Laura Flanders: Let’s talk about the stimulus.  What infrastructural contribution would you all offer to the stimulus package?

Audience member: There’s no way you can think about success for anyone when you don’t think of children’s development, of women and their environment.  You’ve got to look at issues of health and healthcare first.

Ai-jen Poo: We’ve got to demand childcare — all the things that have been on our shelf for the past 40 years.  All that unfinished business needs to get done, and none of it is there.

Esther Broner: You know, I think back to when my students didn’t know what to do with their children during class, so we all brought the babies to class.  There was childcare after that.  Where is direct action now?

Melissa Silverstein (from the audience): I remember when the Women’s Action Coalition began (a group that started in 1991 by artists, in response to the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings) and met at the Quaker Meeting House to do actions.  When it died out, I felt a force depleted in me.  I’ve lately been spending my time working on issues related to women and pop culture, movies, and tv.  I’d like to ask people to think about how most people, not in NYC, only get to see big Hollywood blockbusters.  Only nine percent of films are directed by women.  Women’s visions are missing from mainstream America.  I spend a lot of time online, in my little world.  I feel very connected yet at the same time disconnected.  So, how do we take our connectivity with each other, and our disconnectivity, as women?  As Ai-jen was talking about domestic workers, I started thinking about freelancers — we need to connect to each other, too!

Ai-jen Poo: The work around the economy is a great way for women to connect.  Women are the last hired and first fired.  How do we see the economic stimulus as providing a chance for us to start connecting in new and broad ways around a common vision that is expansive?  Because all of these issues are connected: There are the historic women’s issues — childcare, representations of women in popular culture — but then there are newer issues like job creation.  Why don’t we demand 10,000 jobs for women in, for example, community organizing, or in nontraditional women’s fields like construction, where a lot of the new job creation is going to happen?  We have to make the links.

Esther Broner: At the same time, if we don’t have strong labor unions, we will not have change.  There has to be pressure for change.

Audience member: Let’s start another — intergenerational — WAC!

Laura Flanders: WAC itself was intergenerational, actually.  But after President Clinton was elected, and after 1996, WAC waned.  People got tired of going to meetings.  There was a sense of “that was tiring, but we made it, we got Clinton elected, and now let’s leave it to them”.  There’s a similar potential with the current moment.  But we can’t leave it to them.  We can’t stop.  But what’s it going to take?

Esther Broner: We need to march again.  I don’t want to be invisible anymore.  I want my voice very loud, and heard.

Laura Flanders: Is it people in the streets again that we need?  Ai-jen, what do you need?

Ai-jen Poo: We need a lot of things.  We need a vehicle, we need a great communications infrastructure…

Esther Broner: We need another Bella Abzug.

[A long line of women stands at the microphone, ready to speak…Time is waning…Laura asks each one to speak, but speak quickly.]

Audience member: I don’t think we are where we need to be with women’s right to choose.

Gloria Feldt (from the audience): A movement needs to move.  Power and energy comes from moving, not from standing still.  I see some women who are incredible leaders here – what Esther did in her life, what Elizabeth has done, what Ai-jen has done.  And yet I hear ‘We’re not here to lead, we’re here to spark.”  Well, the hell with that!  How do we as feminists get beyond wanting to be in a circle and sparking?  How do we get to lead?

Mia Herndon (from the audience): When we’ve lead in the past, we left a lot of people behind.  There are a lot of young women who don’t support feminism now because it’s left a bad taste in their mouth.  When we’re talking about money and power, we lose sight.  So we have to remember that.

Rita Henley Jensen: What we haven’t focused on enough is misogyny, and the end of welfare.  The US has the highest maternal mortality rate among developed nation; African American women die in pregnancy 3,4,5 times more often than white women.  We carry the hatred in this country across generations.

Audience member: Often we talk about academia as where we find our feminist ephiphanies.  But often we forget that feminism also happens in the K-12 realm as well.  As a feminist educator and activist, I often feel very alone at these kinds of events.  Feminist teachers really work alone; we don’t have foundations that support us, or coalitions.  Feminist teachers should make coalitions with each other.  I’d like to see feminist organizations partner with feminist teachers to work on issues together.  And I’d like to see curricular change.

Audience member (family court judge in Brooklyn, who worked with Barbara Seaman in early 1970s): The key going forward is to be able to communicate and build a structure of communications….

Audience member (from Mexico): One of the founders of the women’s movement in Brazil is in the audience; and I was one of the founders of the movement in Mexico.  We had the first women’s studies conference, with 400 attending.  In the 1970s and 1980s, we had a lot of international feminist communications.  We have to again increase international communications among feminists.  And I agree with Gloria Feldt, who said that leadership must lead.  In recent years, we have deconstructed everything.  We now need to CONSTRUCT.  We need to ask ourselves: what kind of feminism do we have for a real, real new deal?

Audience member: We are at a time when the celebration of women’s power is exciting and fierce.  I’ve been thinking of an idea: We should start a boat that goes in international waters and takes women’s art, lectures, and stories from country to country.  We should come together and do an environmentally-sound lovecraft, make the ocean our mutual space, and use media to broadcast from there.

Laura Flanders: A real mothership.