One more must-read, just in case you (like me, gulp) missed it: Susan Faludi’s recent oped at the NYTimes. Writes Faludi:

As Thelma, the housewife turned renegade, says to her friend in “Thelma & Louise” as the two women flee the law through the American West, “Something’s crossed over in me.”

Senator Clinton might well say the same. In the final stretch of the primary season, she seems to have stepped across an unstated gender divide, transforming herself from referee to contender.

What’s more, she seems to have taken to her new role with a Thelma-like relish. We are witnessing a female competitor delighting in the undomesticated fray. Her new no-holds-barred pugnacity and gleeful perseverance have revamped her image in the eyes of begrudging white male voters, who previously saw her as the sanctioning “sivilizer,” a political Aunt Polly whose goody-goody directives made them want to head for the hills.

I know it’s over. I imagine she knows it’s over. But I admit, I’m truly enjoying that glee in her eyes. That woman is one tough cookie, and I mean that in only the best of ways.

Marie Cocco has a poignant piece in yesterday’s Washington Post that’s well worth a read. In “Misogyny I Won’t Miss,” after cataloguing the range of sexist insults lobbed at Hillary Clinton from right and from left, Cocco concludes, “For all Clinton’s political blemishes, the darker stain that has been exposed is the hatred of women that is accepted as a part of our culture.”

Culture = Democrats included.

Writes Cocco,

I will not miss the deafening, depressing silence of Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean or other leading Democrats, who to my knowledge (with the exception of Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland) haven’t publicly uttered a word of outrage at the unrelenting, sex-based hate that has been hurled at a former first lady and two-term senator from New York. Among those holding their tongues are hundreds of Democrats for whom Clinton has campaigned and raised millions of dollars. Don Imus endured more public ire from the political class when he insulted the Rutgers University women’s basketball team.

Depressing indeed.

As promised, my quick report on this week’s “Women and Ambition” panel co-sponsored by the National Council for Research on Women and PricewaterhouseCoopers:

The thing I love about corporate panels is that they start and finish on time. They are impeccably moderated. They serve food. This one delivered on all fronts, and went a step beyond. Every audience member was given a remote control devise by which to cast votes, enabling the moderator to poll us in real time and post the results on a big screen up front. It was cooler than Oprah, I swear.

There were some interesting results from the audience poll: 75% of the women in the crowd described themselves as “ambitious.” 94% of the men in attendance said the word “ambitious”, when used to describe someone, carried a positive connotation, but only 57% of the women agreed.

Women’s ambition is certainly a hot-button issue these days. Everyone agrees that we should be much further along in terms of our representation at the top tiers of corporate and political leadership than we are. How are ambitions born? What impedes then? What can companies do to help women nurture and realize theirs? Panelists–psychiatrist and author Anna Fels, the White House Project’s Marie Wilson, entrepreneurship scholar Myra Hart, law partner Marsha Simms, and economist Lise Vesterlund–sounded off on these issues, and more.

Some memorable quips:

Moderator Jennifer Allyn: “We’ve been talking about critical mass since the 1970s. There has to be more than 16% [the percent of women in Congress] before women can stop being seen as the ‘only’ and constitute more of a critical mass.”

Marie Wilson: “Anytime you have only one woman in a top position, all you see is their gender–hair, hemlines, and husbands.” “You cannot be what you cannot see. So we have to make the women who are in leadership more visible.”

Myra Hart: “Research shows that women straight out of Harvard Business School land the same kinds of jobs at the same compensation of men. But 5 years later, women’s career paths indicate a change. Much of it may be self-selection, but some of it is not.”

Lisa Vesterlund: “Research shows it’s not that women are under-confident about their ability to compete and win. It’s than men are actually over-confident about theirs.”

And my personal favorite:

Marie Wilson: “In the last 6 months of media coverage, Hillary Clinton’s ambition has been described as ‘unquenchable.’ John McCain’s ambition hasn’t been mentioned at all.”

For more on women’s leadership, consider joining me at the Council’s annual conference this year, titled “Hitting the Ground Running: Research, Activism, and Leadership for a New Era,” on June 5-7 at NYU. To register, contact Jessyca Dudley at jdudley@ncrw.org, 212/785-7335, x205 or visit www.ncrw.org.

For those in NYC looking to be inspired, come join me on Sunday afternoon for a reading by kid writers in Bryant Park!

Writers at Writopia Lab (pictured) have been arduously developing short stories, memoirs, op-eds, scripts, and poetry over the past six months under the tutelage of journalist Rebecca Segall and her team. They’ll be sharing them on Sunday, May 18th, from noon to 3:00pm. There will be a tent set up in case of rain. The youngest writers (ages 9-13) will read from noon to 1:30pm; the teens will read from 1:30-3:00pm. Folks can come and go as they wish.

This summer, I’m excited to be teaching a class for Writopia Lab. More about that, and more, in the e-newsletter I’ll be sending next week!

This is my cousin Shaina, at her ballet recital. She’s a bumble bee. Aw. I took ballet at Shaina’s age too and didn’t quit til college. When the ballet teachers started telling some of the girls in my classes to lose weight I cut loose. I liked me my HoHos. So enjoy the dance of the bumble bees Shaina, but if you keep at it, fight for the right to your Hoho, too 🙂

The economy may be Issue No. 1, but what do working women have to say about it all?

The leading labor-rights organization, the AFL-CIO, and its community partner, Working America, are collecting data online for their Ask a Working Woman survey between now and June 20. The survey is a chance for working women to tell decision-makers what it’s like to be a working woman in America in election years. It’s open to all. They want to hear what working women need – health care, pension benefits, flex time? – to make the crazy juggling act that is working womanhood easier.

Findings will be announced to decision makers and released in nationwide media in order to highlight and help improve the status of the working mothers, daughters, sisters, grandmothers, aunts, cousins, nieces, you get the picture. In 2006, more than 22,000 working American women took the survey. I hope in 2008 they get even more.

There’s more background information about the survey available on the AFL-CIO News Blog.

The devastation in Myanmar and China has been so overwhelming as to render me silent on it all. But this morning I caught a segment on the news, and later read in the paper, about all the Chinese parents who have lost their only child. And I lost it.

There’s a Bloggers Unite for Human Rights challenge going on today and so here I am, still wordless, carrying unspeakable grief in my heart all the while knowing it’s nothing compared to what the victims of the cyclone and the earthquake are feeling on the other side of the world.

Amnesty International has posted links to a number of their campaigns–ways to get involved in human rights and aid efforts around the globe. And here is a link to the Red Cross’ donate page.

But here’s my lingering question for this day, and I know I have much to learn from others on this front: When devastation is so emotionally overwhelming that your impulse is to turn away, what can you do in that moment, really do, to stay human and not just let yourself turn away?

I just got an email from a coordinator at Current TV, where they just released a compelling video that profiles “Ducky Doolittle” as she travels across the country teaching people about sexual empowerment. So I’m sitting here at Starbucks (yes, evil Starbucks) and I open the link for the video and before I know it Ducky is shouting “THIS IS THE CLITORIS!” through my computer, for all of Starbucks to hear. Hehe. I guess that’s kind of the point–and I’m all for it. But still, I’m left here at Starbucks kinda wanting to crawl under my chair.

I’m late and light on posting today because this morning I went to an 8am panel on “Women and Ambition,” sponsored by the National Council for Research on Women’s Corporate Circle. Those corporate ladies start early!

A true post about it coming before week’s end, but in the meantime, I wanted to share a little good fortune: I realized once on the subway that I already own the two amazing books that were included in the giveaway package. So I’d like to offer them as giveaways to the first two people who email me at girlwpen@gmail.com with their snail mail addresses. Please specify your choice. The books are:

1. Anna Fels, Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women’s Changing Lives
2. Marie Wilson, Closing the Leadership Gap: Why Women Can and Must Help Run the World (with a new afterword)

And an aside: I just did a quick Google image search using the word “ambition” and all the pictures that came up featured guess who…men! Except for this one above. Hmmm.

Just of few of many links, culled from around the internets:

NPR host Renee Montagne reports on “The Mother’s Index,” which compares the well-being of mothers and children in 146 countries.

Broadsheet sounds off on some pop culture mom-ranking.

MotherTalk blog tours Choosing You: Deciding to Have a Baby on My Own and The Working Woman’s Pregnancy Book.

And PunditMom smartly rants on the media branding of families, from the perspective of an adoptive mother.