Maybe you'll be inspired to use the power of your voice, pen, mouse, or video camera to increase public awareness of major milestones in women's advancement too on August 26?

One of the most exciting new efforts to achieve gender parity is called "EVE: Equal Representation Everywhere." If you can only be that which you can see, then girls need to be able to see as many women in leadershsip roles as men. And that includes in statuary, on stamps. and everywhere else that we give recognition to people who have made significant accomplishments.

Right now EVE is looking at making sure women are represented in parade balloons such as will be wafting above July 4th parades all around the country. Here's how you can help:

Join EVE’s 99 Club to help fund the new Amelia Earhart balloon!

We need 99 donors to give $99 each. Visit our secure online donation page to contribute today — and put Amelia Earhart back in the skies!

Americans love parades. And one of the things we love best about parades are those giant helium balloons: floating behemoths in the shape of popular characters like Uncle Sam, Spider Man, Smokey the Bear, Santa Claus, Garfield, and hundreds of others.

But did you know that very few parade balloons depict female characters?

That’s why EVE is teaming up with StarBound Entertainment, one of the country’s top balloon suppliers, to create a whole new line of balloons featuring great American women.

First up: Amelia Earhart!

Our new Amelia Earhart balloon will be a replica of Earhart’s famous red Lockheed Vega (pictured up top), with Amelia in the cockpit. This 40-foot helium balloon will appear in parades all over the country, and be seen by millions of Americans on TV and in local celebrations.

In honor of the original Ninety-Nines, the club for women pilots founded by Amelia Earhart in 1929, we’ve named our fundraising group the 99 Club.

We need 99 donors to give $99 dollars each — $9,801 total — so we can put Amelia Earhart back in the skies.

Your donation enrolls you as a member of EVE’s 99 Club, and we’ll list your name on the Wall of Fame (see the bottom of this page). We’ll also list you on our Donor page.

Just $99, and Amelia will fly once more. Families, kids — little girls — all over the country will be reminded of one of America’s greatest heroines.

Become a member of the 99 Club today! Visit our secure online donation page to contribute — and put Amelia Earhart back in the skies!



Listen on Blogtalk radio to the lively multi-generational conversation that took place last night on Second Life--and please share your comments--I'd love to hear how you would answer the questions that we were asked.

The panelists are journalist and author Lynn Harris, youth activist Shelby Knox, and myself talking with host Jay Ackroyd.

Submit your Mother's Day story to the Women's Media Center here and help spread the word that there are many choices women make about pregnancy and childbearing over the course of their lives. As a mother, I celebrate our choices as we celebrate Mother's Day.

Three of our WomenGirlsLadies intergenerational panel members, Deborah Siegel, Courtney Martin, and I (we were missing Kristal Brent Zook, who couldn't change her teaching schedule to appear on the show) had a chance to talk with Eldridge and Co. host Ronnie Eldridge on her CUNY television show.

Click the photo above to see the video. We covered the intergenerational waterfront, from the state of the women's movement, what happens when feminists disagree about political candidates, how we'e going to get worklfe balance policies and actual practice, and what we all have in common to how the women's movement has changed men too.

Our next public event will be Sept. 28 at the University of Missouri Kansas City. We'd love to come speak to your group too! Contact me and I'll be delighted to give you more information.

Words of Choice, dynamic pro-choice theater company from New York, is bringing attention to choice this weekend where it is needed most: in the nation's Capitol.
 
On Friday, April 23 at 7 pm, Words of Choice will appear in DC in partnership with the amazing DC Abortion Fund for an event that will raise funds to help women pay for abortions. The performance will be in DC at the Lankford Auditorium, 1200 U St., NW, in the True Reformer Building. A brief discussion follows the 70-minute performance.
 
The DC Abortion Fund (DCAF) is an all-volunteer, non-profit organization that makes grants and no-interest loans to DC women who cannot afford an abortion. „We hope to make „choice‰ a reality because we believe that a woman‚s right to healthcare should not depend on her wallet," it rights.
 
Tickets are $20 and $40. See www.wordsofchoice.org for ticket purchasing information.
Or go to DCAF on Network for Good.
 
On Sunday, April 25 at 4:30 pm, Words of Choice will be performing at the First Amnesty International Human Rights Art Festival in Silver Spring MD.  The performance at Montgomery College (Silver Spring/Takoma), Health Sciences Auditorium 122, (7977 Georgia Ave. across from the Performing Arts Center) is free and open to the public.
 
A discussion will follow with Jill Morrison, reproductive rights specialist at the National Women's Law Center, Claire Moses, editorial director of Feminist Studies and professor of women's studies at the University of Maryland, and moderated by Regina Oldak, former chair of the Montgomery County Commission on Women, a Board member of Planned Parenthood Metro Washington, and counsel at the National Women's Law Center. Planned Parenthood Metro Washington will be on hand with literature and information.
 
Words of Choice is making sure that reproductive freedom is heard and seen at this Human Rights Art Festival, which includes over 150 artists and arts activities.  "It's an honor to be bringing reproductive justice topics to this weekend festival celebrating human rights and the arts that speak to them," said Cindy Cooper, creator of Words of Choice.
 
Words of Choice ˆ smart, funny, endangered ˆ will feature Crista Marie Jackson, Carl H. Jaynes and Claudia Schneider, under the direction of Francesca Mantani Arkus. This cast traveled to Colorado and Kansas in 2008, and performed there with Dr. George Tiller before he was murdered.  These performances are dedicated to Dr. Tiller.
 
See the Words of Choice promotional trailer on YouTube and learn more about it at its blog.
 



It’s said that when a baby elephant is being trained, she is tied to a post almost immediately after birth. During the first few weeks of life, she attempts to break free of her restraints, but she’s not strong enough. So she comes to believe she can’t get away from what is holding her back even after she has grown large and plenty powerful to uproot the post entirely. As a consequence, even as an adult, she remains tied to the post due to an internally motivated behavior that is no longer rooted in external reality.

Wow, that just perfectly describes so many of the women in my generation, including myself. If women want to embrace our power we must reject baby elephant thinking and throw off the shackles of learned behavior that no longer serves us. And when older women talk with younger ones, they might have no reference point for the barriers we older ones are all too familiar with. No wonder there can be strains on communication across generations!

One of the most heartening differences I have found among the generations is that the younger women are, the less likely they are to hold such false restraints in their minds. But the older women are, the more likely they are to have a sense of engagement with the women's movement that has fought for the very advances that created the amazing possibilities women today have to do or be whatever they choose. Without a movement, it is easy to start going backward. History is replete with advances that turned into retreats because people didn't know how they got there.

All of this is why I feel the conversation engendered by WomenGirlsLadies is so important, and I invite you to participate in it here,  on the WomenGirlsLadies blog or in person if we are so fortunate as to be invited to your university or organization.

Diane Sawyer asked Pelosi herself whether she agrees with that perception in her March 22 interview, the day after the health reform bill passed the House of Representatives. Pelosi seemed a little taken aback, as she often does, and demurely replied that she takes the idea as a compliment to all women.

Linda Lowen writing on About.com suggests that Pelosi pumped up her political muscle significantly from this victory, while at the same time acknowledging the irony that the staunchly pro-choice legislator caved to anti-choice Democrats to extract the votes she needed. And on Morning Joe today the debate was whether Pelosi, Sandra O'Connor, Hillary Clinton, or Eleanor Roosevelt deserved that crown (Though Joe was quick to point out that her approval rating hovers at 11%). Or would you consider a media icon like Oprah Winfrey more powerful?

It seems to me that when anyone wins a big battle, the degree of power attributed to her or him goes way up. Pelosi deserves to take a victory lap, though in my opinion she's running hobbled by her own inability to overcome the Stupak anti-choice faction of her party as well as Obama's unwillingness to stand by his original public option proposal.

What are your thoughts? Who do you think is the most powerful woman in American history?

This beautiful piece was written as an exclusive for the Women's Media Center by Shruti Swamy a writer for India Currents Magazine, currently working toward her MFA in fiction at San Francisco State University. Thanks to the Women's Media Center for permitting the republishing of this and other articles.

Far from a generational divide, the author, as a young feminist, finds sustenance in the ways the women in her family handled their more limited life choices.

The author's grandmother, Baa, at her house in Mumbai.

It’s hard for me to imagine what my grandmother’s youth was like, spent in rural and then urban India. At 16, she was arrange-married to a man she had met once years before, at 17 pregnant with her first child, by 21 the mother of three young children. There are few pictures of her from that time, so I’ve made them up for myself; Baa on her wedding day in hot, heavy clothes; Baa working in the green fields through her first pregnancy, chewing ginger for strength; Baa with another baby in her arms, cooking dinner for her family.

I had been thinking of her when I first read in the New York Times about a perceived generational divide in feminist responses to the Stupak amendment (“In Support of Abortion, it’s Personal v. Political”). Feminists