The TEDxWomen event – Resilience, Relationships, ReBirth, ReImagine – on December 1, 2011 was the FIRST bicoastal, global TEDx event in history!

I was thrilled to be a part of this energizing, awe-inspiring day.

The 2011 TEDxWomen event brought together an exhilarating array of speakers – of all ages – in Los Angeles and New York. The live events at the Paley Center in the two cities were part of “a genuinely global, groundbreaking community.” We were joined by women and men gathered at over 100 events on every continent and in every time zone. Pat Mitchell, President and CEO, and the Paley Center for Media team of organizers were amazing. Congratulations to them all.

The videos from our session and all others are available on the TEDxWomen site. Just click on the name of a speaker in the Video section.

I participated in Jane Fonda’s session on “ReBirth.” Click here to take a look at my video and please leave your Comment.

TEDxWomen…The Conversation Continues.

Enjoy!

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)

I am thrilled to announce that my “papers” – the boxes of stuff that I always meant to sort our and never did – from my years at Ms. Magazine (1972 – 1989) are now in the Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s Archives at Smith College. Along with other collections from those exciting days, including Gloria Steinem’s papers, they should be accessible soon. My papers from my time as (the only woman) editor of The Columbia Journalism Review will be there too.

The Sophia Smith Collection is a major resource of women’s history where our past lives on.

The Sophia Smith Collection
Women’s History Archives at Smith College

The Sophia Smith Collection is an internationally recognized repository of manuscripts, archives, photographs, periodicals and other primary sources in women’s history. It was founded in 1942 to be the library’s distinctive contribution to the college’s mission of educating women.

Under the inspired leadership of its first director Margaret Storrs Grierson, the Sophia Smith Collection evolved from a collection of works by women writers into a historical research collection of material documenting the lives and activities of women. In 1946 it was named in honor of the founder of Smith College.

Today, the Collection consists of approximately 650 collections (over 10,000 linear feet) of material in manuscript, print, and audiovisual formats. The holdings document the historical experience of women in the United States and abroad from the colonial era to the present.

Read more…

To learn about Sophia Smith, the first woman to found a women’s college, click here.

To visit Ms. magazine and Ms. online store – click on the Wonder Woman cover.

This wonderful photo of Gloria Steinem, Robin Morgan and me was taken by Jenny Warburg at a party we and her son Blake Morgan threw for Robin’s seventieth birthday at Bob’s and my apartment….

Photo Credit: Jenny Warburg

“All this time, and they were still laughing!

And, damned beautiful, too!”

-Robin Morgan

Enjoy and please send us your photos celebrating 50, 60, 70… info@suzannebraunlevine.com

Photo Copyright 2011 (all rights reserved) Jenny Warburg.

www.RobinMorgan.us

www.gloriasteinem.com

For the first time in the history of the United States, half of all people on payrolls are women. This big landmark is the centerpiece of The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything, a newly released 400-plus page study that includes a national poll of changing attitudes among women and men, and two dozen essays from experts on various aspects of women’s status, including Billie Jean King, Oprah and others who have lived it.

Time magazine, which consulted on the poll, is releasing a related cover story today, and NBC, which provided free office space and other in-kind support, will make it the subject of a week of television programming.

The creators of this campaign to launch a national conversation are Maria Shriver, who lent her skill at cross-country interviewing and wisdom from running the California Women’s Conference, plus the Center for American Progress, a Washington think tank self-described as a source of progressive ideas, and headed by John Podesta, former chief-of-staff for President Bill Clinton. The result is a freestanding project with Rockefeller Foundation and other private support, and also a very conscious echo of a government commission and report on the status of American women that was ordered up by Shriver’s uncle, President John F. Kennedy, almost 50 years ago. Headed by Eleanor Roosevelt, it set up state commissions that led to the founding of the National Organization for Women.

Will this $250,000 poll and estimated $2 million project succeed in creating real change where so many others have failed? The report itself headlines such warnings as “Plenty of study, few results: Real family friendly workplace reform is long overdue.” It lists some of the many prestigious calls for, say, a national system of childcare; an area in which every other modern democracy has long done better than the United States. In the Nixon era when women were a third of the paid labor force, for instance, Congress passed childcare legislation, only to see it vetoed as “family-weakening.” Now that women are half of all workers with incomes that are necessary to 80 percent of families—indeed, 40 percent of babies are now born to single mothers—childcare is still nowhere on the list of priorities in Congress, and we have also become the only industrialized country without any requirement of paid family leave.

The good news is that The Shriver Report is useful, timely, enlightening and even enjoyable to read—an improvement over many such studies—and could inform discussions from the kitchen table to the halls of Congress. At a minimum, it should end forever the debate about women’s place in the labor force; women are the labor force. It also goes into such deeper places as the racial and economic disparities in women’s health and the invisible and essential jobs done by immigrant women. It also exposes the frequent truth that women are better educated than men yet it doesn’t afford them equal advancement, and critiques the media for portraying women as far more successful than they really are, thus creating the myth that no more progress is needed.

The bad news is that by its title and promotion, this report risks portraying women’s arrival at 50/50 as an irresistible force that by itself “changes everything.” You have to pay attention to understand that the immediate cause of workforce parity is not women’s advancement but men’s job loss: three out of four paychecks eliminated by the recession have been in construction, manufacturing and other fields that are better paid and therefore still overwhelmingly male. This fact has already been much reported, often with more concern for the male breadwinning ego than for the now even greater number of women who are struggling to support families while still averaging twice as much childcare and housework as men (though as The Shriver Report points out, men are doing much more than their fathers). Increased domestic violence and alcoholism have been reported as if they were inevitable results of a recession—if there were a Men’s Anti-Defamation Society, it should sue—and women are being made to feel almost guilty for having a job at all, however poorly paid and rivaled by work at home.

Personally, I’m rooting for The Shriver Report to be right in its underlying assumption that government and business will have to adjust policies to meet women’s needs as parents and workers in order to keep the economy going, and also that more men will get accustomed to women as indispensable co-workers and co-breadwinners, and thus increase their share of housework and childcare. Men will still have more to say about the success of this report than women do, so I recommend the essay, “Has a Man’s World Become a Woman’s Nation?” by sociologist Michael Kimmel. He offers a long list of benefits to men, women and children when fathers are egalitarian. It stretches from better sex for the parents to children who get along better with their peers and have more friends because they learn cooperation by doing housework with their fathers. This alone could be worth the price of admission.

If the attention this report generates helps create ideas and pressure for more equality in practice, the money and effort will have been worth it a hundred fold. If it meets the dusty fate of so many other reports and opinion polls, it will have helped to keep a Washington think tank going in an off-election year, but the same effort and funds could have been better spent in support of grassroots women’s groups that create small businesses, jobs and childcare from the bottom up. Right now, anyone with a stake in increased equality also has a stake in the success of The Shriver Report. Go to http://awomansnation.com and see what you can use to make the change you need.

Somewhere between the Man’s World that is gone, and the Woman’s Nation that could be unequal, too, you’ll find a step toward democracy.

This post is available at: www.womensmediacenter.com.

Visit the site, read and share “It’s Not a Man’s World or A Woman’s Nation,” by Gloria Steinem, news, videos and “Exclusive” articles by women journalists.

The Women’s Media Center was founded in 2005 as a non-profit progressive women’s media organization by writers/activists Jane Fonda, Robin Morgan, and Gloria Steinem to make women visible and powerful in the media.

To celebrate Gloria’s 75th Birthday and to honor her unique and transformational work as an organizer and activist in the women’s and broader social justice movements, the Ms. Foundation for Women, Inc. has established The Gloria Steinem Fund for Organizing.

Gloria has traveled the United States and the world, for more than 30 years, igniting powerful new connections between women across race and class that have inspired so many to discover and let loose their own rebellious, activist selves.

“Once I began to listen to my own authentic voice – or at least to
realize I had one – I discovered a new answer to my earlier
rhetorical question: How much more rebellious could I get?
The answer was: A lot.” — Gloria Steinem

Seizing on the moment of opportunity now present for change in our country, The Gloria Steinem Fund for Organizing at the Ms. Foundation for Women will propel women’s leadership and solutions forward quickly and boldly. As Gloria says, “The future depends entirely on what each of us does every day, and at this moment in the life of our nation and the world, there truly is no day like today to take action.”

The Fund will focus on opportunities to achieve policy wins at national, state and local levels and to shape our culture in ways that make a real difference in the lives of women and girls, and their families and communities. The new Fund will support communications activities that respond quickly and speak strongly on the urgent issues – from health care to immigration to economic recovery – that the nation is now turning to address.

To encourage each of us to contribute to the cause of simple justice, the foundation has established Outrageous Acts, a social networking, social change campaign that invites everyone to engage in, celebrate, and support acts in the cause of simple justice on behalf of women, families and communities.

Get started at:
 www.outrageousacts.org.

For information on the Ms. Foundation for Women, Inc. visit:
www.ms.foundation.org