Politics
Equal Rights for All: On MLK Day, How RBG Logic Can Advance the ERA
Issue 2836 — January 20, 2025 On this long weekend when MLK day falls on inauguration day, and much of the country faces a big chill, a long overdue step forward for women’s rights was announced by President Biden: the ratification into the U.S. Constitution of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA for short). Many of…
Read MoreHammering Power: Part 1 of a 3 Part Series on how Kamala Harris Uses the 9 Leadership Power Tools
Issue 273 — September 16, 2024 “When the only tool you have is a hammer, you are likely to treat everything you see as a nail.” The hammer is a metaphor I use to deconstruct and reconstruct the meaning of power, so that women will embrace their hammer of power with confidence, authenticity, and joy…
Read MoreThe Sum – Meaning of the Week: Positive
“The first responsibility of leadership is the creation of meaning.” —Warren Bennis. Word of the week is POSITIVE. As in posit your own terms. As in position yourself. As in having an optimistic outlook for the sake of your health, happiness, and success. Yesterday I arrived at my Arizona home to find my car had a dead battery.…
Read MoreThe Sum Volume #3: Don’t Shhhh Me!
“The first responsibility of leadership is the creation of meaning.”—Warren Bennis. Welcome to the Sum, where I share my take on the meaning of sum of the week’s parts. I want your voice too. Leave comments here or @GloriaFeldt. The Sum of this week is voice. To put a positive spin on it, we’ve had many…
Read MoreThe Sum Volume #2
“The first responsibility of leadership is the creation of meaning.”—Warren Bennis. Welcome to the Sum, where I share my take on the meaning of sum of the week’s parts. I want your voice too. Leave comments here or @GloriaFeldt. It’s about power this week. Of course with me, every day of every week I’m obsessed with…
Read MoreBoston Leads the Metropolis Charge to Erase Gender Wage Gap
I was so excited to learn about Boston’s new initiative, designed to do something different to close the wage gap…The Women’s Workforce Council has created a compact to which businesses and companies of Boston are asked to pledge to pay their employees equal wages.
Start Your Own Game: Muriel “Mickie” Siebert — Leadership Lessons for Women from Wall Street
A few days ago, I went to the best funeral I’ve ever attended.
It’s unusual to say that about an occasion normally considered sad and somber. But the memorial service for Muriel “Mickie” Siebert, a well-known finance executive in the U.S. and the first woman to own a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, goes down in my book as a perfectly delightful send off.
Mickie founded her brokerage firm, Muriel Siebert & Co, Inc. which became part of Siebert Financial and went public in 1996. She also served as New York State’s Superintendent of Banking (referring to herself in her 2008 autobiography Changing the Rules as the S.O.B.). Mickie’s career has lessons for all women, no matter their occupation:
- Have a dream and go for it.
- Start your own game if those in power won’t let you into theirs — or even if they will but you prefer your vision of how things should be.
- No matter how high you climb, help other women rise and keep them close to support you.
Women’s Equality Day and the Civil Rights March
It was all over the news for days. Every pundit, every political talk show, every newspaper 
running big retrospective spreads. Op eds galore, and reminiscences of what it was like to march together toward equality.
Today, August 26 is Women’s Equality Day, the day that commemorates passage of the 19th amendment to the US constitution, giving women the right to vote after a struggle that lasted over 70 years. A big deal, right?
Right. But that’s not what all the news was about. In fact, though President Obama issued a proclamation and a few columnists like the New York Times’ Gail Collins gave it a nod, hardly anyone is talking about Women’s Equality Day. At least not in consciousness-saturating ways that garner major media’s attention, as Saturday’s March on Washington commemorating the 50th anniversary of a similar Civil Rights march.
Yet the two anniversaries are rooted in common values about equality and justice for all. They share common adversaries and aspirations. Racism and sexism are joined at the head.
Read MoreThe Young Politica: Guns on Campus
If you, like me, have come to look forward to Maegan Vazquez’s “Young Politica” columns on Heartfeldt, you are going to miss her interesting take on the world through the students’ lens. During the past two semesters that she has interned for me, it has been my pleasure to see her grow and her writing develop.
Enjoy her last column here. I told her I predict we’ll be reading her in the Washington Post in a few years.
Today, airsoft rifles closely resembling AK-47s were found in the dorm room of a New York University student, according to the New York Post. The psychology student, Bernard Goal, 20, allegedly assembled and sold them for up to $500 each. 
The story may not have been at the top of my radar (nor on the radar of the New York Post a few weeks ago, but in a post-Boston Marathon and post-MIT shootout world, I have become hyperaware of all things ammunition on campus—especially when that campus is my own.
As a member of the media, it would be naive of me to cite this as a reason for stricter gun laws on campus. Even I know that when in search for stories, a journalist often writes about what is most concerning to their audience at that moment in time. Right now, almost anything guns is a-go.
Up until recent events, campus gun laws were not an issue I was concerned with; mainly because my college doesn’t have a real campus. Rather, students take classes in buildings scattered across lower-Manhattan.
Read MoreWomen’s Campaign Fund Won’t Settle for Less Than Half
Monday night I attended the bipartisan Women’s Campaign Fund’s annual “Parties of Your Choice“.
As always, they begin with a raucous reception at Christie’s for several hundred guests, after which we all scatter around town for intimate dinners in beautiful homes. At each party, there are several WCF-endorsed candidates or elected officials who tell their tales and make their pitches.
Here are a few photos I took during the evening, which was peppered with chants of “Change the players. Change the game.”
Read More