The New Agenda Blog

Remember the 1990s and the Clinton scandals? Remember how, after a while, all the media attention was like so much white noise and it became a chore to pay attention? Remember how most people you knew wished those spittle-flecked Republicans would just STFU already? Maybe you don’t. Maybe you recall those as the Bush years and you and your friends just wished all those spittle-flecked Democrats would blow it out their ears for once? The point is that a constant barrage of hyperbolic negativity often has the opposite effect from what was intended. It doesn’t breed agreement; it breeds apathy and discontent.

So it is with the subject of Sarah Palin. She is constantly under attack and disrespected by feminists on the left, who often don’t know much about her other than what they hear in the echo chamber that is the left-blogosphere. The noise level has ratcheted way up since she started describing herself and her conservative sisters as feminists and “Mamma Grizzlies.”

As a writer who teaches people how to write, I can tell you that you’ll lose your audience if constant negativity is your opening strategy, which is why I almost didn’t finish reading the NYT op-ed by Anna Holmes and Rebecca Traister, A Palin of Our Own. It droned on and on for nine solid paragraphs (out of 15 total) of negativity and bad logic, using few, if any, examples or citations to back up questionable partisan speculation about Sarah Palin.

I’m glad I did finish it though, because it is the most promising sign yet that feminists on the left are finally willing to address their #1 problem: internal issues regarding women and the Democratic Party. For a while now feminists on the left have been engaged in a profoundly destructive focus, clearly seen in the various campaigns to tear down Sarah Palin, the vitriol directed at her and other Republican women, and the impulse to, ironically, defend feminism against expansion. It’s a weird dynamic akin to xenophobia, and it has cost them the ears, hearts, and minds of many women of every generation, but especially those of us who didn’t get to go to the best colleges or didn’t go to college at all, and who don’t live in fabulous urban areas. In other words, most of America. The kind of internal focus promoted by Holmes and Traister in their article will be a necessary step in creating a constructively focused feminism that can attract these women back. (more…)

Beverly Cooper Neufeld is VP of the New York Women’s Agenda and Director of the Equal Pay Coalition NYC, and formerly Executive Director of The White House Project. This article has been cross-posted from On The Issues Magazine with the author’s consent. The opinions expressed herein are those of the author, and not necessarily those of The New Agenda.

A small cadre of women rallied on the steps of New York’s City Hall on April 28th, 2007, the day known as a Equal Pay Day. This day marks the time when a working woman catches up to what a white male earned in the previous year – she puts in 16 months of work to make what he earned in 12 months pay. It is a calendar translation of the often-recited statistic that a woman earns 77 cents to one dollar earned by a man.

Sponsored by the New York Women’s Agenda, this was the first ever recognition of Equal Pay Day in New York City. Those of us on the steps wore red because when it comes to pay, women are in the red. We were also seeing red, but turned that energy into the formation of a new coalition of 41 diverse organizations that is attempting to transform our town into the best city in the nation for working women. Called the Equal Pay Coalition NYC (EPCNYC), we are leading the way for New York City to take the lead in addressing the persistent pay gap.

Talk about Equal Pay is all the rage today. The Wall Street Journal blogged about Equal Pay Day. Lilly Ledbetter became a news fixture after she helped get a law passed to extend the time limitations for cases of secret pay discrimination — she had been denied compensation on those grounds for years of underpayment. A long-running lawsuit against Wal-Mart for paying less to women has been given the go-ahead in court, and in May, a jury awarded women at Novartis Pharmaceuticals substantial sums in back pay and punitive damages after finding of sex discrimination in the compensation.

There is a growing recognition, nationally and globally, that women’s economic security and well-being is a vital issue of our day, closely linked to the nation’s security, financial recovery and future health. But, there is little forward movement to create the needed change.

Overcoming the “Mad Men” Mentality

On the federal front, our Equal Pay laws, passed in the early 1960s when the world of “Mad Men” was not fiction, are weak. A partial fix, legislation known as the Paycheck Fairness Act is closer to passage this year because of the united effort of major women’s groups organized by the American Association of University Women (AAUW). It has a tough Senate fight ahead, and that’s before the midterm elections. The Paycheck Fairness Act would strengthen current “equal pay for equal work laws” and protect workers from retaliation for sharing salary information. It has a chance, unlike the languishing Fair Pay Act, which would tackle “equal pay for work of equivalent value,” a critical reform but more difficult to explain and institute, making it harder to rally support. (more…)

Susan is the Founder of the blog Amazing Women Rock, where the following article was originally posted. The opinions expressed herein are those of the author, and not necessarily those of The New Agenda.

The woman who was butchered and meat-hooked using photoshop for the ad featured in my last blog post may or may not have known how the image of her body would be used by advertisers.

But Canadian-born actress Pamela Anderson, whose boob-jobbed breasts famously drew millions of viewers to the infamously bouncing-down-the-beach TV series Baywatch, volunteered to be drawn and quartered by anti-fur lobbyists PETA for this protest piece, which was recently banned in Canada:

The Best Of Intentions…?

Pamela and PETA may very well have noble intentions (I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt here), but their continued used of the female form (almost always revealingly and tantalizingly unclothed), as an attention-getting strategy is, in my humble opinion, distasteful.

On its website, PETA proudly displays its growing list of overtly sexual, and possibly-designed-to-be-banned-and-so perhaps-not-surprisingly-banned advertising including the two below, both reportedly not accepted to be run during recent Superbowls. The banned ads can be found on the PETA site in a section disturbingly called “The Peta Files.”

Exhibit 1 is soft porn with vegetables: (more…)

The opinions expressed herein are those of the author, and not necessarily those of The New Agenda.

I just love this video, and I have to keep watching it over and over again. At first, I wondered if it were a commercial or preview for an actual movie. However, after looking through www.imdb.com and finding nothing, I think this is a video a bunch of women created just for fun. And it certainly is a lot of fun.

This is a nifty yet anachronistic take on 1800s women who are bored into depression and need some adrenaline and excitement in their lives. Thus, they obtain stronger self-confidence and a different perspective. Instead of just waiting for men to notice them, they actively go out and get the men of their dream.

Once upon a time virtually every American was familiar with the name Carrie Chapman Catt. For much of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries she was the face of the women’s suffrage movement. Most Americans today don’t know many of the details of the women’s suffrage movement and passage of the 19^th amendment, and those that do are generally more familiar with Alice Paul’s story than with Carrie Chapman Catt’s. We learn some of Chapman Catt’s story and celebrate her many accomplishments on this, the 39^th annual Women’s Equality Day, which celebrates the 90^th anniversary of passage of the 19^th Amendment.

Carrie Clinton Lane was a trailblazer all her life. She graduated Valedictorian of her class at Iowa State College—the only female in the class of 1880. A mere five years later she became superintendent of Mason City, Iowa schools. Though she married twice, both of her husbands died, leaving her to live half her life with her suffragist companion (and Indiana native) Mary Garrett Hay. Chapman Catt and Hay are buried together at Woodlawn Cemetery in Bronx, New York. We visited their graves on our women’s history tour this July, but more on that later.

What Chapman Catt was most famous for were her tireless efforts and dogged determination to pursue voting rights for women. Alice Paul and Lucy Burn are often credited with the final push that resulted in the 19^th Amendment, and they deserve that credit. But their tactics would likely not have worked if Carrie Chapman Catt, along with Susan B. Anthony and other giants of the first wave, had not laid the groundwork. It was also Chapman Catt and her organization, the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), who finished the work that Paul and Burn, sick and frail from their hunger strikes and prison beatings, could not. (more…)

The following article is cross-posted from Unwritten Rules with permission of the author. The opinions expressed herein are those of the author, and not necessarily those of The New Agenda.

In our privileged world “Feminism” has become a dirty word. For most western young women, to be called a Feminist is an insult.

My son and his girlfriends associate Feminism with anti-men and women who wear unattractive clothes. To them the “F” word is, at best, dated and no longer relevant.

In the U.S., Feminists have become divided along Party lines with women on the right and left fighting amongst themselves – which isn’t helping the feminist cause.

This is why The New Agenda is campaigning against sexism and for collaboration across the political divide on a “Pro-Women” platform. As Amy Siskind, President of The New Agenda, stated in The Huffington Post, “why should we care whether it’s Republican or Democratic women (or both) who lead us to gender equality?”

I don’t really care whether we call it Feminism or Pro-Women.

What I do care about is that the job of Feminism is far from done, and the in-fighting amongst feminists is distracting us from the many urgent reasons why we need Feminism, or the Pro-Women Movement, now more than ever.

Here are 20 of those reasons: (more…)

The opinions expressed herein are those of the author, and not necessarily those of The New Agenda.

The current media frenzy about the latest female celebrity to replace her last name with that of her new spouse is sure to infuriate long-standing feminists who have fought long and hard for women to keep their maiden names …or not. You see, this time, the rules have changed, and they have been forever changed by Portia DeRossi.

The 37-year-old actress has filed a petition in a Los Angeles court to change her name from DeRossi to DeGeneres, the last name of her much more famous same-sex partner, giving birth to a new debate about whether taking a spouse’s name is, in fact, a feminist issue, when that spouse is, in fact, of the same gender.

On one side of the debate is Assemblywoman Fiona Ma, who has recently put forth a bill that would make California the seventh state to give married spouses and domestic partners equal opportunity to take their surname of choice. Ma says the proposal is really about “equality in relationships.”

But would pioneering feminists like Lucy Stone, the 19^th century women’s rights champion who advocated for women to retain their own names after marriage, necessarily agree?  Quoted as saying that ‘A wife should no more take her husband’s name than he should hers…my name is my identity and should not be lost,” the Lucy Stone League, which carries on her work, proclaims that when women take their spouses names it is considered ‘name-abandonment,’ but that this is so much a part of U.S. culture that few recognize it for what it is: a powerful instance of sex discrimination that has a major effect on women’s lives and work. (more…)

The opinions expressed herein are those of the author, and not necessarily those of The New Agenda.

Women in their 20s are enjoying sex in ways past generations have never known:  casual encounters, one night stands, internet sex, and even the ever-so-eloquently-named “f*** buddy,” this being a person that is there for the singular reason of sex, with no strings/ emotions/ feelings attached. Women in their 20s are enjoying pure unadulterated sex. Women are taking control of their sexuality and becoming equal and active partners in sexual rendezvous with men. We are assuming the dominant roles that men have asserted for centuries and are applauded for. Who doesn’t like a man who is strong, self-assured and sexually confident? Now, who doesn’t like a woman with the same qualities? Unfortunately, more than you think.

In theory it sounds great, right? Women knowing what they want and grabbing life by the balls (no pun intended…okay, maybe it was intended). But, in reality, when women start speaking openly about their sexuality and sexual conquests, chances are pretty high that, sooner rather than later, someone is going to turn to the person beside them and smugly label that beautiful, confident woman a “ho.” Is that all it takes to be a ho? Sleep with multiple partners and have fun doing so? And the men having multiple sexual liaisons are…studs? Boys being boys?

As more and more young women become financially independent, they are allowed greater freedom in their concepts of dating and relationships. A woman can take care of herself. She can pay her bills (and that incredible pair of Christian Louboutin) without a man supporting her. This is quickly becoming the new status quo. In previous generations, society told women it was their station in life to act submissive so that a man will find you attractive and he will marry you and subsequently take care of you, which allowed for a conscious and subconscious male dominance where the men call the shots in the relationship. (more…)