Posts Tagged ‘Women’s Movement’
Friday Round Up: Will Egyptian Women’s Revolt Sustain a Movement?
I was incredibly moved to see photos of Egyptian women marching in Tahrir Square earlier this week. A few hundred protesters were expected; thousands showed up. And they were angry.
Women figured prominently in the demonstrations that brought down Hosni Mubarak last February . But once the government toppled, they were pushed aside, and not included in the constitutional reform committee. Egyptian feminists warn that decades of painstaking advances could be reversed, as religious fundamentalists ascend to power in what has been a nominally secular state.
This week’s protest was spurred my pervasive police and military brutality to women. Attacks on women,
Read MoreFriday Round Up : As Pink Headlines Declare End of Feminism (Again), World’s Women Leaders Keep Moving Forward
Want to have a little cognitive dissonance?
First watch this video of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered a keynote address at the first-ever Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Women and the Economy Summit 9/16/11 in San Francisco CA, essentially saying that women are the key to the world’s economic future.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jbLUHIveIQ[/youtube]
And for good measure, take a gander at the latest
Read MoreFriday Roundup: Splitting the World Open
In the newsletter I sent out this past week, I began with this quote from the late feminist poet, Muriel Rukeyser:
“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.”
This week’s Roundup links to a selection of articles, each of which represents a way that women are using their “power to” by simply telling the truth, which is so often the most difficult thing of all. And we are seeing the world split open as these women challenge millennia of gender-based oppression rooted in sexual abuse, assault, harassment, and even verbal disparagement of women. Check them out and share your thoughts. I’m especially interested to know whether you feel as I do that despite the pain of seeing and knowing these horrific acts, the fact that they are coming out in the open–the truth-telling–is splitting the world open in ways that ultimately are positive.
Statement/petition from Change.org to unite people around the world in support of the alleged rape victim of Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Sign on!
French feminists could care less that Strauss-Kahn is a fellow countryman, and are protesting his actions, loud enough for the entire world to hear. Please check out the great protest pictures in this Gotham article.
Join the Nobel Women’s Initiative today by going to the UN Action Stop Rape Now website and download the sample letter asking your elected official for increased action against sexual violence in conflict.
For more information on rape as a weapon of war, please read this great article by NYC writer Anna Louie Sussman.
The response of the Women’s Media Center and many feminists around the country to Ed Shultz and his sexist remarks is right on the money: men have no right to use sexist language to keep women in their place, regardless of their political affiliation.
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WomenGirlsLadies on Ronnie Eldridge Show
Three of our WomenGirlsLadies inter-generational panel members, Deborah Siegel, Courtney Martin, and I (we were missing Kristal Brent Zook, who couldn’t change her teaching schedule to appear on the show) had a chance to talk with Eldridge and Co. host Ronnie Eldridge on her CUNY television show.
Click the photo above to see the video. We covered the inter-generational waterfront, from the state of the women’s movement, what happens when feminists disagree about political candidates, how we’re going to get work-life balance policies and actual practice, and what we all have in common to how the women’s movement has changed men too.
Our next public event will be Sept. 28 at the University of Missouri Kansas City. We’d love to come speak to your group too! Contact me and I’ll be delighted to give you more information.
Read MoreDon’t Think Like an Elephant
Recently I was at the SeeJaneDo conference where I heard this story. I was so moved by it that I immediately had to include it in my forthcoming book about women’s relationship with power–No Excuses, to be published in October–despite having already having turned in what were supposed to be the last changes.
Read MoreIt’s said that when a baby elephant is being trained, she is tied to a post almost immediately after birth. During the first few weeks of life, she attempts to break free of her restraints, but she’s not strong enough. So she comes to believe she can’t get away from what is holding her back even after she has grown large and plenty powerful to uproot the post entirely. As a consequence, even as an adult, she remains tied to the post due to an internally motivated behavior that is no longer rooted in external reality.
Want Equal Rights? The Truth Is – Just Take Them!
“If women want any rights more than they’s got, why don’t they just take them, and not be talking about it.” —Sojourner Truth, former slave, abolitionist, Methodist minister, and early U.S. women’s rights leader
International Women’s Day began 99 years ago. With so much progress accomplished since 1911, yet so much more remaining to be done, it seems to me that it’s time for women to change our approach to something closer Sojourner Truth’s.
Her advice to women as she stated it in the above quote to Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of the influential anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, when they met in 1853, comes from a position of knowing her own power. Despite being been born into slavery and experiencing oppression, poverty, and discrimination far greater than most women reading this blog in 2010, Truth was way ahead of many of us in her perspective about how to advance equal rights.
Without question, in many places around the globe, women remain as oppressed as Sojourner Truth–born Isabella Baumfree in Ulster County, New York, and once sold for $100 and a herd of sheep–was before she “walked off” from her master.
Read MoreMomsRising–The Women’s and Men’s Movement of Tomorrow
I took an early morning walk today in Central Park with Joan Blades, founder with her husband Wes Boyd, of the progressive political on-line grassroots powerhouse, moveon.org. But her agenda wasn’t moveon.com. Joan is a serial entrepreneur and a very successful one, whether creating a software company or a new nonprofit organization. It was the latter she wanted to talk with me about today: her latest venture, MomsRising.
Joan has plunged her creative hands into a key mobilizing issue of the day, building a more family-friendly America in the workplace and public policy. Fresh from getting the New Jersey legislature to pass a paid sick leave measure, she brought me up to date on the organization she started in 2006 in response to her own experiences as a mom in the workplace.
MomsRising has over 140,000 citizen members already and is aiming for 1,000,000 to participate in their citizen advocacy agenda. Over 85 national and state organizations have aligned with MomsRising to create a coalition that works at the state and national levels to bringing motherhood and family issues to the forefront of the country’s awareness so they can advance workplace policies such as paid sick leave, maternity and paternity leave, flexible work hours, and equal pay for equal work. Quality childcare and healthcare access are also on their rather large plate. And they’re pumping up their political fundraising so they can do more lobbying on all these issues.
Read MoreThe Daddy Shift: Men of Tomorrow
Everything is politics.
Certainly within the family the issue of who takes care of the kids is highly charged and highly staked for all concerned. It seems to me that the next wave of feminism must be for men and women together to take on changing the workplace so both can have a life while earning a living and making sure their children are in fact well cared for.
That’s why this Washington Post article, “Get Ready to Step up, Dad” caught my eye. Here’s an excerpt”
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