intergenerational

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.

Well now this is interesting–and on a continuum, somehow, with the National Organization for Women’s late 1960s protests against sex-segregated help-wanted ads in the New York Times. As Lynn Harris reports over at Broadsheet, my local NOW chapter (NYC-NOW) has scored a homerun with their anti-human trafficking campaign. Specifically, New York magazine announced this week that it would no longer be running ads for sexual services, including escort agencies and suspicious “massage.” And according to the New York Post, it’s the 15th publication to do so this year.

Writes Lynn, in good third-wave feminist style,

To be sure, not every “Punjab Princess” advertising in New York is doing “bodywork” against her will. And it’s hard to imagine that Pink Orchid is going to close up shop just because it can no longer snare New York readers pretending to be looking for the Approval Matrix. But those are hardly good reasons to shrug and keep running the ads, or to dodge an opportunity to make a move based on principle. One of NOW’s stated goals is to “shed light on how the trafficking industry is a part of the local economy and identify the legitimate businesses that do business with traffickers.” At very least, it’s a necessary reminder that women and men are trafficked not just in Bangkok, and not just in hidden brothels, but right next to our own crossword puzzles.

Our dear Courtney Martin has done it again. Check out her retort to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s recent op-ed on “Generation Q” over at American Prospect. In Friedman’s piece, Q is for Quiet. Courtney’s called hers “Generation Overwhelmed.” If this girl ain’t emerging as one of the most important voices of a generation, I don’t know who is.

(Full disclosure: I was at the party Courtney mentions in her piece. Marco and I were the oldest ones in the room, representing Boomer and Gen X respectively, and we were, as usual, deeply inspired by the FOCs–friends of Courtney–we met that night.)

As I’ve mentioned here before, photographer Emma Bee Bernstein and writer Nona Willis-Aronowitz (daughter of Ellen Willis) are writing a book based on a six-week road trip across the USA. I have a sense this book is going to be big. Read about it already in the Metro. They’re photographing and talking to young, smart, ambitious women about what they think and feel about feminism. They’re also talking to feminists of their mother’s generation and beyond, to ask them about the past and future of feminism. (Um, I am not their mothers’ generation but I got talked to about the future of feminism and let’s just say that Nona is another who I would follow anywhere. Love that girl.)

They started in Chicago, have taken weekend trips to Minneapolis and the Detroit area, and a couple days ago, they started on the long stretch across the country. I’ve set them up with my dear friend Shelby in Wyoming. Can’t wait to hear how that goes. Check out their blog, from the road, GIRLdrive. Here’s a lil taste:

Both of our mothers were deeply involved in Second Wave feminism, so we are closely connected to the movement’s history. But our roadtrip seeks to discover how other women our age grapple with this history of freedom, equality, joy, ambition, sex, and love.

This book is about our generation. It’s about gutsy young women across the American cityscape. It’s about the past and the present, and it glimmers on the future. It’s about the promise of the open road. It’s about us—girls with drive who can’t even take a road trip without turning it into a book.

Now how’s that, Jack Kerouac.

So, please check out their blog and comment away–but know that the blog comments are fair game for the book, hehe.

…that one I mentioned earlier today is here, and it’s called “From Barricades to Blogs.” Reporter Jennie Yabroff spoke to some feministas across the generations and cites some great quips from Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Katha Pollitt, Susan Faludi, and Jessica Valenti. (She mentions my book! Whahoo!!)

Three quick hits before I dash off to a Girls Write Now meeting tonight:

Camille Paglia sounds off on “the sisterhood myth” over at The Guardian, while six leading feminists sound off on the books that changed their lives.

Molly Bennett interviews feministing.com’s Jessica Valenti in The Nation.

And last weekend Smith College celebrated the 65th anniversary of its renowned Sophia Smith Collection with history, art, feminism and the vivid voices of women across decades. Headlining the festivities was “Voices of Feminism Oral History Project,” a four-year initiative highlighting the stories of women overlooked by the longstanding notion of feminism as a white, middle class movement. Happy anniversary, archives!

Bonnie Erbe recently hosted a roundtable on feminism and Gen Y on PBS’s To the Contrary. Over at feministing.com, Gen Y feminist Ann Friedman responds to the charge that Gen Y is not a movement generation, noting that the online feminist community is where it’s at:

I think if the online feminist community has proved anything, it’s that we are a movement generation. I participated in feminist actions on my college campus, but that felt more like a club than a movement. I worked for a women’s rights nonprofit, but that felt more like a day job than a movement. I went to rallies and marches, but they felt more like one-off events than a movement. It took blogging here, and being part of a community of feminist bloggers, for me to really feel like part of a feminist movement. To feel I was part of a group of people, committed to a set of ideals, who are working day in and day out to advance those ideals.

So my question then is: When does a virtual movement become “real” in the eyes of those who have, in the past, done activism differently? Because it’s not just about getting young women involved in feminism. It’s about getting feminist organizations involved in online.

Scroll down here to see the video or just listen to the audio.

(I hear that a To the Contrary episode with clips from me and Jessica Valenti aired recently, but I can’t seem to find the link! If anyone has seen it, please let me know? And shoot me the link? Many thanks.)

More on the young feminist road trip I mentioned briskly in an earlier post. Twenty-three year old writer Nona Willis-Aronowitz (daughter of Ellen Willis, founder of Redstockings, Voice editor, and the New Yorker’s first rock critic) is pairing up with Emma Bernstein (daughter of painter and art journal editor Susan Bee — and niece of my mentor/friend Susan Bernstein) to document what “feminism” means to members of their generation, in words and images. Their book will map the future and acknowledge the past. I’m looking forward to doing whatever I can to help these ladies out – how much do I LOVE this project?!

From the National Women’s History Project’s blog, Writing Women Back into History, come these tidbits and reminders:

September includes the anniversaries of Billie Jean King defeating male chauvinist, Bobbie Riggs, on the tennis court in 1973 and Sandra Day O’Connor being sworn in as the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court eight years later. The first weeks of September also include the play-offs for the WNBA.

GREAT hooks for anyone considering writing an op-ed this month!

(Pic is of the tennis dress King wore at the match.)

Louise France and Eva Wiseman set it straight, with a piece in the Observer Woman on how younger women’s attempts to rebrand feminism 35 years after the launch of Spare Rib magazine. The article begins:

My mother and I are in the pub. I tell her that I’m researching a piece about Britain’s young feminists. My mother, who is in her 50s and was inspired by reading Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch when she was a Seventies housewife, looks astonished. ‘But there aren’t any,’ she says, with the finality of a lid being placed on a saucepan.

F-Word editor Jess McCabe and other young feminists answer the following questions: How did you become a feminist? How are you different from your mum’s generation? What are the clichés about feminism? Can you be a feminist and go to a lap-dancing club? What makes you angry? Check out their answers here.

(Thank you, Catherine, for the clarification!! -GWP)