Women and Power: Connecting Across the Generations

Consider these four women:

Helen Thomas  -- 89 years old, a first-wave feminist who broke into the mens' club that was the Washington DC press corps, and has since covered every President since JFK.

Gloria Steinem  -- 75 years old, a prominent second-wave feminist, co-founded the National Women's Political Caucus in the early '70's, founded Ms. Magazine, and became a leading feminist icon, campaigning vigorously for the Equal Rights Amendment.

Dr. Ana Nogales  -- 58 years old, an Argentine-born health and human rights activist who immigrated to the US in 1979, founded Casa de la Familia to aid victims of abuses ranging from human trafficking to rape and domestic violence, and is one of the most well-known and respected Latinas in the United States.

Courtney Martin  -- 29, author, editor at Feministing (a blog with over half a million unique readers a month), and a frequent speaker on feminism, body image, and youth culture. She's a third-wave feminist and media darling, with appearances ranging from Today to The O'Reilly Factor to various NPR affiliates.

So what do these three women have to talk about? Are they on the same page or at each other's throats? The cross-generational cartoon stereotype depicts a 60-something, white, man-hating, frizzy-haired feminist sneering at a spoiled, bulimic, twenty-something slacker. And some pundits would have you believe there's a vast generational divide, with not only divergent life experiences, but rivers of misunderstanding and resentment flowing through it.

But Courtney Martin doesn't entirely agree, and points to the media spreading common misconceptions about younger women including "the notion that my generation, the younger generation, is entitled, and ungrateful, or out of touch with what feminism means. That is something I hear bandied about a lot, particularly in mainstream media spheres."

Thomas, who at 89 is a pillar of the mainstream media and still asking the tough questions at the White House, sees that the biggest misconception younger women have about older women is, "That they're old! That they are not attuned to any new ideas, and that they think only about the past, rather than the future."

Dr. Ana Nogales notes that young Latina women rarely use the word feminist. "They might use 'powerful woman' and lately 'wise Latina', as portrayed by Judge Sotomayor. It is a linguistic issue that was tinted by negative connotations in the past as: "women that do not want to be women".

Steinem, Thomas, Nogales and Martin, along with a host of other women, are going to sort through it all, face-to-face, in real time, at a conference convened by Omega Institute called "Women and Power: Connecting Across the Generations." In essence, the conference sets out to explore how to build bridges across generations that inspire and empower women to change the world.

The conference, organized by Omega's Women's Institute and scheduled for September 11-13 on Omega's beautiful Rhinebeck, NY campus, also includes trailblazers like award-winning novelist Isabel Allende; Jessica Mendoza, a gold and silver medalist with the US Olympic softball team; Charreah Jackson, blogger and editorial assistant at Essence Magazine; Lateefah Simon, the youngest woman to win a MacArthur fellowship; Alberta Nells, youth leader of the Navajo Nation; and many other remarkable women.

Elizabeth Lesser -- Omega founder, author, and Oprah Network host -- sees communication at the root of the generational disconnect. "Over the past few years of organizing the women's conferences at Omega, we have come to understand that new language needs to be found to express what women are feeling in the world today. The feminist movement has changed as have opportunities and challenges for women. What worked in the 20th century will not necessarily work today in the 21st."