Women and Power: Connecting Across the Generations
Belief:
Why I Want to Turn Religious People Into Atheists
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Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace:
4 Myths About Taxes, Debunked
Paul Buchheit
DrugReporter:
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Jim Hightower
Environment:
White House Garden Won't Make Up for Obama's Nomination of Pesticide Lobbyist for US Chief Agriculture Negotiator
Jill Richardson
Food:
Don't Be Scared of Food: Are We Being Needlessly Hysterical About Food Safety?
David E. Gumpert
Health and Wellness:
47,000 Women Could Die As a Result of the New Mammogram Guidelines
George Lakoff
Immigration:
Hate Group, FAIR, Is Looking for "Ethnically Ambiguous" Actors to Amplify Its Racism
Adam Luna
Media and Technology:
The Memory Scrub About Why Ft. Hood Happened Is Almost Complete ... If It Weren't for Archives
Mark Ames
Movie Mix:
The Yes Men: Pranksters Out to Fix the World
Mark Engler
Politics:
White House's Ties to Health Care Industry Deeper Than Visitor Records Show
Daniela Perdomo
Reproductive Justice and Gender:
Why Can't We Look Away From Sarah Palin?
Vanessa Richmond
Rights and Liberties:
Citing "National Defense Needs," Obama Administration Says it Won't Sign Ban on Land Mines
Amy Goodman
Sex and Relationships:
Hot Mormon Muffins and Models for Jesus: What's With All the Sexy Christians?
Liz Langley
Take Action:
G-20 Meetings: Nothing Much Happened in the Suites, and There Was Too Much Punch in the Streets
Laura Flanders
Water:
Poseidon's Financial Shell Game: Why Is a Private Desalination Plant Asking for Public Money?
Peter Gleick
World:
Is Obama Following in the Footsteps of Bill Clinton?
Jeff Cohen
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.
See more stories tagged with: women, gloria steinem, helen thomas, courtney martin, dr. ana nogales
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