Posts by Gloria Feldt
Power to You Facebook Chat
Webinar Event
Power To You Facebook Chat
Even if you don’t want to get out of bed on a Sunday, you can join me for a Power to You Facebook chat about No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power. It’s easy!
March 25, 2012 –3-4pm, Gloria Feldt Facebook Fanpage. Find out how
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The Power Hour: Leadership and Women's Health
Leadership and Women’s Health Event
The Power Hour: Leadership and Women’s Health
Gloria interviews Dr. Nieca Goldberg on the controversial topics of Leadership and Women’s Health.
Free admission. RSVP 203-226-0199 or PowerHour@mediamuscle.com
March 26, 2012 –
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Are You Angry Enough to Embrace Your Power To Act? (3 Signs You Are)
In decades of experience as a women’s advocate, I’ve learned people can be inspired to action by one of two things: anger or aspiration.
A roiling, boiling anger is propelling women — even many who’ve never been activists before — to embrace their “power to” to take leadership and make change. They’re making their voices heard over the din of political rhetoric they might shun under other circumstances.
There was no one trigger, rather a succession of insults. I talked with Richard Lui about them this week on MSNBC’s Jansing & Co. Here’s a smattering:
- After 30-year-old Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke was denied the chance to speak about why contraceptives should be covered by insurance…
- After the stunning optics of an all-male “expert” panel pontificating on women’s reproductive health before a Senate committee (also all-male because the women on the committee were so incensed they walked out)…
- After shock jock Rush Limbaugh denigrated Fluke, calling her a slut and a prostitute (can one be both—don’t sluts give it away?) and demanding to see videos of her having sex…
- After bills like those in Texas and Virginia forcing women seeking abortions to submit to 10″ ultrasound “shaming wands” (as Doonesbury dubbed them), an AZ bill requiring women to bring notes to their employers verifying they take birth control for health reasons not pregnancy prevention or risk being fired, and a Tennessee bill that mandates public reporting of the doctors by name and the demographics of each patient…
Women are rightly furious.
Why is this happening?
Read More"Black Woman Novelist" -Toni Morrison Defines Her Own Terms
“I’ve just insisted – insisted! – upon being called a black woman novelist…And I decided what that meant, because I have claimed it. As a black and a woman, I have had access to a range of emotions and perceptions that were unavailable to people who were neither.”
It’s Women’s History Month and I can’t resist profiling Toni Morrison, a prolific writer who has worked to represent through fiction the experience of black people—particularly women–in America. Ms. Morrison’s novels focus on marginalized characters struggling to find their place in a society built upon the legacy of slavery and the violence of racial prejudice. Most known for her imaginative fiction, Morrison has also written essays, non-fiction, plays, a libretti, and children’s books.
Ms. Morrison developed her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), while raising two children and teaching at Howard University. She later took a job as an editor at Random House, where she played a vital role in bringing black literature into the mainstream, editing books by authors such as Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis, and Gayl Jones.
Commercially successful and critically acclaimed, her 1987 Pulitzer Prize winning novel “Beloved” was chosen by a New York Times survey of prominent writers to be the best work of American fiction of the previous 25 years. In “Beloved”, Morrison imagines what it would have felt like to be Margaret Garner, a fugitive slave woman who chose to kill her infant daughter rather than see her grow up in slavery.
In an interview with the Paris Review, Morrison says about Margaret Garner:
Read MoreMadonna & Me Charity Reading
Book Reading Event
Madonna and Me Charity Reading
Susan Shapiro hosts a Madonna and Me charity reading at Barnes & Noble.
(Bullet bras welcome)
Join Laura Barcella, Emily Nussbaum, Wendy Shanker, Gloria Feldt & Susan Shapiro as they read from the anthology “Madonna & Me.”
10% of book sales to Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen
Editor Laura Barcella and I read our essays from the anthology “Madonna and Me” – Like a Virgin and all that
March 23, 2012, Friday, 7:30-9pm.
396 Avenue of the Americas at 8th Street, Greenwich Village, NYC.
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Soundtrack Series: March Maddness Madonnathon
Book Reading Event
March Maddness Madannathon
March Maddness Madonnathon from Soundtrack Series. I join other guest writers reading my essay from Laura Barcella’s new anthology, Madonna and Me.
March 22, 2012 – Thursday, 7-9:30 pm. Le Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleeker Street, NYC
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She’s Doing It: What Courtney Martin Learned This Year
Read MoreWhen I speak on college campuses, I score points with students when they find out I know Courtney Martin, author, among several books, of Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters and Do It Anyway. Though she’s the youngest of the four of us on the WomenGirlsLadies intergenerational feminist panel, she is usually the most together. The one who knows where we’re supposed to be when, gets the power point together, and remains calm when things go awry.
Follow Courtney @courtwrites and find her commentaries on The American Prospect and many other publications. Courtney is the Founding Director of the Solutions Journalism Network, along with New York Times columnist David Bornstein. In addition, she is the leader of the Op-Ed Project’s Public Voices Fellowship Program at Princeton University–coaching women academics to become part of public debate. She is a partner in Valenti Martin Media, a communications consulting firm focused on making social justice organizations more effective in movement building and making change and is an Editor Emeritus at Feministing.com.
Here’s what Courtney says she learned since I interviewed her for No Excuses:
Can Rick Santorum Ban Porn?
Politico Arena asks:
Presidential candidate Rick Santorum has promised to wage war on pornography, the Christian Science Monitor reports. http://bit.ly/yPdOaW
If elected, he would order his attorney general to “vigorously enforce” existing laws that “prohibit distribution of hardcore (obscene) pornography on the Internet, on cable/satellite TV, on hotel/motel TV, in retail shops and through the mail or by common carrier.”
Could Santorum turn this topic into a successful campaign strategy? Or does the idea step on First Amendment rights?
My Response: Rick Santorum has just laid bare (so to speak) one more layer of a debate about the nature and purpose of human sexuality that he is sure to lose. Not because porn is a good thing—and of course existing laws should be enforced, duh—but because when push comes to shove, the American people don’t want government telling them what to read or watch or do in their private sex lives. What they do want is jobs and an economy that works again. And voters are very likely to connect Santorum’s focus on pornography with his overall sex police-like attacks on contraception and women’s rights.
Read MoreLesser-Known Women Often Make History
Today in the Women’s History Month series, let’s shine a light on lesser known women. 
In the spirit of the month, here are links to articles drawing attention to women you may not have heard of—and the awesome things they are doing today.
- Anna Clark has compiled a list of underrated women writers of novels, stories, poems, and graphic novels from around the globe.
- The BBC has profiled some of the women activists involved in Syria’s uprising.
- Bitch Flicks recommends 11 films about trailblazing women.
- Houston Press lists ten of their favorite Female Artists making music today. Rock on ladies!
NCJW Leader's Retreat
Keynote Speaking Event
NCJW Leadership Training Retreat: Focus on Leadership Plenary Keynote address
NCJW leaders from around the country gathered from March 16–18 in Florham Park, NJ for a weekend of learning and networking at NCJW Leaders’ Retreat 2012.
This hands-on leadership training retreat gave current and future NCJW leaders the opportunity to boost their leadership skills to build and grow a successful NCJW section.
On Saturday, I delivered the Focus on Leadership Plenary Keynote address. Hamutal Gouri, Executive Director of The Dafna Fund, delivered the Focus on Israel Plenary Keynote address.
March 17, 2012 – NCJW Leaders’ Retreat 2012 “Focus on Leadership”, Plenary Keynote speaker. Florham Park, NJ
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