{"id":1563,"date":"2009-03-21T15:03:20","date_gmt":"2009-03-21T20:03:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/girlwpen.com\/?p=1563"},"modified":"2009-03-21T15:03:20","modified_gmt":"2009-03-21T20:03:20","slug":"liveblogging-what-does-the-stimulus-package-need-for-women","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/2009\/03\/21\/liveblogging-what-does-the-stimulus-package-need-for-women\/","title":{"rendered":"Liveblogging: What Will the Feminist New Deal Look Like?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Laura Flanders: <\/strong>Let’s talk about the stimulus.\u00c2\u00a0 What infrastructural contribution would you all offer to the stimulus package?<\/p>\n

Audience member:<\/strong> 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.\u00c2\u00a0 You’ve got to look at issues of health and healthcare first.<\/p>\n

Ai-jen Poo:<\/strong> We’ve got to demand childcare — all the things that have been on our shelf for the past 40 years.\u00c2\u00a0 All that unfinished business needs to get done, and none of it is there.<\/p>\n

Esther Broner<\/strong>: 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.\u00c2\u00a0 There was childcare after that.\u00c2\u00a0 Where is direct action now?<\/p>\n

Melissa Silverstein (from the audience):<\/strong> 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.\u00c2\u00a0 When it died out, I felt a force depleted in me.\u00c2\u00a0 I’ve lately been spending my time working on issues related to women and pop culture, movies, and tv.\u00c2\u00a0 I’d like to ask people to think about how most people, not in NYC, only get to see big Hollywood blockbusters.\u00c2\u00a0 Only nine percent of films are directed by women.\u00c2\u00a0 Women’s visions are missing from mainstream America.\u00c2\u00a0 I spend a lot of time online, in my little world.\u00c2\u00a0 I feel very connected yet at the same time disconnected.\u00c2\u00a0 So, how do we take our connectivity with each other, and our disconnectivity, as women?\u00c2\u00a0 As Ai-jen was talking about domestic workers, I started thinking about freelancers — we need to connect to each other, too!<\/p>\n

Ai-jen Poo:<\/strong> The work around the economy is a great way for women to connect.\u00c2\u00a0 Women are the last hired and first fired.\u00c2\u00a0 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?\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 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?\u00c2\u00a0 We have to make the links.<\/p>\n

Esther Broner: <\/strong>At the same time, if we don’t have strong labor unions, we will not have change.\u00c2\u00a0 There has to be pressure for change.<\/p>\n

Audience member<\/strong>: Let’s start another — intergenerational — WAC!<\/p>\n

Laura Flanders:<\/strong> WAC itself was intergenerational, actually.\u00c2\u00a0 But after President Clinton was elected, and after 1996, WAC waned.\u00c2\u00a0 People got tired of going to meetings.\u00c2\u00a0 There was a sense of “that was tiring, but we made it, we got Clinton elected, and now let’s leave it to them”.\u00c2\u00a0 There’s a similar potential with the current moment.\u00c2\u00a0 But we can’t leave it to them.\u00c2\u00a0 We can’t stop.\u00c2\u00a0 But what’s it going to take?<\/p>\n

Esther Broner:<\/strong> We need to march again.\u00c2\u00a0 I don’t want to be invisible anymore.\u00c2\u00a0 I want my voice very loud, and heard.<\/p>\n

Laura Flanders:<\/strong> Is it people in the streets again that we need?\u00c2\u00a0 Ai-jen, what do you<\/em> need?<\/p>\n

Ai-jen Poo:<\/strong> We need a lot of things.\u00c2\u00a0 We need a vehicle, we need a great communications infrastructure…<\/p>\n

Esther Broner: <\/strong>We need another Bella Abzug.<\/p>\n

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

Audience member:<\/strong> I don’t think we are where we need to be with women’s right to choose.<\/p>\n

Gloria Feldt (from the audience): <\/strong>A movement needs to move.\u00c2\u00a0 Power and energy comes from moving, not from standing still.\u00c2\u00a0 I see some women who are incredible leaders here – what Esther did in her life, what Elizabeth has done, what Ai-jen has done.\u00c2\u00a0 And yet I hear ‘We’re not here to lead, we’re here to spark.”\u00c2\u00a0 Well, the hell with that!\u00c2\u00a0 How do we as feminists get beyond wanting to be in a circle and sparking?\u00c2\u00a0 How do we get to lead?<\/p>\n

Mia Herndon (from the audience): <\/strong>When we’ve lead in the past, we left a lot of people behind.\u00c2\u00a0 There are a lot of young women who don’t support feminism now because it’s left a bad taste in their mouth.\u00c2\u00a0 When we’re talking about money and power, we lose sight.\u00c2\u00a0 So we have to remember that.<\/p>\n

Rita Henley Jensen:<\/strong> What we haven’t focused on enough is misogyny, and the end of welfare.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 We carry the hatred in this country across generations.<\/p>\n

Audience member:<\/strong> Often we talk about academia as where we find our feminist ephiphanies.\u00c2\u00a0 But often we forget that feminism also happens in the K-12 realm as well.\u00c2\u00a0 As a feminist educator and activist, I often feel very alone at these kinds of events.\u00c2\u00a0 Feminist teachers really work alone; we don’t have foundations that support us, or coalitions.\u00c2\u00a0 Feminist teachers should make coalitions with each other.\u00c2\u00a0 I’d like to see feminist organizations partner with feminist teachers to work on issues together.\u00c2\u00a0 And I’d like to see curricular change.<\/p>\n

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

Audience member (from Mexico): <\/strong>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.\u00c2\u00a0 We had the first women’s studies conference, with 400 attending.\u00c2\u00a0 In the 1970s and 1980s, we had a lot of international feminist communications.\u00c2\u00a0 We have to again increase international communications among feminists.\u00c2\u00a0 And I agree with Gloria Feldt, who said that leadership must lead.\u00c2\u00a0 In recent years, we have deconstructed everything.\u00c2\u00a0 We now need to CONSTRUCT.\u00c2\u00a0 We need to ask ourselves: what kind of feminism do we have for a real, real new deal?<\/p>\n

Audience member:<\/strong> We are at a time when the celebration of women’s power is exciting and fierce.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 We should come together and do an environmentally-sound lovecraft, make the ocean our mutual space, and use media to broadcast from there.<\/p>\n

Laura Flanders:<\/strong> A real mothership.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Laura Flanders: Let’s talk about the stimulus.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 You’ve got to look at issues of health and healthcare first. Ai-jen Poo: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1902,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21106],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liveblogging"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1563","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1902"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1563"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1563\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}