By Suzanne Braun Levine,
Women’s Media Center
In 1963 Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique identified The Problem That Has No Name—a soul-destroying malaise and sense of uselessness that beset the woman who had bought into the “mystique” of perfect wife, homemaker, and mother. Because she wasn’t happy, she thought something was wrong with her. The second wave of the Women’s Movement gave a name to that problem and countless other experiences that women were afraid to discuss.
Everything changed in the seventies and eighties, and an unintended consequence of the revolution in women’s roles …

David Greenbaum,
Potter & Co-Founder
The BlueStone Gallery

“I strive to create pieces of enduring beauty,” says the renowned potter, David Greenbaum. “Clay is a glorious, humbling, sensuous, messy and most marvelous medium of expression.”

Mary Eileen Williams, author
“Land the Job You Love!”

One third of job seekers are now over 55!

How are we doing?

By Karin Lippert, 67
July 26, 2011

Are we the most engaged and empowered generation of women over 50 in recorded history? Most days it certainly feels like it. Not only are we 37 million strong, but our generation is the first to truly embrace second adulthood and celebrate our ‘Pride of Age” birthdays.

By Suzanne Braun Levine

Back in 2000 my first book Father Courage: What Happens When Men Put Family First came out. In it I talked about men who desperately wanted to be more involved with their families and do more of their share at home but were constrained by the workplace culture and the prevailing image of how a Real Man prioritized his work and family. One told me that he was so afraid of getting caught leaving his office at 6:00 p.m. and being thought not committed to his work that he parked in a distant corner of the parking lot. Another told me that when he went to the playground with his baby daughter on a weekday, people assumed one of two things – that he was unemployed (a failure) or a sexual predator.

By Mary Thom
July 14, 2011

The author, editor of the WMC Exclusives, recalls a moment decades ago that encapsulates the power and purpose of the former First Lady, who died last week at the age of 93.

I was so touched by the note and poem I received from my friend Sean Strub – a feminist in good standing as well as a major AIDS activist – that I want to share it. He found the poem when he was going through his mother’s papers after she died recently. The short story he mentions, The Yellow Wallpaper, is a feminist classic, written in 1892; about a woman who is kept housebound by her husband and slowly goes mad.

Sean’s mother’s aversion to the word “feminist” is an example of the familiar “I’m not a feminist, but……” syndrome – a woman who walks the walk but doesn’t feel comfortable with the talk. It is clear to me – and to her son – that Janey was a feminist in spirit, which is where it counts. — Suzanne Braun Levine

By Suzanne Braun Levine

Recently I came upon a photograph of myself in my first bikini (it was really a two-piece, compared to what goes as a bikini these days) and I was struck by how good I looked. That thought lasted about two minutes until I realized that when that picture was taken, I thought I looked fat and bulky; I was not happy to be looked at. Then I realized that I feel the same way today. Fat and bulky. Plus, wrinkled and saggy. What a waste, I thought, not feeling good about my body back then. And just as much of a waste feeling ashamed of it now.

By Suzanne Braun Levine

Esther M. Broner, who died this month at 83, was a true woman of valor – generous to her friends, nurturing to her children, and devoted to the dignity of women. She wrote 11 books of fiction and non-fiction – all with a mystical subtext, was a philosopher, a witch (the good kind), and a believer in ritual.

By Suzanne Braun Levine,
“Happy Anniversary,
SheWrites.com™!”

Finding material to write about is not always easy. One route is the memoir, which is built on revealing material you know well. Or you can write about something you don’t know well but would like to learn about. I combine the two by weaving some – but not all – of my own life story with answers to the question “What’s going on with women?” I have spent most of my professional life chronicling that transformation of women’s lives at different stages, and the experience has, in turn, inspired and empowered my own. Every time over the past forty years that I posed the question “What’s going on with women?” the answers were different.