In Favor of Feminism: Share Your Views
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Divine-Love that commercial! Hadn't seen it, so thanks for posting.
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Chicagoan, I got emotional watching it.
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Kung Fu Nuns fighting for girls!
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Serenity, I love the video of the Kung Fu Nuns! As was said, it takes time to change people's minds, but they are visually showing that women, that girls, can be and are more than quiet and domestic. They are breaking down stereotypes and teaching the women and girls to be their own heroes. Very inspiring, and it reminded me of this quote:
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MacKenzie Scott and Melinda French Gates donate $40 million to gender equality projects
Last June, Melinda French Gates and MacKenzie Scott launched the Equality Can't Wait Challenge, an intense contest to identify the best ideas for helping to expand women's power and influence in the United States by 2030. One year later, the challenge is complete, and on Thursday, Gates' incubation and investment firm Pivotal Ventures announced the four winners, each of which will receive a $10 million award to continue their work.
Rising to the top of the more-than 500 proposals submitted for consideration were: The Building Women's Equality through Strengthening the Care Infrastructure coalition, the Changing the Face of Tech project from the Ada Developers Academy, Project Accelerate, led by Girls Inc., and The Future is Indigenous Womxn initiative from New Mexico Community Capital and Native Women Lead.
An additional $4 million in funding was awarded to two runner-up proposals: one for providing support to survivors of intimate partner violence, and a training program for women who want to get more engaged in politics.
"The overwhelming response to the challenge proves there's no shortage of transformational ideas about how to accelerate progress for women and girls," Melinda French Gates said in a statement Thursday.
Girls Inc.'s Project Accelerate was one of the four "Equality Can't Wait" challenge winners. Through a network of 78 partners, Project Accelerate wants to lift 5,400 diverse women into positions of power and influence across the American economy, shifting the corporate landscape for generations.
"The awardees are strong teams working on the front lines and from within communities to help women build power in their lives and careers," MacKenzie Scott added in a statement of her own. "And best of all, they're not alone. This challenge received so many bold ideas to activate new levers, remove old barriers, and push forward for gender equality."
To Scott's point, two of the winning ideas mark collaborations among established advocacy and action groups. The Strengthening The Care Infrastructure coalition, for example, came from a wide swath of caregiving and women's organizations—including The National Domestic Workers Alliance, the National Women's Law Center and the MomsRising Education Fund—with ideas for changing attitudes around caregiving and mobilizing public demand for paid family leave and flexible care. The Future is Indigenous Womxn initiative, meanwhile, is a partnership between New Mexico Community Capital and Native Women Lead to give Native women more equitable access to capital, business development resources and career opportunities. Their goal is to support and scale businesses owned by Native women.
The diverse focus of the winning groups reflect the parameters of the Equality Can't Wait Challenge, which specifically sought ideas for creating real, measurable change for women in at least one of the following areas: wages and wealth, unpaid care, share of leadership roles, content creation (in other words, increasing the percentage of cultural and intellectual content created by women), and public perception.
- Forbes
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I need to print those good statements. Already can predict how they will be received and perceived but that is okay, I can deal with it. Thanks for posting them.
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I try to remember to assert myself with those kinds of statements, too, Betrayal
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I'm recommending a film currently on Netflix, “This Changes Everything".
The documentary “.....paints an impressively full picture of how Hollywood's gender imbalance is sustained and also how it reverberates throughout the culture."
Many top actresses and women directors go on record discussing the few roles and work available to females in Hollywood, both on the big screen and on TV,
Just a few statistics shared during the documentary:
“The ratio of male to female characters in film is exactly the same as it was in 1946, and the percentage of female directors... it isn't even that there's glacial progress, there is zero progress. There's utter stagnation for decades... we're talking about in front of and behind the camera.” (Quote from Geena David, actress and producer of the documentary).
Per the film, 72 percent of speaking roles in the 101 top-grossing G-rated movies released from 1990-2005 were male; meanwhile, comparing male to female narrators in those films shows that less than one in five were women or girls.
*This Changes Everything” was made in 2018. I think you'll find it interesting and insightful.
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Okay, here is a plug for the women in the Olympics. They have won more medals than their male counterparts and receive far less funding. So what does that say for female resilience?
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Thank you, DivineMrsM (love that name) for this thread. And thank to all the wonderful posters who have made this a great thread. I just fund this today, and read through it - wow, I can relate to so much posted here.
I became a feminist at age 16 when my father told me he would not help me with college expenses, because I had 3 brothers, and his priority was for them to go to college. He said college education is wasted in girls, who will just go to college to meet a man, and then stay home and raise babies. I went anyway, without his help.
One of the things I appreciate most is that sexual harassment in the workplace is starting to be taken seriously. I know it still exists, but at least now we have a name for it, and there are remedies.
I was not taught to speak up if it would make men uncomfortable, and I endured a lot of workplace harassment in the days (1970s) when it was expected.
I worked in an open office at age 17, where a much-older man, when I came in for my shift, would loudly sing "she has freckles on her but, but she's pretty" just to see me blush. I worked in a catholic hospital where a co-worker , seeing me by the elevator, would comment that he hoped I was "going down" as he thrust his crotch toward me, while all his friends snickered. At the same hospital, an older married man (the head of a department) would page me to a location hoping to get me alone, gave me gifts (which I refused) and ask me on dates every day. When I complained to the head of my department , she actually said he "seemed like a nice guy" and maybe I should give him a chance.
I know this kind of thing still goes on - but now we have a name for it, now we have HR departments, rules, trainings, etc. It's not perfect, but at least sexual harassment is not just what girls and women have to tolerate in order to get a paycheck.
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tinkerbell, thanks for sharing some of your personal stories on why you became a feminist and how you were harassed in the workplace.
Years before I met my dh, his father told his sister he was sending her to college to get her M.R.S. Apparently, he said this at the dinner table in front of the whole family. He angrily said she was too ugly to find a local man to marry her. You should see photos of her from that time. Attractive, slender young woman with long blonde hair and blue eyes. But his words caused lingering emotional trauma to her. (Their father, who I only knew shortly before he passed away, was a piece of work. He had a great job in the steel mill and refused to send his sons to college, saying they could get jobs in mill, too, which they did. Dh had wanted to go to college but the family did not support his dreams. Dh always said he did not want his own sons to have jobs where they had to wear a hard hat to work, and our son and dh’s son from his first marriage are now successful software engineers). But so many of the men of that WWII era, which Tom Brokaw refers to as “the greatest generation” (???) were incredibly closed-minded, demanding they be in control and that the world turn their way.
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Divine - Sadly I can relate to your SIL. Fathers have the power to be so cruel to their daughters.
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I can't find it now, but I saw a meme that basically went:
Men: All you women who say "men are pigs", you know that your father is a man too, right?
Women: You know that for many women, their fathers were among the first to harass or abuse them, right?
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Yesterday I watched a documentary that may have been mentioned already. "This Changes Everything" is a look at gender-biased opportunities in the entertainment industry over the last 100+ years. It shows the differences in numbers of directors, writers, lead roles, screen time, etc. There is a small focus at the end of the movie about the #metoo movement, but it doesn't focus on that.
Early in the show, the importance of this is discussed. Yes, it's just movies and teevee, so you could write it off as unimportant. But it IS important. Movies and teevee is a huge part of how we pass culture, both within the US (and greater "Western" world) and outside of it.
It was on Netflix, was about 1.5 hours and well worth my time. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5795282/
It was quite like "Picture a Scientist," which was on PBS. https://www.pictureascientist.com/
When you document how few opportunities there are for women, and how men (usually white men) use the lack of women to justify the lack of women, it's the same story. And it's the same story in all kinds of other fields that we work in.
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MountainMia, I agree with your review of the film “This Changes Everything”. It is well done and contains important insights. For example, people creating and producing children’s programming were unaware that boys/male representation far exceeded that of girls/females, however, when shown the data that supported this fact, they made changes and developed more equity between the two.
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I was fortunate in that I was born on my Father's birthday and was able to share so many with the first man who truly loved me. He has been gone for 12 years now and it has been an adjustment to having an unshared birthday which I will celebrate again next week. I was his "Princess" and I feel for those of you who did not have a kind, loving father.
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In every day life, I see the prioritizing of men over women.
Recently, my husband and I showed up to a family picnic. We walked over to my sisters sitting by the pool and as we approached, one sister got out of her nice, comfortable chair and said to dh, “You can sit here, and Camille (that's me) and I can sit here." She squatted over to the bottom of a lounge chair where my niece was relaxing, expecting me to share the edge of it with her.
I sat right down in the chair she had just vacated, saying, “I'll sit here!" Then dh went and found a spare chair, which he did not mind doing at all, and brought it over to our group to sit.
This is so typical of my sister. She is giving the man the comfortable chair while finding it perfectly acceptable that three women cram themselves on a lounge chair so he is accommodated. She is conditioned to think, “There is not enough. We women will compensate by making ourselves less than the man, we will sacrifice our own comfort and be inconvenienced because because that's what we are supposed to do." And for the sister, it's not enough that she just minimizes herself. She makes sure to try to drag other women down with her, to condition us to have her same beliefs. In the first place, she didn't even have to get up from her seat. Dh and I easily could have both found spare chairs.
It may seem I'm making a big issue out of something simple, but I see small instances of this type of behavior by women all the time. This particular sister is so adept at minimizing herself and expecting me to do the same that it is difficult for me to be around her very long.
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Betrayal, I’m glad you have wonderful memories of your father and even share a birthday with him.
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Divine, I'm so sorry your sister is somehow stuck in 1961 and can't get into the 21st century.
I've been watching the Olympics and following discussions on attempts to make some of the women's uniforms (outfits?) less sexualized. I am SO SICK of NBC's cameras fixed at ass-level during beach volleyball, and I wonder if they'd be covering that sport so much if the women were wearing less revealing clothing? Who wants sand in their butt crack, anyway? I'm glad nobody has to compete in ridiculously bulky clothing, but why did it get so sexualized in some sports (rhetorical question, we all know why). Hooray for the German gymnasts! Maybe having had such a smart female leading their country for years helps.
I used to work in a photo archives, and this was one of my favorites. It's so surprising considering the date of 1897. I'm not crazy about the "Mrs" but at least her first name was used AND her hyphenated last name that included her birth name (her husband was the photographer, which is why it says "Starke" at the bottom). I think people at the turn of that century weren't as stuffy as we assume they were. The cabinet card is in the Photographs and Prints Collections of the Missouri History Museum, St. Louis.
Mrs. Minnie Walden-Starke, First prize, Class One, best appearing wheel woman in Illuminated Parade, 7 October 1897
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Wow, Alice, the photo of Mrs. Minnie Walden-Starke seems before its time! I can see why it is one of your favorites. It’s got everything going for it, beautiful subject matter, visually gorgeous and historically unusual. As they say, every picture tells a story. This one is intriguing! I would also conclude Minnie’s husband was so proud of her, which would be somewhat out of the norm for men to promote women this way back around the turn of the 20th century.
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Alice, great story. I love the bike shorts and the bike has a top bar (known by many as a man's bike). I think Minnie did not believe the myth that bike riding would tear a woman's hymen, thus damaging her status as a virgin. Though as a married woman she did not have to fear that!
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US women dominated medal count at Tokyo Olympics in ways they've never done before
Christine Brennan
USA TODAY TOKYO —In a historic first, nearly 60% of U.S. medalists were women.Of Team USA's 113 medals at these Games, 66 were won by women and 41 were won by men. (Six of the medals were won in mixed events featuring male and female athletes.)
The 66 medals is the most ever won by U.S. women at an Olympics.
Not only was this the fourth consecutive Summer Olympics in which U.S. women won more medals than U.S. men, it was the third consecutive Summer Games in which women outnumbered men on the U.S. team.
There is absolutely no secret why this is happening. It's because of Title IX, the U.S. law signed by President Richard Nixon in June 1972 that mandated equal treatment for girls and women in sports, opening the floodgates for the participation of millions of female athletes over the last half century.
To that end, it's possible to chart the increasing importance of Title IX in the changing face of U.S. Olympic teams.
At the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, Team USA was comprised of 375 men and 271 women, with men winning 58.4 percent of the medals to 38.6 percent for the women, with three medals in mixed events.
Ironically, those Games became known as the "Women's Olympics" due to the introduction of softball and women's soccer as well as stellar performances by women in gymnastics, swimming and basketball, among other sports.
By 2008 in Beijing, women still were outnumbered by men on the U.S. team, 282 to 306, but that was the first time U.S. women won more medals than U.S. men, 56-55.
Four years later in London, for the first time ever, more women were on the U.S. team than men, 268-262, with women winning 58 medals to 45 for the men, with one medal in a mixed event.
This trend is expected to carry on in future Olympic Games, but not without some hard work.
"For progress to continue," Ledecky said, "we're going to have to continue to advocate for equality for female sports, not be afraid to speak out, to pursue legal and political remedies and have a seat in corporate boardrooms, and not be timid about participating in those processes that will continue to bring change."
Said Olympic gold medalist and Title IX attorney Nancy Hogshead-Makar, who is fighting for colleges to eliminate persistent inequality in their support of women's sports: "These outstanding performances by America's women's team in Tokyo are the tip of the iceberg of women's potential."
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Thanks for that article! I loved watching so many women win medals this year, but I didn't realize just how many they won!
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Yes, and a shout-out to Allyson Felix, the most decorated U.S. Olympic track athlete (11 medals, two of them in the most recent 2020 Olympics), male or female, ever. You may remember the story I shared about her on the first page of this thread. She partnered with her sponsor, Athleta — which Simone Biles left Nike to join — and the Women's Sports Foundation to create The Power of She Fund: Child Care Grants. The grant program has committed $200,000 to help fund child care costs for mothers who are also athletes while they are traveling to competitions. Grant recipients receive $10,000 each. Allyson Felix is mom to 2 year old Camryn.
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