International Women’s Day began 99 years ago. With so much progress accomplished since 1911, yet so much more remaining to be done, it seems to me that it’s time for women to change our approach to something closer Sojourner Truth’s.

Her advice to women as she stated it in the above quote to Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of the influential anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, when they met in 1853, comes from a position of knowing her own power. Despite being been born into slavery and experiencing oppression, poverty, and discrimination far greater than most women reading this blog in 2010, Truth was way ahead of many of us in her perspective about how to advance equal rights.

Without question, in many places around the globe, women remain as oppressed as Sojourner Truth--born Isabella Baumfree in Ulster County, New York, and once sold for $100 and a herd of sheep--was before she “walked off” from her master.

But even in the most gender-repressive societies such as Yemen, there are Sojourner Truth-like women and girls such as ten-year-old Nujood Ali, who

This woman was no teabagger. She was a progressive Democratic woman, a key member of Obama’s base. The impassioned ones who swept him into office on a frothy wave of belief in the change he promised; the ones now feeling somewhere between skeptical and cynical.

“I want real health reform. What happened to that and what can I do about it?” The questioner lobbed this at me after my speech encouraging women to use our power as activists. If hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, then it would be very important to listen to what women like her had to say about Obama’s State of the Union address.

So I went to the discussion boards, the White House Facebook page, Twitter, and posted a query on my own Facebook page to see what my friends were saying about his speech.  The focus on jobs and the economy was clearly the top priority for most people and rightly so. Capping government spending, being transparent about who’s getting the pork, becoming a global leader in solar energy, and a tax break for small businesses all got shout outs for being ideas that people appreciated. He apologized elegantly without showing weakness. He said bipartisan twice, enough to keep the centrist

The time to be purists and hold politicians' feet to the fire is at the beginning of any battle. 

Here is what I wrote about abortion coverage back in September that summarizes how I think the issue should have been framed and fought for, hard, so that we would been able to mount a stronger campaign for fair health reform and then on to rescind the Hyde Amendment going forward

Accepting (and even defending!) the Capps amendment in the first place was a huge mistake. The opening salvos of the health reform debate should have been the time to challenge the entire notion of separating out one aspect of basic women's health care from any other. No, let me back up a bit and say I would have slammed Obama when he allowed family planning to be labeled controversial in the first stimulus package.

After acquiescing on those first two moments of decision, we were pretty well sunk. But the silver lining is that women began to realize--and got angry--that we'd been thrown under the bus by Congress, the president, and even some of our own advocacy organizations who had been complicit. 

But it good that anger breeds activism. We can do something about this, you know. It is always up to advocates to make politicians do the right thing. Today is the best day to start driving our own bus, and turning things around. The Women's Media Center has declared today Not Under the Bus Day. Go to their website and find lots of direct action you can take that wil make a difference. Whether or not it changes the outcome of this particular health reform vote, it will without question set a new and better path down the road to women's heath care that's fair, safe, and fully covered. 

I'm personally on this bus. Won't you jump on and make a difference for women's health going forward?

I served on the U.S. government delegation to the 5-year evaluation of progress toward achieving the Cairo goals in 1999. But during the Bush administration, not only did the U.S. fail to pull its pledged share of the global load to empower women through health and development programs, the right wing led a vigorous charge to dismantle those efforts. Believe me, people like me weren't invited to take tea in the Ben Franklin Room!

Fortunately, women leaders from other countries refused to go backward. They held back the Bush onslaught. There was a global sigh of relief when President Obama rescinded the Global Gag Rule as one of his first acts after being inaugurated last year. With Clinton at the helm at State, there's no question women and girls globally have a champion who will work to make sure progress begins again. For as she herself first said in her groundbreaking 1995 speech at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing: women's rights are human rights and human rights are women's rights. Watch the video of her speech here:

Though I've been away from the state of my birth for almost as many years as I lived there, I have continued to subscribe to the Texas Monthly wherever life has taken me. It's a great magazine in general, but I especially look forward to their annual "Bum Steer" awards, in which they skewer the high, the low, and the absurd. The intro to the just published 2010 awards reads, in TM's typically diffident (and alphabetical) fashion:

It was a year of accomplice apes, bedraggled Bugattis, Christlike Cheetos, dim-witted deli-owning Democrats, egregious errata, fatal foreplay, gun-toting golfers, heartless high school hoopsters, ignoble implants, jackass judges, killer Kims, laughingstock legislators...shameless Stanford, territorial T-Boone, useful urine, vituperative vixens...and zero tolerance zealots.

Since my son lives in the former Sugar Land congressional district--arguably the most conservative in the nation--of the #1 Bum Steer, I cannot resist sharing the cover with you. Get your barfbags out, Ladies and Laddies. It doesn't get any "bummer" than this, but who else would you place on your bum steer list if you were doing the choosing?

The Senate passed its version of what they are now calling "health insurance reform" in the snowy dark of the winter solstice night, moving Majority Harry Reid's (D-NV) bill (stuffed into its sausage casing) toward likely final Senate passage later this week. The so-called compromise to Sen. Nelson's (D-NE) Stupak-like language in there, banning abortion coverage unless a woman turns herself into a pretzel, and over in the House, Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) is still yammering that's not stringent enough. The fight will continue this week and then go to conference committee. Ample time remains for more mischief to be done, or for improvements to be made. Get the latest information and take action daily at notunderthebus.com.

At a critical moment for health care reform, Townsend says it is essential for religious progressives to speak up.

December 16, 2009

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend broadened the Kennedy family’s dispute with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops Tuesday night.

She elaborated on an op-ed she wrote for Politico.com criticizing the Conference of Catholic Bishops’ opposition to health care reform unless an unprecedented expansion of restrictions against abortion is included. “I don’t think the bishops should be allowed to do that,” she said Tuesday night. “I think we should be speaking out (against them).”
Townsend, former lieutenant governor of Maryland, also said it was crucial for progressives from within religious groups who had fought for women’s rights and gay rights to be “more articulate” about their faith.

“We progressive religious people have our backs against the wall. We allowed it to happen,” she said.

Citing Pew Center polls that show Republicans are more likely to say they are religious than Democrats, Townsend said not allowing one party to claim religion “means speaking about it and talking about it.” Already, she said, evangelicals are changing course, supporting progressive civil rights causes, “while our bishops are stuck.”

She questioned whether “you can build on something that is fundamentally corrupt