No Excuses

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis reviewed No Excuses on her blog Grade A Entrepreneurs. She has generously allowed me to reprint the article here on Heartfelt.

Last Friday, Marian Scheuer Sofaer invited a few friends for a breakfast in Palo Alto, CA with Gloria Feldt, who presented her now famous book, No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think about Power. A great intimate setting early in the morning that did not diminish Gloria’s energy and determination to fight for the cause of women: “Women today,” she said, “are in the midst of an unfinished revolution.” While it is true that women have come a long way (“maybe”), parity is still not here – women’s salaries are still lower than men’s, and as of September 2010, the United States ranks 73^rd among 186 countries in its percentage of women serving in national parliaments (not to mention the dismal percentage of women in the boardrooms, etc.). “Women need to lead their own way forward.”

Gloria Feldt states the problem unambiguously: “By far the most confounding problem facing women today is not that doors aren’t open, but that women aren’t walking through the open doors in numbers and with the intention sufficient to transform society’s major institutions once and for all.” The former president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America (who had given birth to three children by the age of 20), Gloria Feldt offers a relevant flashback on Margaret Sanger (1879–1966), who opened a birth control clinic in 1916. Not only did she transform her convictions into actions, she did not ask for permission: she did it.

The book evolves around a very interesting analysis of the relationship of women to power. Most of the time, “power” boils down to being a demonstration of force, through attitudes, rhetorical means and the like; in other words, the word denotes a “power over” things, situations, or people. This is a vision of power with which women are traditionally uncomfortable, as it reeks of centuries of servitude and bullying. Implicitly getting back to the actual etymology of the word, Gloria Feldt exhorts women to understand the term as designating “the ability to,” and speaks of a “power to…” This means: the capacity to accomplish things, and before anything else, the faculty of ridding oneself from the fear of coming across in an unfeminine fashion or a sort of “bluestocking.”

This latter is a term that ended up being used derisively to stigmatize educated women in the 18^th century, targeting the members of the Blue Stockings Society, an important educational and social movement created in England by Elizabeth Montegu (and to which the first woman-programmer in history, Ada Byron Lovelace belonged!)

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis reviewed No Excuses on her blog Grade A Entrepreneurs. She has generously allowed me to reprint the article here on Heartfelt.

Last Friday, Marian Scheuer Sofaer invited a few friends for a breakfast in Palo Alto, CA with Gloria Feldt, who presented her now famous book, No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think about Power. A great intimate setting early in the morning that did not diminish Gloria’s energy and determination to fight for the cause of women: “Women today,” she said, “are in the midst of an unfinished revolution.” While it is true that women have come a long way (“maybe”), parity is still not here – women’s salaries are still lower than men’s, and as of September 2010, the United States ranks 73^rd among 186 countries in its percentage of women serving in national parliaments (not to mention the dismal percentage of women in the boardrooms, etc.). “Women need to lead their own way forward.”

Gloria Feldt states the problem unambiguously: “By far the most confounding problem facing women today is not that doors aren’t open, but that women aren’t walking through the open doors in numbers and with the intention sufficient to transform society’s major institutions once and for all.” The former president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America (who had given birth to three children by the age of 20), Gloria Feldt offers a relevant flashback on Margaret Sanger (1879–1966), who opened a birth control clinic in 1916. Not only did she transform her convictions into actions, she did not ask for permission: she did it.

The book evolves around a very interesting analysis of the relationship of women to power. Most of the time, “power” boils down to being a demonstration of force, through attitudes, rhetorical means and the like; in other words, the word denotes a “power over” things, situations, or people. This is a vision of power with which women are traditionally uncomfortable, as it reeks of centuries of servitude and bullying. Implicitly getting back to the actual etymology of the word, Gloria Feldt exhorts women to understand the term as designating “the ability to,” and speaks of a “power to…” This means: the capacity to accomplish things, and before anything else, the faculty of ridding oneself from the fear of coming across in an unfeminine fashion or a sort of “bluestocking.”

This latter is a term that ended up being used derisively to stigmatize educated women in the 18^th century, targeting the members of the Blue Stockings Society, an important educational and social movement created in England by Elizabeth Montegu (and to which the first woman-programmer in history, Ada Byron Lovelace belonged!)