 Welcome, welcome, welcome. This is a very special day. It's a special day for a forum. It's a special day for a celebration. It is a special day for the center. We opened on March 22nd in 2007. And it's hard to describe what it's like to give birth to a vision and to see it move from idea to form and to see the form move into action. And in addition to seeing that with the center today, we're also launching a whole new form and a whole new action, which I'll tell you about in a moment. The center is an exhibition space, is the permanent house, as you all know, of the great, the dinner party by Judy Chicago. And we are also an education facility. And many of you who are here today join us on the weekends where we have a wonderful array of panelists and speakers. Our mission is to raise awareness of feminism's cultural contributions and to educate new generations about the meaning of feminist art and about the meaning of feminism in general. The cherry on the whipped cream, atop the icing of the cake, was Holland Cotter, whose recognition of the center in the January 11th, 2009 article on museums look inward for their own bailouts. Mr. Cotter wrote, the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art draws a select audience with a defined interest. Its presence for the museum is invaluable. It distinguished this institution from any other. You can only find this here, there, and this is something that reliable numbers of people will always want to find. And those, some things are reliable numbers of people. Are you? It is a place that is your place. It is a place that is our place. It is, in fact, our own place. And it's defined by women's visions. It's defined by women's work. It's women's demands and desires. It's a place for women and men to congregate, to celebrate, and to explore. We, the center, are part of a very big, what I like to think of and what I do think of and call a steamship, which is the Brooklyn Museum. And we couldn't do what we have done over the last two years without the help of committed support of dozens of people at the Brooklyn Museum. So I thank Arnold and Judith and Charles and Kevin and their support staff. And Judith and Rob and the board of directors who have been wonderful supporters of the Center for Feminist Art, Sally, Radia, Traslin, Lauren, Shelly, Ken, and their staffs. Dozens of interns have come in and out and worked at the center over the last two years. And Susie Rodriguez, who is our wonderful designer and architect of the center, which you will see on the fourth floor during our reception. I hope you'll join us. Has won the, I don't know the full title, but it's the best, most highest achieved honor architect, New York architect, Susie, I don't know anything about architecture, but she won a great award for this and well deserved. For myself, I run the tugboat, the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation. And we push and we turn with ease and we bob happily over rough waters. Without a terrific assistant and a partner in crime and an intelligent, talented co-worker, Rebecca Tafel, the last two years would not have been as efficient, nor as successful, and not nearly as much fun. So Rebecca, I thank you very much for the last two years of very good work. Looking forward, I have the great pleasure to introduce you to the new curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Catherine Morris. Catherine is here today. Will you stand? And I am so looking forward to it. Catherine is going to take, Catherine is going to take what we have launched and she is going to bring us to the stars. And I am really looking forward to it and I'm delighted to have you as part of our family. And so we now have this two-year-old center and a two-year-old, well, terrible twos, what better way to celebrate, I figure, than to bring in an uncontrolled, independent speak out. And we're about to hear what you want. So I hope you will join us. A couple of women, two of us, Sharon and I, were decades apart. We grew and morphed into a form and a name over the course of the last year, into 11 women calling ourselves Unfinished Business. And the core group, and I refer to it as the mothership, actually, I prefer to call it that, we're of all generations, from millennia to traditionalists, mostly Xs and Ys, we cross age, ethnicity, economic and social divides. We share grit, tenacity, goals, and the words of my grandmother, a lot of chutzpah. A think tank is our model, intergenerationalism, solidarity, our code, and consensus is our process. So we hammered out together a mission statement for Unfinished Business, because we all, and I think you will agree, know that there is a lot of unfinished business. Our mission statement, Unfinished Business, is a think tank identifying ways of mobilizing external networks to raise public awareness about intergenerational communications, issues of race, class, gender, and the effects of current events on women and children. And today is our launch, and we thank you for joining us in the March and setting the future agenda, which makes a difference to all of our lives, our children's lives, and our grandchildren's lives. We hope that other unfinished business pods the idea of new groups, and Unfinished Business comes down as a UB, Unfinished Business, and it's like UB. UB girl, Ugo girl. So I hope UBs will be spawned all over the place. I'd like to introduce the founding members who are here with the exception of one today. Please stand, Sharna Goldsecker, who's 21, 64, strategic philanthropy through generations, and vice president of the Andrea and Charles Brompman Philanthropies. Welcome. Sarah Gould unable to be with us today. She's traveling, she's president and CEO of the Ms. Foundation for Women. Amy Sanninman here, founder and director of the Groundswell Community Project. And those of you who live in Brooklyn know all of the wonderful work that Amy has done. Olivia Greer, the Culture Project, artistic director, women's center stage, emancipate, a woman's theater group. Hello, hello, Liz Abzug, where are you, Liz? Bella Abzug Leadership Institute, Liz Abzug Consulting Services. I thank you, Liz, for many things, including our wonderful name, Unfinished Business. Benita Miller, Benita, where are you? Where is Benita? She's not here. Nicole Mason, executive director of the Women of Color Policy Network at the Wagner School of Public Service, NYU in today's keynote speaker, and Mia Herndon, executive director of the Third Wave Foundation. Carol Jenkins is president of the Women's Media Center. If you Google Carol, or even better, if you go to the Women's Media Center website, you will see that Carol has been breaking ground in the media all of her life. She is our Wonder Woman shero, a resume of well-deserved awards, so long, and I humbly, Carol, humbly thank you. You are a great woman, you are a great friend, you have a great smile, and I love your laugh. We're a bevy of birthers, all of us. Together, the UB's choreographed today, the program was decided by this group of participants, and on behalf of everybody, I would like to welcome you to it. I'm also delighted, delighted, delighted that the wonderful Laura Flanders is here to be our moderator. She is fabulous. And we have a terrific duo of Asian Poo and Esther Brunner, who are going to be our respondents and musical artist, Toni Blackman, is here, and she will be performing for us and give us another mode of feisty. So please help me welcome, with a great deal of gratitude and excitement for the rest of the day, Laura Flanders. Oh, Harold Jenkins is gonna introduce, oh, I did this all wrong. That's what happens, you're gonna do whatever I want. So what I have to do is go back to my notes. And I have to say that I felt like I was speaking for so long that I figured maybe I should stop. Never, never, never, never. So what's happened is that it gives me great pleasure. And it does too. I was jumping the gun to introduce you to our keynote speaker, who is Nicole Mason. Nicole is the Executive Director of the Women of Color Policy Network Research Assistant Professor at Wagner NYU. She has worked in advocacy and public education at the local, state, and national levels with a special focus on women and underserved communities. For the last 12 years, her work has centered on poverty and economic security for women and low income individuals, civic engagement, youth development, and educational welfare reform and health policy reform. That is really something. In her research and writing, she continues to investigate the intersection of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and other markers of a difference and their impact on rights and public policy outcomes at the local and state level. She's a current member of the Institute for Women's Policy Research Advisory Board for the Status of Women in the 50 States. She's a blogger for the Huffington Post and has been interviewed by National Public Radio and other news outlets. Nicole stood up and agreed, I should say agreed. She met the challenge when we asked her as our group of UBs of Unfinished Business Women to please give this day her keynote address. And I want to thank you for that and I want to apologize for having jumped too far in advance. And I welcome you, Nicole, and thank you for being here. Nicole, by the way, she just flew in on a red eye from California. I have no excuse, she does. She will make no mistakes. So good afternoon. Thank you for joining us and giving up your Saturday afternoon. It's beautiful, it's one of the most beautiful days this spring thus far, so I'm really glad that you were able to join us. Before I get started, I wanted to tell you a real deal about how I got invited to speak. We were sitting around the table at one of our UB meetings and we were thinking about the second anniversary event and they said, well, who should we get to speak? Or perform? So they're like, well, what about Aretha Franklin? And I was like, okay. And then someone said, oh, and Beyonce. We should have Beyonce too. And I was like, well, you know, I don't know about those two. I mean, they're fighting, there was this thing where Beyonce called Tina Turner, the queen of soul. And I don't think it's gonna happen. And so we sort of sat around sort of thinking about how to get one or the other. And then Sarah Gould says, Nicole, why don't you do it? And I was like Aretha, Beyonce, Nicole, that's fine. So that's how I got here today. So in my time with you, I wanna speak about the micro and the macro. I wanna make the connection between the person on the political. And I also wanna talk a little bit about art and activism and what I consider to be our work these days. And because I consider myself here among sister friends, I also wanted to share with you my personal journey to here and where I intersect with you all. Growing up as a child, my mother never talked about race, class, gender, or politics for that matter in our house. I don't even think I remembered who the president was at the time when I was growing up. There was no talk of the president. There was no talk of voting and there was no talk of activism. We just survived living our lives just like most of the others in our neighborhood and in my family. There was racism, there was poverty, there was discrimination to be sure, but those things we felt or believed were part of our lot in life. It was just the way it was. It wasn't until I graduated from high school and with 3,000 miles away to college, I was the first person in my family to go to high school and definitely the first person to go to college that things began to change for me. Away from home, the disparities became even more stark. There's a real difference between my experiences growing up and of those sitting next to me in the classroom. For a while, I sat with the discomfort of not sure what to do. About a year and a half later, I was bored. One hot summer day, I decided to sign up to volunteer at a local batter women's shelter. That experience changed my life. It was there that I began to have language for my experiences growing up. I met activists and advocates young and seasoned who were committed to social justice, a phrase I had never heard before. I now belong to a new community. I decided from that point, that's what I was going to be, a social justice activist. Over the last 13 years, my career as a social justice activist has taken many different iterations. I ran from marching in the streets to my first tattoo of a woman's symbol with revolution through it. That's still on my back that I have to wear the events now because you know, it's out. And allowing my tiny apartment in DC to be used as a refuge for prostitutes who are fleeing their pimps to conducting research to influence public policy at a top university to help improve the lives of women of color, their families and their communities. Now as opposed today, I'm a social justice researcher with radical roots. I tell this story because I think there's something to be said about how we come to the work and the way our histories and backgrounds inform the roles we take up. It's our perspective, it's our standpoint, our point of view. And thinking about what it will take to build a collective vision for change, we will not only have to remember and hold our own perspective, but hold the perspectives of others who are working alongside us. This will be critical if we are to move forward in solidarity and build a movement that is inclusive and reflective of the lives of all women. Artists often create out of nothing. They take a blank canvas, raw materials, and even scraps. They interpret the world through a brushstroke, a camera, welding and performance. These are the tools. Their interpretation of the world is rooted in their lived experiences, their frames, their values, and beliefs. They draw on their experiences and their vision of the world to create something new. Like the artists, I want the activists and social justice leader to interpret the world through our own experiences, frames, values, and beliefs. I want us to use the common language of change and the tools of policy advocacy, grassroots organizing, blogging, strategic giving, community building, and voice to create something new. As a good friend of mine recently said, the old is no more and the new is not yet. We have an opportunity in this current political and historical moment to envision a new. We have a canvas. I'm not sure if it's blank. I don't think it is. I think there's a lot of background. The times are urgent. The current economic crisis has had a devastating effect on women, families, and our communities. There are millions without healthcare. We're still engaged in a war. Global warming is threatening our survival, our very survival on this planet. Violence against women still persists. Immigrants who contribute to our society and our communities are still without civil and legal rights. Gays and lesbians still can't marry whom they wish in most parts of our country and the socioeconomic cleavages between groups continue to deepen. I believe that the problems of our time are not new. It's no longer about knowing or identifying the problem but figuring out how we work across race, class, gender, generation, ethnicity, religion, ability, orientation to solve these pressing social problems. It is about how we work to ensure that those with the least are valued and taken to account by those with the most. It's about making my issues your issues. These are our challenges in articulating a bold vision for the nation and creating a collective movement for change. I don't wanna take up too much time but I wanna leave you with this as we head into the rest of the program. In college, I used to have a zine. I don't know if people still have zines or we're just blogging these days and it was called Give a Sister Lift. Some name I got from Berkeley. And in every issue, I ended with the same quote and it's this. Whether one chooses to label themselves as nationalist, feminist, progressive or Democrat, the real test of a personal ideology is whether he or she is dedicated to the liberation of all people on all levels. Intergenerational and clearly, we've gone from one generation to the next, I feel now I can relax, right? We can all go off to babysit for our grandchildren, knowing that the world is in great hands. Nicole, thank you so much for that, Dr. Mason, who is a tremendous, tremendous, tremendous asset. And Elizabeth, I wanna thank you so much. As your friend, I did wanna jump up to bail you out but I didn't have the paperwork there. But when you talk about friends, Elizabeth Sackler went to see Jane Fonda, one of the founders of the Women's Media Center recently and she went backstage to see her and she said, you know, I think Jane has a cold. She sent me a message, she needs chicken soup. And so I sent Jane the message, you know, Elizabeth says you need chicken soup, do you want any? And she said, I was thinking she would say no. She says yes, I need it desperately. And then I'm now the conduit. I said, Elizabeth, Jane needs the chicken soup. Now I'm thinking that she's gonna call up somebody and have chicken soup delivered. No, no, no, it's Elizabeth Sackler going back to the theater with her chicken soup for Jane Fonda. Now that is a friend. I said to her, across the city, people are gonna be demanding their chicken soup, you know? And I said, I thought I was your friend, I don't have any chicken soup yet. But I want you to know that what Elizabeth Sackler has created here at this museum and what she's done in creating Unfinished Business and so many other things that she has touched is just incredible. You know, you are really truly a hero and an example for the rest of us to, you know, get our acts together, do something serious, and then stand up and defend it and give it to everybody, which is what you've done, so thank you. Oh, it's my pleasure to introduce another friend of ours, another favorite of ours, Laura Flanders, who is the host of Grit TV. If you haven't seen it yet, it's available on grittv.org online, but also, as she has insisted that I tell you, it's available in Manhattan on Channel 67 at eight o'clock every night, so which is really a miracle, you know, Channel 67, and you're trying to get on Beacat as well. All right, and it's on Free Speech TV, the Dish Network, 9415, and also online at firedoglake.com, which is a really great website, so that's grittv.org, is that good, Laura? Oh, okay, excellent, okay. She also serves as the host of Radio Nation, the nationally syndicated weekly radio program of The Nation magazine. In election year 2008, she hosted a five-part series of live town hall events in five different states. In the run-up to the general election, they were terrific shows. They were called Live from Main Street with Laura Flanders, and it was produced by the Media Consortium, which is our group that the Women's Media Center belongs to, a progressive independent media. Laura Flanders is also the author of Blue Grit, True Democrats Take Back Politics from the Politicians, an investigation into what people at the grassroots know that the Democratic party leaders could learn if they wanted to. And Bush Women, Tales of a Cynical Species, an expose of women in George W. Bush's cabinet, publishers weekly called Flanders, New York Times, bestseller, fierce, funny, and intelligent, and that's exactly what she is. Laura Flanders, come on up here. Everybody, well first we need to celebrate, right? Second anniversary, this is very exciting. I mean, think about it, the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, everything about that title deserves celebration. How many institutions do we have in the city with a woman's name in the top of them? Lincoln Center, Guggenheim, I don't know, what else? Lincoln Center, Guggenheim, Whitney actually is named after a woman, which is nice, but this is unusual. We're excited, so thank you, thank you, to have a woman's name in the title, to have the word feminist in the title, to be a place where feminist art is shown, all of that deserves celebrating, so just one more time, our second anniversary, go, go, go. I really love the way that Elizabeth talked about this event and the unfinished business, mother ship, welcome to the mother ship. I love the way that she talked about not leading, but sparking, and we hope to spark a conversation here today. The intergenerational conversation that unfinished business has been all about, she has a vision of taking place all across this country, all across this world, the creation of these little pods she talks about, she smiles when she says it, as all good, scary feminists do, but she's dead serious, and I think we're dead serious, not just out of sort of abstract interest in fairness, but because this is what this world desperately, desperately needs, right? I mean, when you think about what we learn from women's history, and even now we're celebrating women's history month, and I see less of it really than ever, but what we learn from women's history, I mean, I don't know, I did a column recently about obituaries, you know, you can learn a lot from obituaries, and last month there was a really fabulous one, did everybody read the obituary in the New York Times for Conchita Sintron? You missed it? Well, wouldn't you, Conchita Sintron, she was a bullfighter, one of the early women bullfighters, right? She died, or rather, she retired from bullfighting after killing, I think, 750 bulls in the ring, and she died last month in February in Lisbon, Portugal, aged 86, at 18, according to the obituaries, she was known as Ladio Sarubia, the blonde goddess, and the headline about her in a New York Sun article in 1940 read, she's a timid blue-eyed girl, but she kills bulls without qualms. She had a great quote in the piece, she said, I have never had any qualms about it. A qualm or a cringe before 1200 pounds of enraged bull would be sure death, less than one in these political days. Don't cringe when there are 1200 pounds of bull coming at you. My second, my favorite obituary from this month is the obituary of Molly Kool, sea captain, did you read that one? Is everybody reading the obituary pages? Molly Kool qualified to be a sea captain at age 23, the first woman in North America to be a licensed ship captain. She died at the beginning of March in her home in Maine. She was 93, one contemporary account back in the 30s described Kool, spelled with a K, but what a great name. Described her this way, her eyebrows are shaped and arched, her lips slightly rouged, her blonde hair up in feminine curls, that smiths Molly Kool ashore, but in her barge, she knows no fear. It went on to say that she was nothing if not pragmatic. There was a famous occasion where her ship crashed into another one in the dark and she was thrown overboard. A piece of timber floated by, she grabbed hold of it. She was floating there as the ship's passengers were hurling life preservers at her and she finally looks up at them and she says, I'm already floating. Stop throwing useless stuff at me and send a boat. And again, lessons for these economic times, we're already floating, we need a boat. Stop throwing useless stuff at us. So to think that some people think you can't learn from women's history. What challenges remain? A few challenges remain and I'll close my little thoughts with this. I was reading the New Yorker recently, a wonderful article by Ariel Levy on lesbian land, the movement for women-known land in the 60s and 70s. And she talks about a group called the Van Dykes who traveled in Van and were Dykes. And good name, I thought, good branding. Lesbians knew about branding before, just about anybody else. And it talked about a woman over many, many years who had been the leader of this group who she found Ariel in the Northwest, I think in Seattle or Portland, living in her now late 60s. And she reflected on the story and it's a beautiful piece if you haven't read it, go and check it out. She reflected on this woman, Van Dyke, this way. She said Van Dyke works with men now and even speaks to them. She talks about menopause and her grandchildren and her garden, but she's still a wild, big pirate of a woman. Regardless of the different people, of different genders she's chosen over the years as her comrades, Van Dykes' primary loyalty has always been to her own adventure. A woman in her 60s who has been resolutely doing as she pleases for as long as she can remember is not easy to come by in movies or in books or in life. It's not easy to come by, but wasn't that the idea? At least in part, wasn't that the idea? So I think on today's program, we're gonna talk about what we've accomplished, how far we've come, what we learned from history, the challenges that remain, and what is the idea today? We've got two fantastic sparkers, not to lead, but to spark. Two fantastic sparkers with us to kick off the conversation. I wanna introduce Esther Bronner. Esther is a novelist, a playwright, an author, a feminist writer. She is the author of the book that I remember most clearly was Weave of Women in the late 70s and she has one coming up. She wants us to mention The Red Squad. It'll be out in May of this year and you can bet we'll bring her on grit TV to talk about it, I can't wait. Esther Bronner, thanks so much for coming. Also with us, we have Ai-jen Poo. She's lead organizer and founder of the Miss Foundation Grantee Domestic Workers United, about which you'll hear a whole lot more, but suffice to say Domestic Workers United just has had the incredible success of seeing one of its bills, the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, pass through the Senate and the House in the state of New York. It's unbelievable the work they're doing to correct the errors in U.S. labor law. We have a long way to go, but these two women can help us get there. Come on up, Esther and Ai-jen. While they're getting settled, you mentioned that. Just to give you an idea of where we all come from. I think that was a beautiful way to begin, Nicole. We'll obviously come from our mothers and our grandmothers with a few guys involved sometimes. And my grandmother, it's the kind of grandmother who I wouldn't be here without for sure. She was red-baited. She was an unbelievable activist. Had my mother, when she was alone in Washington in the 30s, called her her revolutionary project. My mother didn't really appreciate being referred to as a project her entire life, but there you go. When that review came out in the New York Times that said the book was fierce, funny, and whatever it was, intelligent, her comment was, yes, but is it a starred review? So intergenerational challenges are also part of what is our conversation for today. Let's start with you. Esther, talk a little bit about your history, your personal journey, where you came from. Well, I was thinking that the good thing about getting older is that one becomes historical. And our vision is far reaching. Actually, I just had wonderful cataract operations. So I'm now 20, 25, which I never was in my whole life. So I can see through walls and through hypocrisies and failed efforts. I helped start the women's movement in the Midwest. And that was a time of great excitement, great energy, which I hope we bring into the future. We were exhumers, exhuming the past. All the writers thought we had forgotten. We were exhuming our history. We were reinterpreting things. We were archeologists. So that time about 40 years ago is the time in a way in which I stand. And I think everything else that's happened since I've interpreted through that time. I was talking to Ajahn about teaching writing. And as I brought Alice Walker's work into a student body, the African-American students knew another way of expression. As I brought Mary Gordon's work into the body, the Catholic students knew another way of expression. And with each ethnicity, the Asian-Americans, there was a larger voice. So I thought it was a glorious time and we'll go on. Hi, Jen. Your personal story, where did you begin? Well, I should say, oh, a lot of, maybe even being here to Esther as one of the founders of the women's movement and the feminist movement. A lot of my, I got politicized in college as a women's studies major. And it's my understanding that Esther actually started the first women's studies programs in the country. So thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I grew up in a family. My father was an activist and he was also a great patriarch. So I grew up in a family that was always engaged with the question of what's wrong in society. But then also within my own family, I could see the ways in which that's very multi-layered and that you can actually separate different forms of oppression and inequality and injustice. And in fact, we have to tackle them as one. And being a women's studies major really gave me the language and the tools to understand that more broadly and more deeply in society. So that's really a lot of where I got my beginnings. Let's ask that question. I'm a women's studies graduate also from Barnard. Esther started women's studies at the University of. Wayne State, I studied, I started at Heifer University. Wayne State, Heifer University. How many women's studies graduates or people that studied women's studies here in the room? Wow. Not bad. How many wish you had studied women's studies in the room? I wanna remind all of you, we have microphones over here, one there, one here. We wanna get your questions. You can come and tell us a little bit of your story if you want. The questions I think we're gonna be talking about are the ones that Nicole introduced, our personal journey, our work, and our issues. Are our issues your issues? Are we sharing? And what lies ahead of us? What challenges remain? So while you're thinking about that, coming up to these microphones, asking questions not just of our panelists but also of each other, this is a UB kind of activity here. There's a big we in the room. It's not just about us. We'll continue conversing a little bit. When you thought of your work, Esther, what was it? When you were beginning, what did you believe your work was? Well, I was in the house of academic. In those days, the only people with addresses in that house were men. So you sit on committees, you plan the program, and it's always men. My students were turned down from wanting to write master's essays on Willa Cather or doing a doctorate on Virginia Woolf. You know you had to get started. Anger is very important. Hi, Jen. What about you? When you began, you said you were working in women's organizations since high school. What did you see your work to be then? I really started out doing a lot of work around violence against women issues, because there was a lot of domestic violence in my family, and I was just drawn to it to help me understand what was happening in my family and my community. And from there, that's how I got interested in women's studies. And I volunteered at a place here in New York called the New York Asian Women's Center, which is a domestic violence shelter for in the Asian immigrant community. That's a lot of where I got my interest in activism and organizing, really committed to working to build the feminist movement through that lens. And when it comes to challenges, maybe for the audience, domestic workers' issues don't get a lot of coverage in our media. I don't believe there is such a thing as mainstream media anymore. There are just tributaries. But in the media that gets the most promotion, there isn't a lot of coverage of domestic workers and their issues. So why are domestic workers Bill of Rights? Why is it needed? What are the problems? Well, so how many of you know somebody who works as a nanny, a housekeeper, or an elderly caregiver? Okay, so there's quite a few. So there's actually over 200,000 women who are mostly women of color who do domestic work every day, supporting the families that they take care of, and also their own families on their income as domestic workers. And historically, actually, since slavery, domestic workers have been excluded from almost every major labor law. And in fact, the definition of employee in the labor laws excludes domestic worker by name. So it's not considered real work. And all of us in this room understand why, right? It's associated with work that's historically done by women that's not accounted for, that's not compensated, and not adequately valued or protected. On top of that, it's historically been work that women of color have done, that immigrant women have done. So what you have in this workforce is just an enormous workforce and a situation where anything goes. There's no guidelines, there's no standards, there's no labor laws, there's no recognition. And so what we're trying to do is say, actually, that is profoundly unjust and that long history of discrimination and exclusion needs to be addressed. And that this work helps to make all of the work possible in New York and deserves to be respected and protected. So the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights that we've been working on is about putting those basic, that basic recognition that this is a real workforce into place along with some basic rights and benefits that a woman on her own working in somebody else's home has very little to no leverage to negotiate on her own. So. Not to put too fine a point on it, but we hear a lot these days about needing a new, new deal. The labor law that you're talking about, when did it come in? The labor law that had these explosions. During the new deal, exactly. I mean, the historic victories of the new deal when the labor movement was very strong in terms of the National Labor Relations Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, Occupational Safety and Health Laws, all of those laws exclude domestic workers. So if we were gonna have a new, new deal, we'd like it to be new. Exactly. A new, a real deal for everybody that actually does provide a real safety net and recognition for everybody. That's right. Folks, we're in the process as a country of reconfiguring our economy, right? It kind of got reconfigured for us by a bunch of deregulators over the last 30 years. We've had 30 years of wage suppression. We've had a crisis. Women hit the crisis first. Across race, across class, across region. Women hit the crisis first. Are women at the front of the line of redefining, of reanalyzing, of coming up with how we're gonna recreate our economy? You tell me, are they? Should they be? What would you bring? What would you like to see brought to this pool of ideas that we're stirring around? Or are we gonna leave it to the hands of Larry Summers who said women can't do math? Questions, comments, don't forget to get involved. Yes? This goes back to your earlier comment. But I loved the article as well about Ms. Van Dyke. It was a really remarkable piece. And at the end, and this made me, I thought of it because of the intergenerational aspect of our getting together today, she's quoted, and I'm sure I'll misquote, but she basically said that when she and her brethren were driving around in vans and going from woman's space to woman's space all over the country. I think she would have said sister in. She would have. There was a sense of really, radically changing the world. Yeah. Flat out. And at the end of the article, they quote her as sounding not angry, but sort of disappointed at the notion that the things that seem to be on the agenda today are gay marriage and don't ask, don't tell. And I'm just wondering about, I think that's a really telling kind of generational moment for many of us. I'm sort of in between a lot of generations I feel like in terms of first wave feminism and more recent feminism. And it's hard for me to sort of find space between those two things. So I just thought I would throw that out for us. Thank you. Esther, what about that? I mean, if you had thoughts of where we would be by now, of what that women's movement that you helped to begin would bring us, how is the current moment shaping up? I was sure we'd have socialism at least. Even now, I'm wondering what they're waiting for. I thought we'd have more distribution, certainly of goods. I never thought that rich would get richer and the poor poor. That's not what we were studying for. I thought the country, because women's studies is so democratic, so egalitarian, it's sort of taught in a circle. You don't see yourself as the final source. You evoke from the people around you. I thought that's what our country would be like. So I have to draw a great breath and get out there and work again, I can see. Does this seem like an exciting moment to you? A little scary. I just don't know how many years I have left to work. Can I just tell people, would you like to share a vague idea of how old you are? Because it's kind of startling. I was born in 1927. So I'll be, I think, 82. Am I wrong in my math? More questions from the audience, comments. And then I want to hear from, I think we want to talk a little bit about what we each of us think we're going to do in this moment. I mean, are you really going to leave this moment up to Larry Summers? Who are the people that you think are leading the charge with new ideas? Where are the ideas coming from, do you think? And have all these generations of women's studies graduates integrated themselves into this picture? I think they have in some ways. And more perhaps into the Obama administration than any administration we've ever seen. But we know that good stuff comes out of the melding of political ideas, ideas from politicians, cultural ideas, ideas from artists, and also the ideas of activists, people on the ground. That's where I'm hoping we'll hear from you about what we need to amplify, what we in the media need to amplify, the conversations we need to have. Yes, please. I'm Catherine Williams. I'm from North Carolina, living sometimes in New York. And I was a few years after you asked her, but I started the first psychology of women program at Wake Forest University. But they would only let me teach it in the summertime when it first started. And subsequently, there's been women's studies program. And it's really been quite popular. And I see so many young women who had the advantage of being able to participate in such a program. We also started now in North Carolina. And let me tell you, it wasn't exactly a welcomed organization at the time it started. So it was really being exciting. For me, those were some of the most exciting years in the 60s and early 70s that I can remember in my lifetime. But I do think there's some new things emerging. And when you mentioned Laura about the economy, there's a number of economists. And Hazel Henderson, a woman in her 80s who's in Florida, who's one of the economists that I've listened to for years. And I think that we need to find a way to redefine what wealth is in our country. There. Good, yes. There's several movements going on in various locations. And one really fine economist, male economist, from Alberta, Canada named Mark Anielski, who's written a book called The Economy of Happiness. And what this premise is and what Hazel has been supporting is that we only measure GDP in this country. It's somehow a measure of growth and wealth. But the real meaning of wealth in its origins was well-being. So the proposal is by Hazel and others, and I've been privileged to be part of a little think tank that's looking at this, is can we find ways to measure, like we do GDP, the well-being of communities, of nations, of corporations. And there's actually an assessment tool in things with five points, which is financial, environmental, social, human, and built wealth, all those things. And since 1950 in the United States, the GDP has steadily risen, and the measures of well-being have steadily declined. So the question is, this push that happens from Wall Street on double-digit growth every quarter is strangliness. So my hope is that, as different articles come out, and maybe you'll think about getting the book called The Economics of Happiness, and Pay attention to Hazel Henderson and other women economists, that I think this is a time when we can have an opportunity to redefine the well-being in our culture. And that's what the feminist movement was all about originally, and I hope that the exciting times that we felt way back then will emerge. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I mean, the fascinating thing is that it is, to me, Esther, and maybe Ai-jen, it is, to me, very much what part of what feminism was about, redefining value and the price of things, the price of this kind of growth, if you're destroying this much of the planet. And yet, feminism has acquired different meanings over the years. Ai-jen, what does the word mean to you? What is the word feminism? The word feminism, to me, is about a vision for a different world that's based off of humanity, the wholeness of who we are, justice and equity for everyone. Do you use it in your work with the Domestic Workers Union? Absolutely, every day. Esther? It's also about studying and also about innovating. So now, I'm so worried about two kinds of things. One is, all the publishing houses have collaborated into one or two publishing houses. I think mine was the last book bought in America. The second is, I'm very worried about the newspapers. My dad was a newspaper man. I think, is it enough to have a blog? Are we feminists able to reinterpret, rethink the means of distribution, of self-publication? What can we do to make it our voice at the same time an echoey voice? I don't want it small. I don't want self-publication to be for the self. So I'm hoping that there will be an innovative way that I can't even understand because I hardly understand the internet. Technology connects. It also divides. How many people in this room are involved in publishing? All right. Can I recognize one? Because I don't know a lot of some others. Amy Sholder from the Feminist Press. Stand up, Amy. Come on now. The Feminist Press. Yay. So that's one of the questions on the table. Does technology help us, hurt us? What about the vision of feminism? Yeah. Actually, I'm Nicole Shulman. I'm with the Groundswell Community Mural Project. I work with Amy Sanaman and my colleague, the talented Crystal Clarity. And I've worked on an interactive mural for you guys upstairs when we're done. I wanted to bring it back to labor because I'm involved in labor activism as well. I've worked with the Industrial Workers of the World Union and the Starbucks Workers Union, which has a lot of important women organizers, such as Liberty Locke, who are fighting for the rights of underpaid baristas throughout the country. I think it's important for women of all ages to be involved in the labor movement and support unions and organizing, and not just the organizing part, but also for leadership roles of women in unions because there is a glass ceiling not only in the labor market, but in the leadership of unions. And I think we all need to work to make unions more democratic and take more active part in organizing in our workplaces and demanding more, say, within labor unions that already exist. And also, I'd like to give a shout out to giving support to these organizations and things like Red Roses, which is an arts organization affiliated with 1199 SEIU. Are you excited about Hilda Solis at the head of the Labor Department? Oh, yes, definitely, very, very much. Thanks. Who else? I'm Honey Ann Peacock and my path in working with women has taken, has morphed in many different paths throughout my career in the corporate career, but I've always been working on the behalf of all women. What I saw in the corporate world in the 80s and in the 80s and late 70s was that women were really, that was the first big burst of feminism and everybody was working together. That dissipated as women felt that they, the glass ceiling was raising a bit and they got positions in the corporate world. They got, the women's movement dissipated completely because women thought, oh, I've made it, so I'm going and the rest of you, good luck. More, I've been very sad about that fact and I've never been able to find a replacement for it. That's why I think that this moment right here in this space with the people who are here is a very important moment because as Esther was talking, women, we work in a different way, we learn a different way. It is a circle, it is collaborative and I think these are the times and technology plays a part in this because it's time for a new way of bringing our work together and collaborating and I think that we have here a couple of key groups that I'm familiar with that I think could be central to a coalescing of us in new ways and they have to do with media. So women's media center, women's e-news, these women, the feminist press that I just learned about, these are groups, some of the groups and some of the vehicles around which perhaps we can find way to organize, coordinate, collaborate and work. So I just throw that out because I know this has been a huge frustration for me for a long time, looking for vehicles and so I try to do them by myself or I'm part of a foundation or I'm part of, my own consulting practice, whatever, but I'd like it to be a larger effort. Do you think that the vehicle changed, I mean I think what I'm hearing is you say the vehicle changed, do you think there was a part of it that you changed too, you weren't up for the same amount of meetings? No, no, I had nothing, I was just kind of observing what was happening because I was in a position in the corporate world where I could see what was happening with women in other corporations, what was happening on women in state and government, what was happening, just it was dissipating because selfishness, I mean people felt, oh, well I've got something and maybe it wasn't just selfishness, it was like they got too involved because of their own career and they couldn't, the movement suffered. How many, anybody, either of you share that feeling, that experience, Esther? It was a golden moment. It was a moment of great energy and excitation and connection. Even now when I read memoirs about that time, I get excited all over again. It's really possible, excitement doesn't have to end, it's possible for us to recreate that. We're ready for it, the country's ready for it. It's now, let's think of what to do. I have to say, Esther has been in every activist organization I've ever been in, including one that was in response to the bombing on 9-11, New Yorkers say no to war, Esther was there, Women's Action Coalition that started at the drawing center with artists in the 80s, Esther was there. I wonder about this historical chaptering that we do, that this happened here, this other thing happened there, this thing doesn't happen anymore. How do you see it, Ai-jen? I think each generation has built off of what has existed previously and folded it in a different way, depending on our historical conditions. And I think that now is the moment of taking big and bold and trying to really seize the day in a way that we haven't for generations. And I think that all the work and all the groundwork that's been laid by past generations is going to be the tools and the seeds of what can grow now. And I do think that this is the moment for us to lean into this crisis and seize the opportunities that are unfolding to reshape the economy, reshape a new deal, a real deal for everybody that we're gonna have to work with people we've never worked with before, we're gonna have to have new alignments, new coalitions, we're gonna have to see our issues through different lenses, and we're gonna have to integrate and break out of our silos of this is the women's movement, this is the labor movement, this is the, and actually see the ways in which a real sustainable new economy that's built off of democracy and equality and some sense of justice is gonna have to be one that includes everybody in all these different issues, the immigrant rights piece, the racial justice piece, the women's piece, all of it needs to be integrated into a vision for a new economy. And I think that now is that moment where we can build off of what's been there in the past and try to figure out how that helps to build something that's greater than the sum of its parts so that we can seize the day. I mean, it's so exciting to think of the moment that we're in, everything you just said, Ai-jen, in its historical context, where did we get women's day from? Where did we get international working women's day from? Well, from an international labor, socialist labor movement of the 1880s through to the 1920s, people who were saying the world is being remade in war, in empire, the growth of a kind of capitalism that is going to hurt women and the most vulnerable. It was in that crucible that we got women's day and that we got a global women's movement and a justice movement. We're in a moment just like that again. And I think we need each other all over again. We need the UBs that Elizabeth is talking about. I think you are next and then you. Yeah, I think we have to seize the moment and we're at a fantastic time, I think. And we can do a lot right now. Introduce yourself. I'm Linda Stein and I'm a sculptor of female heroic knight, strong, powerful women. But I came from a background where I was taught that the boy should be stronger, better, smarter, and I played my role very well. I was very athletic. I threw the bowling ball into the alley and the ping pong ball into the net so the boy could win. That's what I thought it meant to be feminine and I wanted to be popular and I wanted to be feminine. But now I think we should grab on to our anger and remember our past and we're in an art museum now, thanks to Elizabeth Sackler who really deserves so much credit for what she did and using the word feminist. And I think that we should now write letters, talk, Eli Broad planned a museum where there's 87% men, 13% women, how dare he? Where is our anger? MoMA has a fourth and fifth floor permanent collection that has 96% men, 4% women exhibited how dare they? Where is our anger? We have to talk to men and women and I like to lead lectures on masculinity and femininity and why are women allowing this to go on? I mean, we've had to but now is a new time and I think we have a new opportunity and we should grab it. It's nice. My name is Velda Simone. I'm an artist, a graduate of Mega Evers College which was one of the first in the City University history in the 80s that opened the daycare on campus. We also, thank you, we also got around to having the first women's studies in the City University of New York at Mega Evers College. Now, just to think back and think of now also, I think of the work that Betty Shabazz did there. She was everyone's mentor, young and old, Andre McLaughlin who started the women's studies program at Mega, Safia Bindeli having the first women's center in the City University of New York. So I come from a time in university in the 80s where there was this great push. Jetta post that to now. Now we are about to all give birth to a new vision I think in feminism. If you look at the arts, the conversation here today, this is really a great forum for it. It needs to be understood that this is a catharsis because it is about transformation. It is about equality on the work front as well as caring for our neighbor who's Mexican who just crossed the border with her children a few weeks ago and they're needing food and she needing work and her husband was left behind. I think all these things talk about a dynamic and interest and experience now in America where we're all going to have to give birth to a new vision and a new movement where everyone is included to bring about the birth of equality across the board. And thank you so much. That's why I was, I just wanted to say thank you to your perspectives here that we heard today and yours as well. Falda question for you. Sure. You've talked big. If we would get really, really my much missed friend, June Jordan used to say, to be really, really very, very, very, very specific. What would you have in a stimulus package today? What would make the difference for you? We're talking about roads. We're talking about bridges. We're talking about a lot of jobs for guys. What infrastructural contribution, innovation? Would it be childcare? I think that's first and foremost when you think about improvement or moving ahead of actually having success, leading the world as it were. And I think we've done tremendous, we've had tremendous successes in the past. But I think there's no way you could think about any kind of success for anyone when you don't think of children's development first and foremost. When you don't think of women and their circumstances and environment, when you talk infrastructure, you talk about what specifically in the stimulus package could and does directly, specifically, affect us as a people in the United States, you've got to look at health. I think that's now on the agenda, right? So I think that the groups who are listening, whether they're for or against whatever is in the stimulus package have a great responsibility to push forth any other ideas or new agendas that could be addressed. But I think, yeah, they've pretty much targeted well what our problems are here now in America. When you think about feminism, you've got to think the children. And when you think of the children, you've got to be addressing child development and healthcare first because how are they going to make it? Is it in there? Ai-jen, is it there? Did I miss it? This national commitment to a national, affordable, maybe free, socialized even? Childcare program all across the country? Unfortunately not. I think that's the thing is that in this stimulus package that was just passed, there's actually not new streams of money, not new pools of money. I mean, I think it's on us to define what a vision for a real economic recovery looks like. And that's where the bold thinking comes in. We've got to put back childcare, subsidies. We've got to demand labor rights for caregivers. We've got to demand pay equity laws. We've got to demand all the things that have been on our shelf for the last 40 years to get the unfinished business. All that stuff that needs to get done needs to go into that economic recovery package and none of it is there, none of it. I wish thinking about energy from 40 years ago when my students or the young instructors had children and didn't know what to do with them while they were in school. So we had a PN at our president's office and after a day or two. Oh wait a minute, you have to tell us what a PN was. We brought the babies in the diapers and after a day or two, the president conceded. So there was childcare on campus. But we have to do direct action. Where is direct action? PN now. Hi, I just also wanted to... You wanna introduce yourself? I'm Melissa Silverstein. I remember when WAC started and... The Women's Action Coalition. And the energy in that room, I remember you standing up there at the beginning in the Quaker House and I was so inspired and there was so much anger that had built up. So I'm kind of very excited that people are angry again. One pause, does anybody know what the Women's Action Coalition was? It was a group that started in about 91, 92, kind of apropos of the Clarence Thomas Anita Hill hearings. And it was started by artists. It was started at the Women's Center. Annie Philbin and others convened a meeting at the Drawing Center, rather, in Soho. We then got so big, meetings every week. I can't remember what day it was, Wednesday or Monday or something, that we moved to the Quaker Meeting House on 15th Street. There were 300 plus people that women that came every single week. Madonna came. My mother came. Melissa's mother came. And we did actions, we can tell you about it. But it was an exciting moment. It was really exciting. And I just, when it kind of died out, I just felt like a force that was depleted in me. But I've been spending my time working on issues related to women in Hollywood and film and pop culture and TV through my blog. And I wanted people to think about kind of the influence that films have on mainstream public. And us being in New York, we had the opportunity to see a lot of women's films. But most of the people who read my site, all they have opportunities to see are these big Hollywood blockbusters don't star women and this and don't have any women directors. And the statistics about women directors and women producers and women writers are abysmal. There is, the 2008 statistics just came out, 9% of films are directed by women. And that's the top gross movies. And the thing to understand about that as we're in this great artistic center is that women's visions are just missing from mainstream America's ability to see our stories and what we have to say. And I spend a lot of time on tech online and I'm in my little world and I feel connected but also really disconnected. And so why I'm very excited to be here to talk about labor issues and other issues but it's kind of like how do we take our connectivity that we have with each other and our disconnectivity. And like for example, I'm a freelancer and when you were talking about domestic workers I was like, you should totally hook up all the freelancers because we're like sitting in our houses, we have no rights either. And there's that freelancers union now but what do they do to me, maybe health insurance? But so like there's a lot of energy that's kind of disconnected but if we figure out a way to connect it. So I also just wanted to talk about pop culture too. All right. Anybody want to, either of you want to respond? You respond. Well, I do think the work around the economy is a really great way for us all to connect because we're all affected by it and women are on the front lines, particularly poor and working women are really on the front lines of the crisis. Jobs are getting lost. Women are always the last hired and the first fired, right? Especially women of color. And so how do we see the economic stimulus as providing a chance or an opportunity for us to start connecting in new and different ways with a broad enough platform that we can all work together around a common vision in a way that really makes sense and is expansive. And I would say that all of these different issues are really connected. And so there's the historical women's issues like issues of representation and glass ceiling and discrimination in the workplace and childcare issues, like all of those issues that are, the cornerstone issues for the women's movement, all of those things need to get on the radar but then there's also new opportunities to innovate and try to influence how other things are happening like with job creation, if we're gonna create new jobs in the workforce to try to stave off unemployment, why don't we demand 10,000 jobs for women in community organizing, for example? Or job training programs specific to women in non-traditional women's fields like construction where a lot of the jobs in the economic stimulus are gonna happen. So how do we start to use this framework of economic recovery to connect and build deeper relationships and also have a broad enough vision and platform that it can hold us together for the long term? At the same time, if we don't have strong labor unions we will not have change. There has to be pressure for change. Christina. My name is Christina Biagi and I'm an artist and a writer. And I rejoice in everything that's been said here. It's wonderful. And I would recommend to have a new edition of WACC, including older women like myself and much younger women and women in between and so on. I think we should really do that. That's all. Yeah. Thank you. Well, to be fair, WACC was intergenerational, very. One of the most intergenerational groups I was ever part of. And I'll just mention what happened to it because I think the trajectory might be useful. It was very, very involved when there was immediate stuff and we went and people went and participated and in trials where guys were on trial for rape and they were being that the crimes were being under reported. And we tried to stand in solidarity with women who were victims of domestic violence and survivors. WACC members got very involved in the 1984 Republican National Convention in Houston. We went down there. We had fabulous projections from all kinds of unbelievable artists, Sue Coe and Barbara Krueger and all these people made fantastic slides and Laurie Anderson did the soundtrack and they were projected as big as big could be on the convention center in Houston and we had a drum corps. Everything was great. The election happened. People got a little tired. They were tired of a weekly meeting. They thought we'd accomplished something. Clinton was re-elected. It was a moment not unlike this one where there'd been a lot of activism and people had been really involved and people got really involved in this last election like you've never seen before. And afterwards there was this kind of, oh God, that was tiring. Now let's leave it to them and we can't. And one question I wanna throw out to everybody as we move towards the ending of this wonderful program which will be Tony Blackman will come and help send us out into the world. Two things I wanna remind you of, there are cards like this for you to fill out. There will be a raffle for a door prize at the end. Liz is gonna draw the raffle. There's also a reception upstairs after this forum. More information about that at the back. Don't forget to pick up the cards on the table at the front. The question I wanna throw out to people as we move towards the last part of this program is what single intervention would make the difference for you? If you wanna be more connected and we have the web and wasn't that our term, the feminist term, wasn't that the web? We have the web, we have, so many people want change, we have this moment, what would make it possible for you to transform your vision, this panel is about vision, into what we need to implement what it's gonna take? Is it another email list? I think our walking bodies, remember the Women for Peace that marched against nuclear energy that marched in front of the White House? We need to do that again. We have to march in front of places. I don't wanna be invisible anymore. I don't even wanna be somewhat visible. I think I wanna be heard. I wanna be, I want my voice very loud and I want us to figure out what we can do for that to happen. What do we need to get, is it people in the streets for you, Ai-jen? What do we need to get people in the streets? What do we, what do you need? Well, we need vehicles like the Women's Action Coalition that can organize. We need to organize, we need a vision and a program for policy reform that is based off of our feminist values that's very clear where we can start moving concrete demands forward and we need a great communications infrastructure. We need all kinds of stuff. We need all of our voices and a vehicle to move them. I should say WAC went on till 96. It was the 96th convention and it was after that it kind of crashed, not before starting groups all across the country. There were pods of Women's Action Coalition that happened in Los Angeles and Chicago and all over, so it's a good four years there. It did have a little bit of impact. We need another Bella. That's what we really need. We need another Bella Absurd. For sure. There, that side. Hi, my name is Reynolds and I'm an artist and an activist and I just wanna say that having the Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art for Me is a dream come true because I work here also and I live across the street and I was a women's history major at Sarah Lawrence Double with Art. And I remember coming here to see Judy Chicago. I think it was in 1980 at the Brooklyn Museum and it was the only thing I could see in art class that was contemporary that I liked because it was something I could look at. But anyway, I just wanna address a couple things that I haven't heard today. And I think they can be summarized. I went to see a Carol A. Schneemann show this week and there were two issues that she uses her work to address that I haven't heard about. One was she had done a show about Lebanon and an invasion in the 80s that a lot of feminists, we're not feminists, goddess antiquities were destroyed. So I wanna say, the feminist movement is international. As long as there's not artifacts in Baghdad, I don't think we have come as far as we can go. And there is now an organization called SAFE that is planning a vigil on April 10th for museums because the museum in Baghdad was destroyed when we invaded. And another thing I haven't heard today is really a talk about bodies. Carol A. Schneemann had menstrual blood on tissue paper in one of her art pieces. And I wanna say, I don't think we are where we need to be with a women's right to choose when girls in say Mississippi cannot walk into a Planned Parenthood clinic without being assaulted by protesters. This is going on right here in New York. It is the same people that wanted to close our museum when there was a Madonna up that they did not like in the sensation show. I led a little march, I had a kid called Moms for the Museum. A nun spit on my kid and cursed us out with four letter words. All right, a man pulled out a swastika. I thought he was gonna shoot us. And this was just a little march with four year olds and drunks. All right, now these same people are at Planned Parenthood on Bleaker Street every first Saturday of every month, at 10 o'clock. Okay, and there's now a bill at city council called the Clinic Access Bill to like at least keep them to the street. So they can't harass women. All right, thank you. All right, folks, I wanna let everybody who is lined up here speak, but that's it, okay? And I want you in a sisterly feminist intergenerational kind of way to care about your sisters and to share only as long as you believe you would like them to share. Oh, Laura. Given that it is now quarter to four. Gloria. That is a challenge to me. Hi, I'm Gloria Felt and so many threads of this are so important, but this is what I really wanna say. A movement has to move. Power and energy come from moving into new places, not from standing still. And that requires something that I have heard people dance around today. I see some incredible women who are incredible leaders here today. The fact that we are here thanks to Elizabeth Sackler, that is incredible leadership. The fact that what Esther did in her life, that is incredible leadership. And Jin, what you have done is incredible leadership. And yet what I have heard people say is, we're not here to lead, we're here to spark. Well, the hell with that folks, we are here to lead. I mean, we must. The answer to the questions that we're talking about here and a leader by the way in my view is anybody who gets something done. So the challenge that I wanted to put forth and if we have time, I'd like to hear some response to this. And that is, how do we as feminists get beyond wanting to be in a circle and sparking but not leading? All right. Let's lead. All right, go, good. Hi, my name's Mia Hurley and I work at the Third Way Foundation. I guess I would just quickly say that in our efforts to lead, I think we actually have left a lot of people behind. And so my one challenge is how, or one of the things that I think should be a part of that infrastructure is how do we collaborate effectively? And how do we ensure that we do no harm to each other? Because I believe, because actually there's a lot of young folks who are feminists in their work who still don't claim feminism because of all the bad taste in their mouth. And because of lack of support and the ability to share resources effectively or to lift up voice when we have opportunities. And when the money gets on the table and when we're talking about power, even state power, oftentimes we lose the ability to hold each other strong. So I want that to be on the table real firm. Mia Herndon, Third Way. Hi, I'm Rina Heli Jensen, Editor-in-Chief of Women's E-News. And this is my perspective, which is that we haven't confronted that the reality is misogyny. And what I'm focused on right now, the connection between the end of welfare as we knew it and the enormous amount of suffering that that has resulted in and the fact that the United States has the highest maternal mortality that would be dead women among developed nations and the African-American women die during pregnancy. Three, four, five times as often as white women and it's not the lack of prenatal care. The recent studies indicate it is nothing but hatred. It is the stress that we carry throughout our lives, living with the violence. And the poverty and the burden of taking care of the children by ourselves that is embodied in the current welfare law and that results in these statistics. So I would encourage us all to acknowledge that all of us are carrying this burden of hatred across the generations. Thank you, Rita. Women's E-News, womenseenews.org. Good afternoon, my name is Iliana Jimenez and I teach at Elizabeth Irwin High School in downtown Manhattan. I've been teaching high school for 12 years. Oftentimes you talk about feminism located within higher education and academia and this is where we found our feminist epiphanies, our feminist awakenings, et cetera. But a lot of times we forget the fact that feminism actually is also happening in the K through 12 sector. As a feminist teacher, as a feminist activist, as a feminist educator, when I consider myself a teacher activist, I often feel very alone at these events. There are activists who kind of collaborate with one another, partner with each other, have foundations that support them, have organizations that support them, et cetera. But feminist teachers really work alone. We don't have coalitions. We don't have foundations that support us. We don't have a forum really to connect with one another. So to answer your question, what would be the intervention that I would want to see happen? Three things. I would like to see feminist teachers in K through 12 schools make a coalition with each other. What are we doing in the classroom? That makes it feminist work. What is feminist work in the K through 12 sector? The second thing is to kind of follow up on Mia's point before, which is there are people being left behind. And I often feel like it's young people. Young people are being left behind and the teachers who are guiding them are being left behind. And I would like to see more work between women's foundations, feminist organizations and teachers, partnering with each other saying, how can we work on this together? And then the third thing is creating some kind of K through 12 gender studies curriculum due to our schools, public and private. There is an organization in Canada called the Miss G project, which is trying to integrate women's studies into their schools. I would love to see something like that happening here. Thanks. So thanks. And I want to thank also Elizabeth Sackler for starting the center. My students who I bring every year, my feminist studies class, they love it. So thank you. Excellent. Hi. My name is Anne O'Shea and I am a family court judge here in Brooklyn, which is my third or fourth career. I think the thing that's key for us going forward is to be able to communicate and to build a structure of communications. And I just want to tell one very quick story. When I was 1971 or 72, I was working with Barbara Seaman, who was one of the leaders of the women's health movement. Quite an extraordinary woman. And she, we discovered this book that was in typewritten form that was called, Why Would a Girl Go Into Medicine? And it was an expose of medical schools and their admissions policies and how they treated women once they got into medical school. And it was penned by a woman who was known as Margaret Campbell. Barbara and I took to making copies. I was working at a women's magazine at the time and we would make copies. And in the feminist press, we advertised, you can get this book for $2.50 to cover postage. And we were sending hundreds of them out and using the Office Xerox machine to make these books. And it was actually written by a woman named Mary Howell who was at that time the dean of Harvard's medical school. And because of that work, obviously if they had known who she was, she would have not have been the dean very long. But there were enormous changes that came out of that book. And I think that the power of the media and to the extent we have all these new tools like the women's e-news and still the feminist press and all of these new tools I think are remarkable and we need to really take hold of those and use them. Thank you. You got five minutes folks. I'm Gail Levin. I'm a professor at CUNY and art historian and actually the biographer of Judy Chicago. And I wasn't going to say this, but in response to the high school teacher, Judy has just launched based on the dinner party a new K through 12 curriculum just this month, which I think might be relevant to the call for gender studies. What I as an educator wanted to say is that part we've been talking about what is the stimulus need for women? And it was mentioned we need to get beyond traditional women's jobs. So many women are teachers and it broke my heart in Obama's recent community meeting in California to hear a teacher talk about being laid off after 25 years. And we need to revalue how we treat teachers in society as a profession, all educators. And the last thing I want to say is that in this economy especially, we need to make sure. And I feel certain that Obama has his heart in the right place. I just hope the rest of the government will go with him. We need to make sure that our young people can afford to get higher education, can afford to go to college, and that they don't need to join the armed forces and go to Iraq so they can pay college tuition. Over here, yes. This speak out is fantastic. And I have two proposals. My name is Lourdes Arispe. I come from Mexico. I would first like to say that Carmen Barroso is here. Carmen Barroso was one of the founders of the feminist movement in Brazil. And I was in Mexico in 1976. A woman from the Ford Foundation came and said, Lourdes, would you like to organize the first conference of women's studies? And I said, fine. I think we'll get some 50 women. So we had the conference. There were 400 women there. 400 from all Latin American countries from the United States. But in the 70s and 80s, we had a lot of international communication. My house was the hotel for all visiting feminists in Mexico. My first proposal, petition, plea, is we have to again increase international communication between us feminists all over. If they could do it in 1880, when there was still steamboats going across the Atlantic, don't you think we could figure it out? Yes, we certainly can. And my second proposal, I agree very much with the friend who said that leadership must lead. I think in the last 20 years, we have deconstructed everything. The feminine personality, the masculinity, post-colonialism, we've deconstructed too much. Now we need to construct. We need a new mindset. We need to ask ourselves, what kind of feminism do we have for a new real green deal now? All right, good. All right, last comment from the we here. Hi, I'm Layla Love and I'm actually about to change what I was gonna say based on what she said. But I wanna say I think that we are in a time when the celebration of women's power is so exciting and so fierce. And I saw a celebration in a conference I went to that Liz Abzuk held for freedom on our terms and ever since the idea of celebration in the movement, in the lawmaking that we come together in that way is so powerful. And I have been thinking of an idea that we should start a boat that goes in international waters and takes women's art and lectures and stories from country to country and that we could come together and do an environmentally sound project where we had an international space and we could broadcast media from it. We can broadcast art, we can have healing, we can have nutrients. We can go on rescue missions and we can have this beautiful, beautiful lovecraft and just make the ocean our mutual space and use the media, use these satellites, use what we have in this time right now. So that's my huge big dream. That's what I'm talking about. A real mothership. I'm gonna let each of our guests close before we go to Tony. I just wanna say that Grid TV is on air. It's on satellites, it's on cable. It is on our first public television station as of this month in Philadelphia. You can watch us anytime at gridtv.org and subscribe. There are podcasts of every kind. And I just wanna say Grid TV is really we TV. It's a platform and a lot of the organizations, Mia, a lot of the people you've heard from today have been guests on our program. It's about telling the stories, in particular women's stories and stories of public interest successes. So please come to us. You can write to me, Laura, L-A-U-R-A at gridtv.org with your story ideas, your shows that are coming up, your things that you're doing. We have a question of a day. We have a conversation of the day. And we also play videos from viewers, from grassroots groups, from community organizations, from poets, performers, artists. Please, it's at your disposal. And I hope that you'll join with me in trying to put the tools of online, on satellite, on cable and on television at the hands of more of us, because it's been in the hands of a few of them for way too long. Let's start. Esther, closing thought. I sort of feel like I'm with my daughter here. I just feel like what I'm thinking she's gonna do that I was interested in the house of Akadem and she's interested in cleaning up the houses of the nation. Hi, Jen. Let's build a movement. Let's build a movement that's intergenerational, dynamic, led and strong and has the power to really seize the moment. All right. Well, someone who's gonna take us out to build that movement with all the energy, defiance and inspiration that we need is our next guest, Toni Blackman. She's a poet, a rap lyricist, an actress, the first ever hip hop artist to work in an official capacity with the U.S. Department of State's Cultural Affairs Division, our U.S. hip hop ambassador, Toni Blackman. Come on up. Thanks for the day. In the morning with the pain on my mind, the thought, see, I just couldn't leave them behind. My stomach didn't feel quite right. I tossed and turned all night, tried to sleep tight, but I rose with the sunlight. My heart cried, but I couldn't find the tears. So scared, seemed to be running from my old fears, years and years on my shoulders, closer to success, but the world seems colder. Looking for my center, but all I find is splinters in my skull, these bootstraps, I can't seem to pull on my own. Damn, my thought being grown meant you were grown, but humbling experiences are all that I am shown. I take a nose dive deep into my soul. I'm only treading water when swimming is the goal. I sit upon the rock, but I can't find the road. I was going east, looking for the North Pole. Mass confusion, chaotic intrusions keep bruising my heart. Is there a book on how to heal it? Get back to the start, you know the day, the first day, your first birthday, innocent, pure, before being poisoned by the world's way, the pleasantries they get displayed. But when we do that, from the truth, we have strayed. So you ask how I'm doing, and I say fine. And one day, I didn't lie for the ninth time. I think about all the pain I feel inside. I think about all the tears I done cried. Playing this game to when I've tried. My heart still beats, but many times I've died. So I wanted to open up with this verse. So I had a small window for performance and I struggled with whether or not to do this new song or to show you this new video. And I think that in this Asia we are now, for me the visual is very important. Thank you, Melissa, who said that. The visual is important and I understand the impact that it makes. I had an opportunity to do some work in the DRC in Genshasa through the US Embassy there and the Department of State. And I did a residency there around the elimination of violence against women. And I've been able to take this work and I run a project called Rhyme Like a Girl, which came out of my work with Freestyle Union using improvisation as a tool to promote social responsibility. And now the whole idea is how to gather collectors of people to create music that has a message and then how to gather artists and demonstrate to them that you can have a message and it doesn't have to be corny. So somewhere over the years there are a lot of young artists who think that if they're too positive they're gonna be corny and they're not gonna be cool. And sometimes it just takes someone to take 20 minutes out of your day and to show them how that's not true and then they follow along. It's really not as complicated as we make it. So and they know the distinctions between good, bad, right and wrong. So this actually took place in the Congo and a place where people are dealing with some struggles that I can't even imagine I'm surviving with. And when I was there I discovered how many people die when it rains, just on a rainy day people die when it rains. And so it gave me a new level of fire and I don't know is that Elizabeth who said feisty and it's a word feisty. So I wanted this one minute poem and then they're gonna play the video. It's a song that I co-produced and arranged and it's based on this poem that I've been doing for about 15 years which came out of my work using hip hop as an artist and as an educator. And I wrote this poem because I am an invisible woman. Not because people refuse to see me, they know I am here but it's as if my womaness detracts from my existence. My presence too often mistaken for absence, I am an invisible woman whose words don't go fast enough, whose beats just aren't fat enough, whose contribution goes unseen. They know I am here because I was there. See I rock the mic as he did. I spit rhymes as he did. I bore hip hop as he did, we nurtured it. I am an invisible woman, I am an invisible woman. Now I may not be seen but I'll be damned if I won't be heard, the feminine voice in hip hop. Let's give her another hand, okay? Liz Abzug, everybody. I was supposed to sum up, but I'm a little bit overwhelmed. I took copious notes here of everything that was said, but before I try to just really quickly do that, I want to invite you all to the reception that follows this as soon as we're over in a couple of minutes at the Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art upstairs on the fourth floor where we're also going to be blessed with a interactive, no, what are we calling it, Amy? Where are you? We're calling it a participatory art, what? A mural speak out from Amy Saniman's group Groundswell and she would like to recognize, we like to recognize the artists who have done this and I think it's going to be really fascinating, Crystal Clarity and Nicole Schulman who organized it. I don't know how I got this job. I actually volunteered to do this, but it's, you know, very amazing things that have been said here today. I also, before I just summarize very quickly in my professorial, I happen to teach up at Barnard College Columbia University. I'm an urban studies professor, but I teach women and leadership so luckily my ear rings to all of the things that many of you said. I'd also like to recognize though the men who are in this audience today. Let's give him the hand. The reason being, the reason being that as my mother, the late great bell apps I used to say, men and women have been doing things in pairs since Noah's Ark and we will not be able to do this without our good feminist brothers, supportive men who understand the dynamics and the importance of supporting not only us strong women but showing their feminine sides as well. Well, upstairs in Elizabeth Sackler's gallery, the title of the exhibit is Burning Down the House. I think we've really burned down the house here today and I think you ought to give yourselves all of you, all of you who made some amazing remarks and all of you who came here. I honor you, obviously there is a great amount of energy, anger, will to work into generationally to not only spark but to lead as Gloria Felt said which I couldn't agree with you more, to work across race, gender class, ethnic, cultural, LGBT, gender orientation issues, to work with heart and soul, to work on things such as the economic stimulus package so that women and girls' issues, new jobs can be created so that we define what is the GEP that we talk about well-being economy, that we talk about measuring humanity and well-being as part of our GEP, that we in our feminism have a new world of innovation and that we get our voices out through all media and technology venues that we pay attention to women's issues and labor and women and not just organizing at the worker level but it is important to get women leaders, women heads of the labor unions. We need to look corporately. We have seen that in the corporate world and in the 80s in the government worlds, in my view when it was said that there was a pause of the feminist movement, everybody believed that women had achieved it all and by the way, a lot of students today in college, a lot of college girls believe that we've achieved everything, a lot of girls believe that there's really no need for a feminist movement that they don't understand what all the ruckus is about, that they don't self-identify as feminists and I tell them, you, we have a lot of work left to be done. We have a lot of unfinished business. We do have tools that we never had before. We have technology that can bring circles of women together domestically and internationally, all types of collaborations and collective work and media vehicles and art and song and music and we can build a movement both domestically and internationally and we should link the domestic movement to the international movement and listen to our international sisters, many of whom have been way ahead in the movement for feminism in their countries and I tell my students and I tell you that we have the students, particularly young women who are with us in this intergenerational battle and many of them who are here today but students often have to know that there's a context, there's a framework that you heard it between Esther Bronner and Aizhong that we can't erase what was in the past. In fact, we must build on it. In fact, we must take that context that the second wave of feminists work so hard to create, bring it forward to this current generation, let this current generation use its form of expression through its own linguistics to create new language for a new feminism and that there is anger and there is will and there is the desire as evidenced in this room to take it to the streets, to move, to take direct action and that we need to grab an opportunity of social change that has existed and has been born again in this country through the elections of President Obama and the role, the race of his movement as well as Hillary Clinton's race as the first, for the first presidency, female modern presidency race in the last many years even though we had Shirley Chisholm run in the 60s and that no women should be left behind, no groups of women, no individual women, no based on race, ethnic, religious, LGBT orientation, cross-culturally, cross-economic, socio-economic status and that we had some early mothers that really showed us the way, not just the suffragettes but early mothers in the early part of the 20th century, Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X's wife, Medgar Evers College that had some of the first great women's programs that gave birth to this new feminism. We have to allow this catharsis, this transformation of equality and work to build on it through realistic measures like the stimulus package. And yes, we need to make sure that there are jobs for women in that stimulus package, that there are childcare benefits, pay equity, rights for immigrants workers, non-traditional jobs for women in that economic stimulus package. We have to galvanize our collective spirit, take our anger, take the direct action, use our creativity through art, film, connect through our creativity and our actions, connect politics to art, connect women and power, poor women, rich women in between of all races, all creeds, all nationalities, all backgrounds and we need to, for each of ourselves, decide how we want to be visible, how we want our individual and our collective voices to be heard. We have to use the vehicles of the modern technology, of the internet, of tweeting, of everything else that's in there to express and to take, seize upon, seize upon this moment to make the new deal, the feminist new deal, I'm not so sure I like the feminist new deal, but for the moment to create the feminist new deal, a movement where we spark lead and in my view inspire, which is the purpose why those of us in this core group of unfinished business sit together very frequently to think how we can move, lead, inspire, create and to spin off the energy that you've heard all of you produced in this room today and that there needs to be feminist teachings in K through 12. I can't tell you how much I agree with that point. For men, for boys and girls, for boys and girls, no longer do I ever want to see a girl in a college class, raise her hand and say, excuse me, I apologize, Professor, but I have never heard a boy in any of my classes say that and this is 2009, after all the years of feminist work and all the kinds of parenting that has gone on to see that self-esteem issue still raise its ugly head with girls is really disheartening and that we do have to understand misogyny, Rita, as to the level of misogyny, and by the way, as I feel was shown during the presidential election towards Hillary and others and that we do have to understand that we in the United States have to stop the high level of maternal mortality because it's just outrageous that in this century we have that kind of thing. In the end, we need to collectively embrace the work of our foremothers, build on the roads that they paved, take the wisdom of the women who are working who are older than us, take the women of the wisdom who are working and who are younger than us, bring our men along and collaborate so that we can create an amazing new women's movement, one where war will be ended, love ships will be put into the international waters and I think it's a great idea, by the way, Layla, and to work so that we can break down the barriers of racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, and bring together something that my mother really strongly understood in the early 1990s when she formed her organization, Women's Environment and Development Organization, that we are a smaller world through globalization, but that we really do need feminists in this country and feminists internationally to work on a common agenda. We do have a moment in this country with President Obama that we haven't had for the last 10 years. I think you can see that in the last 30 days of his presidency by signing the Lilly Ledbetter Act and by creating a council for women and girls, which has never existed before, that there is quick movement to work on the 21st century to create women's and girls' rights. It should not be women or girls. It should not be girls or women. It should not be young women versus older women or older women versus younger women. That's why we have created unfinished business and we need to work together to finish the business of true equality, to create true gender equity in the 21st century. I want to thank you all for taking your time today and joining us here today. Thank you.