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I am delighted to welcome a very powered young woman, Lee Taylor, as a regular guest poster. Lee is a writer and feminist activist who is a senior at SUNY Purchase College majoring in History and minoring in Women’s Studies. She is currently working on her senior thesis about Helen Rogers Reid, her great-grandmother, and former President of the New York Herald Tribune. After she graduates she plans on teaching high school. I’m especially thrilled that her first post here is a profile of my friend and Women’s Media Center board member sister, Helen Zia.

Helen Zia was born into a Chinese American family in New Jersey in 1952. Although the fifties was a time Lee Taylor and Helen Ziaof great conformity, the seeds of revolution were sown the day that Zia was born. Zia was brought into an immigrant family which observed traditional Confucian beliefs, including the Three Obediences: a daughter must obey her father, a wife must obey her husband, and a widow must obey her son; the trajectory of Zia’s life proves that she was truly a radical visionary and community organizer who broke seemingly insurmountable social and cultural barriers.

Helen Zia graduated from Princeton University in the first class that accepted women. She was also breaking racial boundaries as one of the few female, Asian American members of the prestigious university. Zia attended Princeton on a full scholarship, working her way through school and majoring in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

She was highly conscious of and became an active participant in the political transformations taking place in her young adulthood. Zia and her generation witnessed the nascent feminist movement, and the full-fledged civil rights movement, as well as the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. Hers was the baby boom generation – huge numbers of young people who were dissatisfied by their government’s war in Vietnam and inequality at home – they were idealistic about the opportunities for peace and sisterhood.

Zia’s career experiences after Princeton, however, showed that the youth-led social justice movements had not reached all areas of society. After graduation, Zia enrolled in Tufts Medical School in Boston. She moved to Boston’s South End; a neighborhood then predominantly inhabited by low-income Chinese, Puerto Rican, and African Americans, far from the glamorous place it is today. Helen soon discovered that medicine, a conservative white and male institution at the time, was not a friendly place for an Asian American woman committed to progressive social change. After two years of medical school, Zia felt a sincere urge to get involved in grassroots efforts to change troubled communities – she quit medical school and became a construction worker in her South End community, which offered Zia a way to create change, educate herself on community needs, and pay the bills.

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I wrote this commentary for The Daily Beast–please go there to comment and share too!

I felt that it was way past time for someone to call out the cynical politicians who won’t vote for health reform under any circumstances but are using women’s bodies as a rallying cry to whip up the anti-choice right. Shamefully, President Obama and most of the Democrats are dancing to their tune, and will continue to unless we voters speak out and insist that abortion and other reproductive health care is covered fairly along with other basic medical care.

They named it “The Abortion-Controversy Hoax.” Probably a better, shorter title than mine.

It’s September. Congress will soon return to tackle health care reform, and I can’t help but notice a familiar political two-step. If you want to see whether a politician–Democrat or Republican–can cut a rug, just ask him or her about abortion. They’ll swing around faster than Tom DeLay on Dancing With the Stars.

Partisans on the right mobbed town halls during the August recess to exploit abortion and women’s health, whipping up controversy around President Obama’s health reform plan. Twisted logic and deliberate misinformation abound in a YouTube ad campaign by the Family Research Council, which, along with other anti-choice groups, also launched a paid media blitz claiming Obama’s health reform plan would pull Granny’s plug while covering abortion—ignoring that most of us grannies want to make advance directives and would be quite grateful if our health plans covered the service.

Meanwhile, Democrats were doing a dance of their own and, without Senator Ted Kennedy to lead them toward their higher principles, tried unsuccessfully to waltz away from the hot-button issue with the Blue Dogs to whom they owe their souls and their majority. No wonder voters are increasingly questioning Obama’s plan.

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September 3 should become a special day on women’s calendar, just as Women’s Equality Day became a special day in honor of women’s voting rights. For the first time ever, two of the three nightly major network newscasts will be …

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Ultra-right Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) says she’s ready to slit her wrist and become blood brothers (?) in a pact to kill health reform.

Personally, I think Americans would be best served, with universal coverage and lower costs, by a single payer plan. But in the absence of any viable campaign for that, the Obama compromise of adding a pubic option to the mix is the best we can hope for. The public option is well-described in this video by Yale Professor Jacob Hacker. Check it out for useful information and corrections to some of the wildly outrageous claims Bachman and her blood (?) brothers are making.

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I have the pleasure of speaking to each “class” of Progressive Women’s Voices, an exciting program of the Women’s Media Center, where I serve on the board. This started during the first class two years ago when I was asked about the lessons I learned leading a social movement where I worked a great deal with the media and messages as vehicles of social change. My comments have evolved over time from the conversations I’ve had with PWV participants and Heartfeldt Politics readers. So as I prepared today to speak to the final 2009 class tomorrow evening, I decided to share the latest iteration here on my blog. Please let me know your thoughts.

The angry, gunslinging, mobs opposing President Obama’s healthcare plan at town halls have created quite a stir. Screaming confrontations aren’t just great political theater that captures media attention, did you know they literally make your blood pressure rise and cause other involuntary physical anxiety-fear-pain-fight-flight reactions?

If you’re a live-and-let-live sort of person, as most Americans are, your first reaction to public controversy might be a racing heartbeat, but it won’t be long before you’ll probably want to race away. We have millennia of rape and pillage warnings in our brains, after all. Who needs it?

Well, actually you do if you’re interested in getting health reform in our time, or if you’re advancing any personal or organizational mission that you care about through the democratic process. Your voice is essential.

Public disruptions succeed not because they are necessarily proposing valid points of view, but for two other reasons:

• The people are organized, passionate, and persistent. They know that if they can cause enough discomfort, the rest of us will probably back away, go silent, and leave the field to them.
• They take charge of the conversation, frame the issue as they see it, and change the terms of the debate.

Let’s look deeper at these two dynamics.

With regard to public discourse: You can’t change eggs into omelets without breaking them. It’s not surprising that change will always upset some people. That causes controversy. It’s just the nature of the beasts social change movements have to dance with. As Dr. Joycelyn Elders, the former Surgeon General who was pushed out of her job when she said controversial things about the positive value of masturbation, told me one time, “When you are dancing with the bear, you don’t get to sit down until he’s ready.”

Since we can’t avoid controversy when we’re changing the world, we have to learn to love it, embrace it, not back away but rather use the energy to advance our cause.

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In Memoriam: “The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.” Pass real healthcare reform now in Ted Kennedy’s honor!

(Please pass this on and let’s start a campaign.)

With thanks to Peaco Todd for this cartoon which she has generously created and donated to this campaign.

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“We want all, but we’ll take half,” is one of the inimitable Bella Abzug’s mantras. It’s also on the masthead of a website I commend to you, called Women for Parity, my first Website of the Week. There are so …

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While I was in Arizona recently, I spent some time with the Arizona State University School of Social Transformation folks brainstorming an online leadership certificate course for women that we intend to launch in the fall of 2010. We plan to use a social media platform to create an ever-growing network of contacts for the women who participate in the course.

I’d love to get your feedback on the idea and how you would use social media as a leadership toolkit to further your work. What are you wanting to know or learn to use? What social media do you think have the greatest promise for organizational or leadership effectiveness?

This video is jam-packed with data about the power of social media. Take a look. Do you agree with it?

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