“A central hub for leading feminist thought-leaders”
Feminist.com was founded in 1995, as a few women and I gathered around the kitchen table in my New York City apartment. The web was pretty new back then, and we wanted to tap into its amazing power to offer people around the world access to information about human rights, women’s issues, health, anti-violence resources, grassroots activism, women’s businesses, and pretty much anything that could possibly support a world where men and women are allied, empowered and equal.

Over 15 years later, we’re proud to be what Gloria Steinem dubbed “the folks who put the dot-com in feminism.” In fact, I was honored to share a special evening with longtime supporters Gloria Steinem and Eve Ensler at our 15-year anniversary celebration.

“Changing the world for the better takes passion, dedication, information, resources, timeliness and mutual support. Today’s activists need to access all that faster than ever before, so Feminist.com puts it at our fingertips.” – Gloria Steinem

Our website is constantly growing–with new columns, contributors, and even spinoff sites such as Our Inner Lives. In 2010, my column “Inspiring Conversations” spun off into a book, Daring To Be Ourselves: Influential Women Share Insights on Courage, Happiness and Finding Your Own Voice.

Whether you’re a student who stumbles upon our site while researching a term paper, a veteran feminist who proudly identifies with the “f-word,” or someone curious about the vast ways that women’s issues intersect with every other part of life, we welcome you and hope you find great value from visiting Feminist.com.

Marianne Schnall
Feminist.com
Founder & Executive Director

My new Column at Feminist.com – Navigating Second Adulthood - will look at the many challenges raised by the question: “What Will I Do with the Rest of My Life?” The answers are different for every woman, but they all reflect new opportunities for self-discovery, intimacy, and activism.

The first column in the Ongoing Series – “We are Each Other’s Role Models” – is an excerpt from How We Love Now: Sex and the New Intimacy in Second Adulthood:

We have gone through so many transformations as we shed the roles we were raised to play, that looking into the uncharted future, we expect that there is still more to discover. About becoming who we want to be. We long for someone to show the way. We look for a connection with our mothers’ experience, but we are unlikely to find the guidance we need there; instead, like her, we look to the women alongside us in a common search for authenticity.

Although there are few role models for us, in the sense of mentors and mothers sharing their wisdom about coping with experiences they have been through, we are establishing a team of guides and protectors. They are us. It has not escaped me that when I call us “we,” I am referring to women who are far enough apart in age— roughly forty- five to seventy five— to be mothers and daughters, technically different generations. But when it comes to finding support, wisdom, and intimacy that will sustain us moving forward, we are a single generation.

Together we struggled to stay afloat in the midst of earth- shattering changes for women in our first adulthood, and we are struggling to assimilate those changes in our Second. I call the women who are meeting the same challenges Horizontal Role Models…

Click here to continue…

When I went to work at Ms. in 1972, I wore a matching pink skirt and blouse — and a girdle. I had just gotten married and was, therefore, not able to get a bank loan without my husband’s approval. I had given up playing basketball (half-court for girls) in college because no coach or court could be found. And I had had an illegal abortion.

Actually it was having had that abortion that was my first tie to Ms. and the women’s movement. The Preview Issue of the magazine, which was excerpted in New York magazine, included among such classics as “Click! The Housewife’s Moment of Truth” by Jane O’Reilly and “I Want a Wife” by Judy Syfers, a list of celebrity names under the headline “We Have Had Abortions.” It took a lot of courage back then to admit to what was a crime. In the corner was a coupon which readers could fill out to add their name to the list. I filled it out with pride and relief (I hadn’t admitted to my crime before), and by the time those coupons were being counted and processed several months later, I was managing editor of Ms.

Click here to read the full article…

I was interviewed recently for an article about the early days of Ms. magazine, which is about to be forty years old. Soon after that I was interviewed for an article about Our Bodies, Our Selves which was first published around the same time. When thinking about those days and looking at some photographs, my first thought is How Young We Were! And my second is How Brave We Were! Now I have another thought: How Lucky We Were! to be there.

The anniversaries of other empowering moments from the early days of the women’s movement are accumulating. They range across the spectrum from entertainment to sports, to health to legislation to mind-opening books that went where women were not supposed to go. It is amazing to look back four decades – one of the mixed blessings of Second Adulthood – but when the events are as momentous as the emergence of a movement, it is also humbling.

I started working on Ms. with the first monthly issue – Wonder Woman was on the cover. I was pretty up tight in those days; I wore a pink silk shirt and pink pencil skirt to work the first day. Over the seventeen years I was there, I learned a bit about casual dressing and a lot about women and about myself. I would not be the person I am today had I not gotten that job. And I certainly wouldn’t have had the expertise to draw on when I started writing about Second Adulthood.

Ms. reported on the breakthroughs – both personal and political – and staffers participated in many. My responsibilities kept me in the office making editorial decisions for each issue and working with a multitude of experienced and first-time published writers.  Keeping the magazine on schedule was not always an easy job with so many editors and writers traveling to demonstrations, events and fundraisers.

In 1981 I took on an additional project (where did I get the chutzpah?); I produced a documentary history of a century of brave women – an hour-long Ms. Special for HBO called “She’s Nobody’s Baby: American Women in the Twentieth Century.” It won a Peabody Award, the first of many for HBO. A recent biography of Gloria Steinem, also on HBO, highlighted the early days of the magazine (how young we look!) That it was produced by the same ceiling-shattering woman executive, Sheila Nevins, is a wonderful touch of continuity.

Later milestones include Anita Hill’s testimony at the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. She showed amazing courage by speaking truth to power, and although she lost the battle (he was confirmed), she won the war for recognition of sexual harassment at work. Next week her legacy will be the subject of a conference called “Sex, Power and Speaking Truth: Anita Hill 20 Years Later.” One of the conveners is a Ms. colleague, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, who like many of the brave women who led the movement is still on the frontlines of change.

Those hearings bring back a personal story. Because of my connection with Ms. I was invited to be one of several commentators in the continuing coverage with Peter Jennings. I don’t remember what else I said, but I do remember I got a lot of points for a wry observation I made about the fact that people across the country were gathered around their TVs in offices and public places. “Well, one thing is for sure; there is a lot less sexual harassment going on at this moment.”
Humor – often black humor like that – was a vital ingredient in the Ms. experience.

Writers Virginia Kerr and Lisa Wohl and editors Suzanne Levine and Marcia Gillespie at the book celebration for Letters to Ms. 1972-1987, (edited by Mary Thom,1987, Henry Holt). Photo: Debbie Millman.

I don’t think any of us could have done what we did without the laughter we shared. One of my favorite Ms. covers was an illustration of a man and a woman [find it below]:

Q. [Male] “Do You Know The Women’s Movement Has No Sense
Of Humor?” says his balloon.

A. [Female] “No! But Hum A Few Bars And I’ll Fake It!” says hers.

Photos: INSIDE Ms.: 25 Years of the Magazine and the Feminist Movement, by Mary Thom (Henry Holt, 1997)

Janey O'Brien Strub and Sean Strub

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

This poem was written in the 1970s, either by my Mom or my Aunt Kitty or possibly it was a collaboration.  I found it in a treasured papers folder of my mother’s, paper-clipped to a copy of The Yellow Wallpaper, a famous short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.  The only other papers in the folder related to the children’s book (“The Polka Dot Dilly”) my Mom and Kitty wrote and illustrated together.

Whenever I suggested to my Mom that she was really a feminist, she would get annoyed.  Sometimes she said I had “accused her” of being a feminist, as though that was something terrible.  She supported equal rights, was offended by gender-based inequities, raised her daughters as she raised her sons and taught us all the importance of independence and self-reliance.  But would she identify as a “feminist”?  No way.

If I were you and you were me,
Then who’d be who when we were we?
If both of us are just us two,
Which us is me and which is you?

I know, I know, it’s easy to see
that you are you and I am me!
I know, I know, it’s silly to fuss,
but which is me when we are us?

If she joins he and he joins she,
Then are they they or she and he?
If you and he team up in two’s,
Then are you you or are you you’s?

I know, I know, it’s silly to stew,
But is you one or is you two?
I know, I know, it’s silly to fuss,
But which is me when we are us?

– Janey O’Brien Strub and Kathleen O’Brien Gallagher

The Yellow Wallpaper, one of Gilman’s most popular works, originally published in 1892 before her marriage to George Houghton Gilman.

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. As one woman said to me after having the same then-and-now photo revelation, “We’d better start appreciating ourselves now or we will look back in a few years and wish we looked as good as we did then.” It’s time to get rid of this second guessing about our appearance, and try to accept that even if our bodies don’t look as good as they once did, we can feel better about our Selves than we did back then.

Many of us have had body image problems all our lives. Most of us have body image problems now that our bodies are changing. Some of it is due to growing up in a culture where women were supposed to be beautiful, and thin and doll-like. That made it impossible for me to appreciate how I looked as opposed to how models and celebrities and role models told me I was supposed to look. (There is some consolation in the certitude that those same models and celebrities are sagging now too.)

One way to look at the current situation is that the pressure is finally off. In the same way as we are reconsidering our expectations in many areas of our lives, women tell me of changing their standards for what they expected from their bodies; one woman put it this way, “You know I’m into ‘fit’ now as opposed to ‘fat.’ I may not look as glamorous, but I can put my suitcase up on the rack on the airplane. I get so much satisfaction out of feeling strong and fit that I don’t focus so much on skin tone and all those things that you can’t do anything about.” My trainer tells me that she has noticed that when her clients turn fifty or when they go through menopause, or become grandparents, they get serious about being healthy and fit; they aren’t so much exercising for appearance as they are for long-term health and for feeling strong. The body image is internal. I often laugh at myself because I used to look fit on the outside and I was nothing but flab on the inside, now it’s the reverse.

We all have good days and bad days, and there’s no getting around that. But we have a new source of healing humor. I have had some of my best laughs with my friends when we get together and someone announces that she’s discovered a new decrepitude. First of all it’s a relief because we’ve probably noticed it on ourselves and not wanted to pay attention to it, but also the camaraderie is infinitely supportive. What I hate are the put-downs, the birthday cards and snide poems that make cruel fun of our looks; when we laugh at those, we are laughing at ourselves, not with each other. For me, there is a big difference between the sort of empowering laughter, and the humor that is, to me anyway, a continuation of the self-disgust that we grew up with.

The pressure is off in other areas too. Including sex. We used to be encouraged to see other women as rivals, so we always had to compare ourselves to them and try to be sexier, or more beautiful or thinner. Now that we are, for the most part, all on the same side, the self-doubt can be handled differently. Many of the women I have interviewed for my next book How We Love Now have told me that when they find a right relationship in their fifties and sixties it’s amazing how un-self-conscious they feel when they get down to the sex part, that they just feel accepted for who they are by themselves and by the other person. What they are focusing on is not how they look, but on how they feel, on what will give them pleasure and their partner pleasure rather than on how they look.

There is a scene in the movie “It’s Complicated” – directed by Nancy Myer — that takes place the morning after the Meryl Streep character has just slept with her ex, played by Alec Baldwin. He waddles off into the bathroom looking… his age, while she gets up smiling and starts wrapping herself up in the sheet. He is confused. “But we were naked last night, what are you doing this for?” And she replies, “We were lying down then.” That line embodies (get it?) the kind of good-natured acceptance of how her body looks with gratitude for how it works.

“Sometimes you don’t have no control over the way things are. Hail ruins the crops, or fire burns you out. And then you’re just given so much to work with in a life and you have to do the best you can with what you got. That’s what piecing is. The materials is passed on to you, or is all you can afford. But the way you put them together is your business. You can put them in any order you like. Piecing is orderly.”

– An anonymous woman quoted in The Quilters: Women and Domestic Art

PIECING
By Robin Morgan

Frugality is not the point. Nor waste.
It’s just that very little is discarded
in any honest spending of the self,
and what remains is used and used
again, worn thin by use, softened
to the pliancy and the translucence
of old linen, patched, mended, reinforced,
and saved. So I discover how
I am rejoicing slowly into a woman
who grows older daring to write
the same poem over and over, not merely
rearranged, revised, reworded, but one poem
hundred of times anew.

The gaudy anniversaries.
The strips of colorless days gone unexamined.
This piece of watered silk almost as shot with light
as a glance he gave me once. This sturdy
canvas shred of humor. That fragment of pearl velvet,
a particular snowstorm. Assorted samples of anger–
in oilcloth, in taffeta, in tufted chenille,
in every imaginable synthetic and ready-to-wear.
This diamond of tie-dyed flannel baby-blanket;
That other texture of deception, its dimensional embroidery.
A segment of bleached muslin still crisp with indifference.
This torn veil of chiffon, pewter as the rain
we wept through one entire July. These brightly printed
squares across which different familiar figures
walk through parks or juggle intricate abstract designs.
Two butterflies of yellow organdy my mother cut
when I was eight months old. A mango gros-grain ribbon
fading off toward peach. The corner of an old batik
showing one small window that looked out on –what?
A series of simple cotton triangles in primary colors.
And this octagonal oddment: a sunburst or mandala or pinwheel
radiating rainbow stripes against what turns out
upon close inspection to be a densely flowered background.
It’s striking enough to be a centerpiece.

Once I thought this work could be less solitary.
Many of us, I imagined, would range ourselves
along the edges of some pattern we would all agree on,
well beforehand, talking quietly while we worked
each with her unique stitch inward to the same shared center.

This can still be done, of course, but some designs
emerge before they can be planned, much less agreed on,
demand an entire life’s work, and are best viewed upon completion.
And then, so many designers bore too easily
to work the same theme over and over, with only
the slightest gradual adjustments, like subtly changing
your thread from brown to gray.

Still, the doorbell does tool in visitors, some of whom
slash rents across the section just perfected
          – all without meaning to,
and some of whom admire the audacity or quality
of scraps–but rarely notice the order, which is
the one thing you control. But some contribute:
a quarter yard of paisley, or a length of gauze
fine enough for bandages. Once somebody left behind
an entire pocket of gold lame, all by itself.
The challenge is to use it so
that the tarnished griefs she stuffed it with
to lend it shape need be no longer hidden.

Throwing such a piece away is not the answer. Nor
has hoarding anything to do with this.
And nobody really hazards piecework in the expectation
That someday all these fragments might inevitably

                                                                                fit

into a gentle billow of warmth, to comfort
the longest winter sleep.
Not even that.

It’s just the pleasure of rescuing some particle
into meaning. For a while.

Of course, this means that you yourself
Are placed where you risk being
worn al the more severely
into translucent linen, held up
toward the light.

“Copyright © 1982 by Robin Morgan, collected in Robin Morgan’s Upstairs in the Garden: Poems Selected and New (W.W. Norton, 1990). Posted with permission of the author.”

Photo Credit: Blake Morgan

I have always thought of Mother’s Day as a celebration of my mother, the Main Mom in the family. I made plans designed to please her and honor her on her Day. Eight months ago she died, and so this year, for the first time, I am the last mom standing. It is a weird feeling to have the day to myself, especially when my inclination is to spend it missing her. Yet when I think of the two of us as mothers, I see the two-way street that runs between a mother and her daughter-as-mother. It is the most intimate connection between one generation and the other, I think, because it is as mothers that we share the most profound experience of our lives – the joyous moments and the painful doubts, the need to be appreciated and the even stronger need to be reassured that we did the best we could.

The day after my daughter was born my mother gave me a gaudy pink plaque that read NUMBER #1 MOM. At the time, I thought the evaluation was somewhat premature, but as the years go by I look to where it sits on the shelf above my kitchen sink in times of parental defeat and self-doubt and find reassurance in the message. In those moments it reminds me of a secret we mothers share – that as much as we all want to be a Number One Mom, none of us feels like she is, by acknowledging that secret we empower each other to appreciate that each of us is as good as it gets.

Happy Mother’s Day – and keep up the good work!

Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi embraces a younger generation determined to achieve the revolutionary goals to which she and others have devoted their lives.

Now, almost age 80, I have lived to witness and participate in the Egyptian Revolution of 25 January 2011.

am writing this Sunday morning 6 February 2011. For 12 days and nights now, millions of Egyptian women and men, Muslims and Christians, people of all ideologies and beliefs—the Egyptian people—have continued to unite under the banner of spontaneous popular revolution. Click here to read full article.

To read other WMC Exclusives, click here.

Courtney Martin: A New Generation of Activists

By Suzanne Braun Levine,

Encore.org

Over coffee on a winter afternoon, I spoke with Courtney Martin for Encore.org about how to go about making the world a better place.

Courtney Martin is the author of “Do It Anyway: The New Generation of Activists.” She speaks to her generation in her writings and her blogs on Feministing.com (“young feminists blogging, organizing, kicking ass”). And she speaks about her generation to older activists who are trying to figure out where all the political flowers have gone.

In her book, Martin profiles eight young people who exemplify the kind of activism that is a “bridge over the chasm between what our parents and teachers told us about good deeds, about success and what the real world needs every day.”

That chasm is very personal; her parents were, as she puts it, “radicals” when they were in their early 30s, as she is now, but her father had to make the practical decision to “get a secure job.” Now he is retired and looking for an encore.

Q. You see a difference between your parents’ activism and that of your generation. Can you describe it?

A. I think the big distinction I make is about a “save the world” mentality. There was a lot of those three words when I was growing up, and both of my parents – in a well-intentioned way – thought: You’re Americans, you’re privileged, go save the world.

To me those three words deny the complexity of what it would mean to make change in this day and age. The world is more globalized, it’s more corporatized, it’s more bureaucratic. You can take any daily decision – like “I want to buy all my clothing from companies that don’t exploit people” – and if you follow that chain you find out, “Well, now I’m not exploiting people, but I’m using some sort of toxic chemical that’s going to someday poison my baby.”

It’s so overwhelming to try to lead a very basic meaningful life, and it’s very difficult to make a really solid decision about what is actually going to help, what is worth your energy, what is going to make a difference.

Read more of our conversation about her generation of activists, mentoring, social activism and her father at encore.org.

www.encore.org

www.feministing.org

www.courtneyemartin.com