Taking a break from election obsession to post this announcement for an upcoming event close to my heart. If in the NYC area, join me at St. John Church (44 John Street) on Jan. 18 at 7pm! Courtney Martin and I will be introducing as New York City’s young women writers read, in pairs, with the women writers who inspire them.
And huge, huge thank yous to those who made end-of-year donations to this fabulous organization. Your helps makes all the difference in the world.
Check out this upcoming series for professionals who are looking to get back into the workforce, called Opting Back In: A Program for Professionals Re-entering the Workforce.
When : Wednesdays, January 9th, 16th and 23rd, 2008
Where : Newman Conference Center, 151 East 25th Street, NYC
Offered by the Zicklin School of Business at Baruch College, Opting Back In is a program for women (and men) who want to relaunch their careers after stepping out of the workforce. For three intensive days, professional coaches, line managers, and Baruch faculty will help participants re-assess their career interests and goals, refresh their negotiating skills, re-energize their careers, and renew and update their knowledge of current business trends.
Speakers include current employers who have hired re-entry professionals, authors of recent books on career re-entry issues, award-winning business school faculty, and professionals who have successfully relaunched their careers after years at home.
My gal Lori Rotskoff is moderating one of the panels, and authors Leslie Bennetts and Pamela Stone are among the speakers. Psst…pass it on!
So it’s that time of year, and I spent last night at the Girls Write Now office writing letter to my nearest and dearest, telling them why I love GWN and that I’ve recently joined their Advisory Board and asking them to consider making a donation to help keep this amazing organization strong. To those of you who receive my letter, I do hope you might consider! And to those I didn’t have the guts to send letters to, you can always of course simply donate by clicking here, or by doing your regular holiday shopping through here. To learn more about the org, click here. And to read some of the girls’ writing, go here. To hear ’em read, click play above!
Thanks to Patti for the sticky hearts, and to Lauren for the beauty bag raffle. I love my polish I “won.”
And while I’m at it, just to spread the luv, thought I’d post a link here to feministing’s development campaign–they’re asking for donations to help them with technological upgrades. Remember, this is the blog that just won the Blogger’s Choice Award for Best Political Blog and is run largely out of pocket by some amazing young women who are changing the way we think and talk and connect around feminist issues online–and in the world.
Ho ho ho, and Happy 3rd night of Channukah to all!!!
The 2008 program for the Council on Contemporary Families Annual Conference! You heard it here first 🙂
April 25 – 26, 2008
Family Issues in Contention
University of Illinois at Chicago
Sessions include:
Young People Hooking Up- Should We Be Worried?
Presider: Waldo Johnson, University of Chicago
Debra Tolman, San Francisco State University
Laura Sessions, Author, Unhooked
Paula England, Stanford University
Is Transracial and Transnational Adoption the Right Policy for Parents? Children? Society?
Presider, Andrae’ Brown, City University of New York
Ruth McRoy, University of Texas at Austin;
Adam Pertman, Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute
Jeanne Howard, Illinois State University;
Pamela Quiroz, University of Illinois in Chicago
Media Workshops:
How to get press coverage of your work
Virginia Rutter, Framingham State College
Joshua Coleman, Psychologist
Adam Pertman, Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute
Translating academic research into popular books and magazine articles
Kerry Ann Rockquemore, University of Illinois at Chicago
Pepper Schwartz, University of Washington
Writing Op Eds
Stephanie Coontz, Evergreen State College
What you should know about Blogging and Why
Deborah Siegel, Woodhull Institute (aka ME!)
And lots more. For more info and to register, click here.
Hey, did anyone go to Woodhull dinner seminar with Leslie Morgan Steiner last night while I was out careening at Helaine Olen’s book party?! BTW, that book party had the best party food ever–little tea sandwiches with cucumber and yogurt, artichoke crostini, and so forth. Party goers included Jessie Klein (who is writing a fabulous book on gender and school violence), Esther Perel (whose book Mating in Captivity just came out in paper) and my better half, Daphne Uviller (who co-edited Only Child with me). Helaine looked radiant in her little red dress, and it was fun meeting some of the women currently running Mediabistro. I may be teaching an intensive with Mediabistro soon–will blab about it here if I do.
And here’s another event some of you might be interested in, here in town:
New York Women in Communications Presents:
An Evening with Wall Street Insider
Maria Bartiromo
Date: Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Location: MSN, 1290 Avenue of the Americas, 6th Floor
Time: 6:00pm-8:00pm
Maria Bartiromo, host and managing editor of “The Wall Street Journal Report with Maria Bartiromo,” and anchor of CNBC’s “Closing Bell” will be interviewed by Robert Dilenschneider, CEO of The Dilenschneider Group and author of the recently released “Power and Influence: The Rules Have Changed” (McGrawHill) on Tuesday, December 18th, 6:00 PM at MSN.
Bob will speak with Maria about her stellar career as a financial journalist, her skill at getting important people such as Condoleezza Rice, Alan Greenspan and President Bush to sit down and talk to her about issues facing the economy and how publicists and corporate PR people should work with the financial media.
Cost: $35 for members, $50 for nonmembers, $20 for student members.
Seating is limited, register here.
This just in from my friends at Woodhull:
On Wednesday, Nov. 28 here in NYC, Leslie Morgan Steiner, editor of the best selling anthology “Mommy Wars” and the writer of the WashingtonPost.com column “On Balance” opens up about her struggles to manage life as mother with ambitious career goals. At this seminar, she will discuss how she navigates through the hectic world of “having it all” and what she’s learned from talking with all types of mothers about how they made their choices to stay at home or go to work.
Completely Unbalanced: Exploding Work/Life Myths
When: Wednesday, November 28, 2007; 6:30 PM -8:30 PM
Where: The Woodhull Office, 32 Broadway, Suite 1801, New York, NY 10004
Cost: $10
For more information about this event, click here. To reserve your spot, contact rsvp@woodhull.org
So this Saturday I spent some time at the Freedom on Our Terms conference, commemorating the 30th anniversary of the National Women’s Conference in Houston back in 1977. A few great quips from the afternoon plenary:
Rosie O’Donnell on the Bush Administration: “What they’re feeding you is McDonalds. It gives you diarrhea and ultimately it kills you.”
Rosie on Mos Def: “Mos Def said the best line on Bill Maher: ‘From Bush to Clinton to Bush to Clinton, they’re passing around the Presidency like a party joint.”
Rosie on the solution to it all: “Ingest art.”
Liz Holtzman on Bella Abzug in Congress: “They made her take her hat off, but they couldn’t shut her up.”
The spirit of Bella infused the afternoon. It was moving. The goal of the conference was to create “a 21st century agenda for action,” updating the planks from 1977. Two young women, Lala Wu and Kate Collier, coauthored a fabulous-looking document for the conference, called “The National Plan of Action: Then and Now.” It’s a great status report. Tons of younger women were in attendance. But I was frustrated by the lack of real intergenerational conversation during the bits that I saw.
It’s easy to be a critic, and I know how much goes into planning this kind of event. So hats off to the organizers, and I know that hearts are in absolutely the right place. But it bothered me that the line-up of younger women at the afternoon plenary were left with only a few minutes each to talk about their organizations, and that there was no time left for them to dialog amongst themselves, or with older feminists. The reason for the time crunch? From what I could tell, the movement veterans slated to speak–and there were many of them–had used up all the time and things were running late. But maybe there was another reason too? Maybe Rosie showed up late? (I came midway through her speech.) In any event, it was frustrating not to hear more from the young women on the stage at the end.
The media panel I went to, on the other hand, was fantastic–Laura Flanders, Emily McKahnn from The Motherhood, Sonia Ossioro (Pres. of NOW-NYC, which recently landed a media coup of their own), and Lauren Brill, a kick-ass young stringer for the WNBA. The room was so full, we were sitting on desks and window sills. The crowd spanned the ages, and the discussion could have gone on for hours. I kind of wish it had. I would have loved to have heard more from some of those in attendance–Shelby Knox was there! I’m looking forward to more of this kind of discussion at this year’s Women, Action, and the Media Conference, on March 28-30, at MIT.
(Photo cred. Check out this and some great photos from Houston 1977 here.)
The seventies are IN! In celebration of the 30th Anniversary of the First National Women’s Conference in Houston, Texas 1977, The Bella Abzug Leadership Institute and Girls Speak Out are sponsoring a conference at Hunter College this weekend called the National Conference for Women and Girls, Freedom on Our Terms: From Houston 1977 – NY 2007. The schedule is posted here.
A very breathy and ambitious (and I’ll admit, inspiring) description of it all is posted here (scroll down to the program summary). In a nutshell, participants will examine the 26 planks that resulted in the original National Platform for Action established in Houston back when I was, um, 8 years old, which dealt with all aspects of women’s lives. The goal of the weekend is to “boldly strategize to update the platform to the present, and identify and target goals for the future.” Sounds good, and my hope is that the feeling there will be authentically intergenerational.
Friend plug alert! Two of my besties are doing very cool things in NYC this next week. On Sunday, Nov. 11, documentary filmmaker Ilana Trachtman will be screening her amazingly moving film, Praying with Lior, at theMargaret Mead Film Festival here at the Museum of Natural History. If you have the chance to see it–and Ilana is touring the country with it this year–do!
Then, on Monday, Nov. 12, Rebecca Wallace-Segall–the mastermind behind WritopiaLab–will be hosting a reading at the Lincoln Square B&N in which young writers from her workshops read from their work. Rebecca has also started a blog with her emerging writers, and is raising some interesting issues about youth, writing, imagination, and culture. For instance, she asks, “Can some video games (violent ones included) sometimes play a positive role in inspiring the minds of youth? Can they transcend their insidious time-wasting, violence-encouraging, obesity-making, inclinations?” Hmm…Marco?!
Cool event going on in my neighborhood today, which sadly I can’t attend. But maybe someone else out there can, and can tell me about it!
Join filmmaker Therese Shechter as she takes a funny, moving and very personal journey into the heart of modern Feminism with her film, “I Was a Teenage Feminist.” Armed with a video camera and an irreverent sense of humor, Therese talks with Feminist superstars, rowdy frat boys, liberated Cosmo girls and Radical Cheerleaders, all in her quest to find out whether Feminism can still be a source of personal and political power. With music by Ani DiFranco, Lavababy, Gina Young, Moxie Starpark and the legendary Helen Reddy,”I Was A Teenage Feminist” redefines the F Word for a new generation. If you, like me, can’t be there, you can still click here to watch some clips from the film.
The Girls Project Film Series
Symphony Space
Sunday, November 4th
6:00 pm
2537 Broadway at 95th Street, New York. Click here for tickets and info
(Thanks to Lani–who is debutting her own film, Praying with Lior, in Boston today–for the heads up!)
