Posts Tagged ‘Gloria Feldt’
Kim’s Story: I’m Still a Feminist Dammit!
PunditMom Joanne Bamberger hosted a very fun get together for DC area bloggers last week. I had a chance to tell them about No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power and to ask for their publicity suggestions and their support in getting the word out. This guest post appeared Friday, September 17, 2010 Friday, September 17, 2010, on I’m Not the Nanny, a blog written by Thien-Kim aka Kim. I was so touched by it that I asked Kim if I could re-post her comments here on Heartfeldt. She kindly let me share her post with you.
In the midst of diapers and runny noses, sometimes I forget that a world outside of mothering exists. I have gone days without reading or watching the news. (Thank goodness Twitter keeps me in the loop.) Some days I don’t even try leaving my apartment. It doesn’t seem worth the fight to get the kids dressed and the snacks packed to go on a outing.
Those days I forget that I am more than a mother.
I forget about me.
Read MoreCountdown to Publication: Defining My Terms
My second in the “Countdown to Publication” series I’m writing for SheWrites.com. Any writers here? Tell me what you think below, but also please consider going to SheWrites.com and commenting on my post there. Join SheWrites.com while you’re at it!
Hi SheWriters-
I’m embarrassed to ask, but did you ever forget what’s in your own book between when you finished writing it and your first launch event?
I found I needed to reread No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How we Think About Power stem to stern before my first in-person media interview about it yesterday. I literally couldn’t remember the chapter titles, let alone the 9 Ways.
Last week I shared my website predicament. The central element of my marketing campaign was six weeks behind schedule, delaying my newsletter and much more. Quick update: as Deborah suggested, I employed power tool #3: use what you’ve got. I’m framing my first newsletter as a sneak preview, being honest that I don’t have it all together yet–but grateful for supportive friends and my passion for helping women lead unlimited lives. It’ll go out September 13. Meanwhile I’m using social media daily to build interest in the book.
It’s also time to focus on short lead media. By last Friday, my eyeballs felt like they were about to fall out from reviewing and adding to spreadsheets my publicist had sent. It hit me that pitching highest leverage media intensively and knowing deep in my bones what core messages I want to communicate to them will be infinitely more fruitful than trying to list and do everything that possibly could be done.
So what I want to share with you this week is the most important of all the 9 Ways: Power tool #2: Define your own terms—first, before others define you. This has profound implications for women and our relationship with power. Because whoever defines the terms usually wins the debate and determines what’s considered important in our personal lives, at work, and in the civic arena.
Read MoreBlogher 2010 Conference
At the 2010 Blogher Conference, I was a keynote speaker on closing panel, called “How to Use Your Voice, Your Platform and Your Power.” Need to Know PBS anchor Alison Stewart moderated a powerhouse panel: Marie Wilson, Founder and President of The White House Project (and creator of Take Our Daughters to Work Day), and P. Simran Sethi, Emmy Award-winning journalist, blogger and environmentalist.
Empowerment is a constant theme at and on BlogHer. All signs point to others recognizing our power – as a group and as a demographic. How are we leveraging that power as individuals? How should we be?
Now that we know marketers and advertisers seek the opinions of women (who make over 80% of consumer purchases) and their blogs, how can we control what we are being sold? Now that we know having a unique presence online has turned us into “personal brands,” how can we use it to our best professional advantage? Now that we’re each part of the large BlogHer community and many sub-communities, how can we harness and strategically focus that collective power? How and when and for what can and should we turn on the power spigot?
Read MorePanel at Netroots Nation 2010 on Why Women Are Key to Victory
Netroots Nation is the premier conference for progressive bloggers. So I’m totally thrilled that they accepted my proposal to facilitate a panel on “Why Women Are the Key to the Future of Progressive Election Victories.”
As the GOP has garnered victories in Massachussetts, Virginia and New Jersey since the 2008 presidential election, progressives are looking for a new path to keep the seats they have and win back the ones they’ve lost. Standard playbook assumptions about where, how and why progressives can win campaigns have been turned on their head as increasing numbers of voters feel disaffected and Tea Partiers throw wild cards into many races. Progressive women can embrace this moment to help move the progressive agenda forward. But too often the Democratic Party fails to recruit and support the very women candidates who could be game changers for progressive politics. We’ll discuss how the growing numbers of activist women—and organizations devoted to helping them participate in politics and political leadership—can help reconnect voters with important progressive economic and gender issues. And we’ll analyze how to access the untapped power of women who want to make a difference for progressive issues and what it will take to get them elected.
Read MoreVideo of Leaders and Speakers at Passion Into Action Conference
Women–power–leadership; it’s all here in this short video summary of the SeeJaneDo Passion Into Action conference at which I spoke last winter, along with an inspiring lineup of women doing amazing things for and in the world.
Read MoreFeminism in Second Life–and Its Challenges in the 21st Century Real Life
Listen on Blogtalk radio to the lively multi-generational conversation that took place last night on Second Life–and please share your comments–I’d love to hear how you would answer the questions that we were asked.
The panelists are journalist and author Lynn Harris, youth activist Shelby Knox, and myself talking with host Jay Ackroyd.
Does Access to Birth Control Give Women Freedom?
Uh, yeahhhh!
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 MoreWhat Does Choice Mean to Me?
RHRealityCheck asked me to answer this question for the 1/22 anniversary of Roe v Wade. What does choice mean to you?
What does choice mean to me? Forget about Roe v Wade and legalities for a moment. Just a few minutes ago I received this message via e-mail from a professional colleague:
I saw my granddaughter born last March and it is because I value life that I value choice. I think we should speak out for ourselves – perhaps even as grandmothers who know a thing or two.
So speaking as another grandmother who knows a thing or two (ahem), I’ll be happy to tell you what choice means to me.
Read MoreReclaiming the Means of Reproduction
Lilith Magazine asked me to review Michelle Goldberg’s The Means of Reproduction. The book waspublished earlier this year and at first I thought this review would be a bit dated. As it turns out, given the health reform debate in which women’s reproductive health is once again the battering ram for Republicans who want to kill reform and controversial fodder for the pundits, the subject matter couldn’t be more timely. In particular, Goldberg’s discussion of the damage done globally to women’s health by the Helms amendment shouts the warning about what might well happen in the U.S. if the Stupak-Pitts amendment prevails.
Michelle Goldberg’s captivating book, The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World (Penguin Press, 2009) is perfectly timed to remind those who came of age post-Roe v Wade and might think they can relax under an Obama administration, just how much work is left to do. An investigative journalist and author previously of Kingdom Coming: the Rise of Christian Nationalism, Goldberg has imbued this long-running story with fresh power by telling it in her young feminist voice.
The Means of Reproduction is a sweeping history of U.S. foreign policy on international family planning that spans four continents and the covers issues such as birth control, abortion, HIV/AIDS, their intersections with environmental concerns and economic development, and the gender politics of all, while staying in intimate touch with how America’s policies affect real women globally.
The story begins during the 1960’s cold war when Republicans like John D. Rockefeller and, yes, George H.W. “Rubbers” Bush led the charge to secure U.S. funding for international family planning, convinced that population pressures threatened national security. Then as now, family planning proponents met predictable adversaries. Goldberg writes, “There is one thing that unites cultural conservatives throughout the world, a critique that joins Protestant fundamentalism, Islamists, Hindu Nationalists, ultra-Orthodox Jews, and ultramontane Catholics. All view women’s equality and self-possession as unnatural, a violation of the established order. Yet in one society after another, we can see the absence of women’s rights creating existential dangers.”
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