Power
Pass Your Power Forward
Regular guest columnist Anne Doyle wrote this post for International Women’s Day, but it applies every day. It reminds me about how important symbols are, and is a great example of what I call “Sister Courage”–be a sister, have courage, and work together like a movement with sister courage. Here’s the link to the original on Anne’s website if you want to connect with her there. I’m so proud of Anne for running for city council (and winning!), as well as admiring her leadership ideas.
After my speech, the same woman came up to me, handed me the pin and told me she wanted me to have it. “Oh no, I couldn’t take your pin. I know it’s very special to you.” She insisted, but told me there was a string attached to her gift. “You must promise me that one day you will give this pin to another woman,” she said. “I am giving it to you with the understanding that you will pass it forward.” “How long can I keep it?” I asked her. She simply said, “You will know when it’s time to pass the pin and its power forward.”
Read MoreShare Your Power Tools Here!
Dear Powered Woman,
I am writing a book entitled No Excuses that explores women’s relationship with power and why this is the moment to use our “power-to” for good in life and leadership.
I have one chapter in that gives nine specific Power Tools women can use to make changes they want in their workplace, in politics or civic life, or in a personal relationship, with concrete examples of what has worked, or what you tried and it didn’t work but you learned from it.
The Power Tools are:
Know Your History (and you can shape your future)
Define the terms—first
Use what you’ve got
Carpe the chaos (chaos is opportunity)
Embrace controversy
Wear the shirt (of your convictions)
Create a movement
Employ every medium
Tell your story
It can be something large or small–they are all valid and important. You can also send photos or video for website use if you wish.
Read MoreHow Did Women Advance in the Oughties?
Katha Pollitt, The Nation columnist and author of a new book of poetry, The Mind Body Problem asked a great question today on a media listserv we’re both on. She wanted to know what we thought were the places where women and/or feminism made advances, went backward, or were treading water.
How do you think women advanced during the last decade? (We can deal with the backward steps in another post…at the beginning of a new year and new decade, let’s start with a nod to the advances.)
Here are my two top-of-mind, unfiltered answers that I sent to Katha, mostly to the positive.
1. The rise of social media has given women the opportunity for a much bigger voice individually and collectively. The asynchronous, information-rich technology and the ability to create “rooms of one’s own” appeal to women who have for so long been overtalked by louder male voices. As a result women are over 50% of bloggers and 57% of the people on Facebook and Twitter. Social media offer a way to connect, share, find support systems, and organize. Women tend to isolate and think they have to solve their problems–often problems caused by systemic barriers–alone. But with social media, they can find answers to their questions and if they choose they can organize to solve problems whether in the private sector or politically. Having been recognized by advertisers as the purchasers of over 80% of all consumer goods, women could also use their online and social media presence to reshape the consumer economy.
The bad news is that this power remains largely in the potential category because women have not used it strategically to mass their voices. Power unused is power useless. This is the name of a chapter in the book I’m writing now and I am sad to say I have all too many examples.
Read MoreDylan Ratigan’s Women’s Moment
I was feeling better about my neck.
I went to a physical therapist about the neck pain I’d been experiencing. So a few days ago, I was distracting myself by watching Dylan Ratigan’s “Morning Meeting” on MSNBC while I practiced the boring exercise regimen Melissa, my therapist, prescribed. Ten reps three times for each exercise holding light hand weights as I hang over the bed.
The segment led with a rhetorical question about whether this could be the breakthrough time for women. La la. Heard that one before.
Dylan reported the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit was going on out in California. That’s a yawn—I went to the Fortune Summit five years ago. And that was supposed to be the time for women. Though I didn’t remember it making a media splash like this before.
Read MoreHelen Zia: A Disobedient Daughter and Her Passion For Justice
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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.
Read MoreWebsite of the Week: Women for Parity (psst–good news!)
“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 many great websites for and about powered women and the issues important to us. I…
Read MoreAretha and Annie: Sisters Doing It
Listen up and boogie down. The mighty Aretha Franklin and Annie Lennox belting out “Sisters Are Doin’ It for Themselves” remind me of the first protest march I organized. It became the theme song for the march, which was huge by Arizona standards, over 12,000 people marching in 1992 to show support for women’s reproductive…
Read MoreWhat's the Cure for Inertia, Stagnation and Utter Depression? Throw Out Fifty Things!
Just this morning I was talking with my friend Karen Scates about how hard it is to get rid of the “stuff” that accumulates over the years. She’s been trying to clean out her closets but keeps finding mementoes she can’t part with. I’m in “deaccessioning” mode, wanting to simplify my life by having fewer possessions. Like yesterday, I was so glad that my husband got rid of our safety deposit box at the bank along with its few remaining contents. Two less things for my kids to deal with when we kick off, I’m thinking. This reminded me I’d asked my friend, author and executive coach Gail Blanke, to allow me to cross post her recent HuffPo article. It’s from her new book Throw Out Fifty Things – Clear the Cutter, Find Your Life; www.throwoutfiftythings.com, because I want to share it with everyone. Check it out! (Thanks, Gail!)
Okay, we’re living in really tough times. Jobless rates are soaring, home values are plummeting, 401K’s are dwindling and bad people are running off with good people’s money. And nothing is the way it was – or likely to be again.
Sometimes it takes a crisis for us to know who we are, or rather who we could become. Sometimes it takes a crisis for us to know what we’re made of, what we stand for, how good we are. And sometimes it takes a crisis for us to let go of the past – so we can grab hold of the future.
Darwin was right. It’s not the strongest of the species that survives – or even the smartest. It’s the one that can adapt to change – whether you’re a country, a company, an institution – or an individual. And if we want to survive, never mind thrive, if we want to rescue ourselves from almost certain extinction, we’ve got to let go of anything and everything that would suck us back into the slime.
Read MoreWho Will the Woman of Tomorrow Be?
It seems only right that as Women’s History Month draws to a close, we don’t just look backward but that we also focus forward to ask what women of the future might or should become.
Who do you think will be the woman of tomorrow? How would you define her character and characteristics? What external forces will influence her? How will she define herself? What are your aspirations for women’s lives five, ten, 25 years hence? Please post your comments here and let’s discuss these questions. Here’s one to start you off:
Will she be a “Powered Woman”? When I asked this question via Twitter (I’m Heartfeldt there), @MadamaAmbi replied with her ideas about the “powered woman“. I love that we both chose the same adjective–“powered” rather than “empowered” or “powerful”–to describe where we think women are and/or will be. It’s a subtle but significant language shift that to me implies women are at a historic point of choice.
Read MoreA Brief and Checkered History of Women’s Path to Parity, Our Power Leap Moment, and the Road Ahead
Today’s Women’s History Month post was written for the NOW New York newsletter. It was a tossup whether to place it in my Heartfeldt Politics blog or if I should put it into Courageous Leadership or Powered Women. While it could have fit in any of these, I chose Heartfeldt because the movement history strikes me as being exactly where the political meets the personal. See if you agree.
“If women want any rights more than they got, why don’t they just take them, and not be talking about it.” –-Sojourner Truth, 1797-1883, former slave, abolitionist, 
Sojourner Truth – click for more infowomen’s rights activist, traveling preacher
During the last 50 years, thanks to feminism and other civil rights movements, reliable birth control, and an economy that requires more brain than brawn, women have broken many barriers that historically prevented us from partaking as equals at life’s table. I feel privileged to be part of this amazing trajectory, and I thank NOW for what it has done for all women, and for me specifically.
I was a desperate housewife in Odessa, Texas, when I discovered NOW a few years after its 1966 founding, and joined as an at-large member. Soon, I’d find the half-dozen other at-large members in West Texas’ expanse. It was a heady time of firsts for women; still, few of us could have predicted either the stunning advances or the discouraging setbacks ahead.
Fast forward to Hillary Clinton’s groundbreaking presidential campaign. Today even right-wing Republicans realize putting a woman on the ticket symbolizes electrifying change. Women outnumber men in universities, reproductive technologies have changed the power balance in personal relationships and we’re closer to parity in earnings than any time in history.
To be sure, women still don’t have full equality in any sphere of political or economic endeavor.
Read More