it home! I saw my thoughts in so many others' opinions, and expanded my thoughts through new opinions presented as well. It is an excellent forum for giving many great women a platform for (hypothetical)ultimate power! More importantly, it's not anti-men, but pro-women, and pro-empowerment of women. It was so fun to see what women would do if they ruled the world. A great read, share this book with every woman you know!