Breaking FMF News!

After much debate, FMF's annual National Young Women's Leadership Conference has been renamed

::drumroll::

The National Young Feminists' Leadership Conference

The name change reflects the diversity of attendees at the conference, and also emphasizes the prevailing political philosophy of the event. So... love it? Hate it? Leave a comment and tell us what you think. And save the date for the 2010 National Young Feminists' Leadership Conference, March 20-21 at the University of the District of Columbia in Washington, DC!

Guest Post: This Is What A Feminist Looks Like

Guest post by Danine Spencer, originally posted at danine.net. Written shortly after Danine returned from FMF's National Young Women's Leadership Conference in March, she posted this essay in honor of Women's Equality Day.

Growing up in the Midwest, I thought feminist was a bad word. Feminists were zealots like Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan who wanted special and unnecessary laws like the Equal Rights Amendment passed. Feminists were lesbians (also a bad word) who hated men, burned their bras and refused to shave their legs. Feminists were not smart, determined, independent women and girls who accomplished anything they set their minds to. As I grew up, graduated from college and entered the workplace, I gained more respect for feminism. If asked, I would probably even describe myself as a feminist but until recently, I couldn’t really explain what that meant.

In March, I attended the National Young Women’s Leadership Conference (NYWLC), where we discussed how women are affected by the economy, health care, reproductive rights, education, global warming, international relations, war and domestic violence. We talked about how to improve conditions for women and girls everywhere. Women like Dolores Huerta, Eleanor Smeal, Lilly Ledbetter and Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis told us we could change the world simply because we were women and feminists.

As the conference continued, I kept thinking about the “feminist” label. The conference’s sponsor, the Feminist Majority Foundation (FMF), sold t-shirts and tote bags that said, “This is what a feminist looks like.” The shirts and bags went like hotcakes and everywhere I looked, women of every size, shape and color were proudly wearing their new conference swag.

“This is what a feminist looks like.”

“Wait,” I thought. “Am I a feminist?”

It was a light-bulb moment. These women, over 500 of us who had gathered to find ways to help women in the United States and around the world, were just like me. We may have had different ethnicities, religions, incomes, abilities, family backgrounds and life experiences, but these were women I would have met at college, work, Wal-mart, church, the doctor’s office, or a family reunion.

In-between breakout sessions, I went to the restroom and looked at the woman staring back at me in the mirror. If all of these smart, savvy, beautiful women were feminists, then I must be a feminist, too. The light-bulb moments continued as I began to understand feminism was not the idealistic extremism I used to believe it was. I started to form my own definition of feminism: women working to improve living and working conditions for all women.

I was proud of my newly-claimed title of “Feminist” but I wondered what my family and friends back in Wisconsin would think. They probably wouldn’t be surprised, as I’ve always been pretty liberal. Would they think I had become even more partisan than I already was? I wanted people to realize the word “feminist” really meant “women’s champion”, not “leftist rabble-rouser,” so I began to make a list of why I am a feminist.

I am a feminist because I believe:

* Every woman should have access to affordable health insurance
* Every woman should be able to go to a doctor when she is sick and obtain prescription medication when necessary
* Every woman should be able to find work that pays a living wage so she can provide for herself and her children
* Every woman should receive equal pay for equal work
* Every woman should be able to choose her own spouse, when and if she chooses to marry
* Every woman should be in control of her own family planning, which includes the right to decide whether or not to have children
* Every woman has the right to freedom of speech
* Every woman should have the same legal rights as men
* Every woman has the right to an education
* Every woman has the right to own property

I also believe:

* No woman should be discriminated on the basis of her gender, age, income level, race, sexual orientation, religion, disability or other life circumstance.
* No woman or girl should ever be raped or sexual abused, period. Rape against women and girls should never be used as a weapon during war.
* No woman or girl should be subjected to genital mutilation.
* No woman or girl should be a victim of human trafficking, sold into sexual slavery or work in a sweatshop.
* No woman or girl should be forced into marriage without her consent.
* No woman should die in childbirth or as a result of pregnancy-related complications

Above all, every woman and girl should have enough food to eat, clean water to drink and a warm place to sleep at night.

Looking over this list, I realize my girlhood notions of feminism were wrong. Fighting for women’s rights is not outrageous. Women’s rights are human rights. We are entitled to our rights and we must fight to help ourselves and our sisters. As Mavis Leno, chair of FMF’s Campaign to Help Afghan Women and Girls, said at the conference, “When you are asking someone to give you your human rights, you are talking to someone who stolen them from you.” We have a lot of work to do, but feminist and labor advocate Dolores Huerta declared at NYWLC, “We can do this. You know why? Because we’re women.”

Yes, we can. As Dolores would say, ¡Si, se puede!

Dr. George Tiller Speaks: Reproductive Freedom, Women's Right to Decide, and a Vision for a Better World

"We have given war, pestilence, hate, greed, judgment, ego, self-sufficiency a good try, and have failed. We need a new paradigm that consists of kindness, courtesy, justice, love, and respect in all our relationships." - Dr. George Tiller, March 2008

The last few weeks have been rough for a lot of us in the progressive movement. Violence, hatred, and anger seem to abound in the world, and it is easy to get frustrated amid the fray.

As a student in March 2008, I attended the National Young Women's Leadership Conference sponsored by FMF. At the conference Dr. Tiller spoke about his experiences as a late abortion provider, his hopes for the future, and reproductive freedoms.

We've uploaded some clips from his speech below:

This man worked tirelessly to provide women in impossible situations with options. He suffered through legal and physical attacks, and risked his life every day to keep coming back. If anyone had reason to get frustrated and angry, he did. What is most poignant to me is that he didn't succumb to that hatred; instead, he kept alive a vision of a better world, and worked toward that world each and every day.

I think we all could learn a lesson from Dr. Tiller's words - I know I have.

NYWLC '09 Poem

Written during FMF's 2009 National Young Women's Leadership Conference by Eleanore Wieland, of Portland Community College:

CEDAW

Women, stand together.
Stand up for each other.
Fight.
Love.
Win.

I am a poor woman,
A queer woman,
A disabled woman,
A student.

My sisters are women of color
Mothers, daughters, grandmothers
All over the world

The struggle, the oppression
of ONE woman
hurts ALL women.
It hurts me.

Women, stand together.
Invest yourselves in each other's success.
Lead, follow, love.

Women are the beating heart of this world.
When women win, the world wins.

---

Eleanore, thanks for sharing your poem with us. I know we and a lot of the other feminists in the room really enjoyed it.

If anyone else has feminist artwork or prose they want to share with us, hit us up at campusteam@feminist.org. Good night and good luck!

FMF goes to the Hill

After FMF's National Young Women's Leadership Conference, feminist activists were set to educate their members of Congress about critical issues of particular concern to women.

Over 85 students and feminist advocates met for a Hill briefing at the Cannon Caucus room on Monday 3/23. Our fantastic panel gave great advice for meeting with your elected officials:

Feminist Majority's Norma Gattsek and Ellie Smeal
Carolyn Bartholomew, former chief of staff for Speaker Pelosi
Reva Price, advisor to Speaker Pelosi
Annie Lipsitz, Scheduler, Office of Congresswoman Donna Edward (MD); former FMLA officer
Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (DC)

FMF staff then led small group discussions on pay equity, funding for family planning and repro health, CEDAW and IVAWA, and global women's rights.

After meeting with members of Congress and their staff, participants visited the Sewall-Belmont House, home of Alice Paul and the ERA campaign. There, Sen. Barbara Boxer's staff discussed their work on the Hill and insights on working for one of the most powerful women in Congress.

Check out our Flickr slideshow for pics of the visit day and conference! Want to add your pictures to the slideshow? E-mail them to campusteam@feminist.org.



So great work to all of the activists that participated at the congressional visit day! Even if you weren't able to go, you should visit your members' district offices at home and ask how they will support women here and abroad.

National Young Women's Leadership Conference Wrap Up!

Whew! Here at FMF we're still all recovering from an incredible 3 days at the National Young Women's Leadership Conference! It was so great to meet all of you, and although putting the conference together was exhausting, we are delighted with how well it went!

You came from all over - people from 38 states and 140 campuses came out for the big event, and it was fabulous to see all of you! We had 4 awesome plenary sessions with great speakers, from Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis to Lilly Ledbetter (center of photo) to the White House Council on Women and Girls' Tina Tchen (right of photo) to Dr. Sima Samar, the Chair of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission!

We streamed the morning plenaries live on ustream, and you can check out video of them here:
Welcome and Opening Plenary: From Campus to Congress - Educate, Activate, LEAD!
Sunday Opening Plenary: Feminism Without Borders

Workshops were great, too - we had 15 workshop sessions on the agenda, which gave us a great a chance to talk more in depth about topics including Exposing Fake Clinics, Organizing on Campus, Gender and Climate Change, Running for Office, the Basics of Women's Health and Contraception, and MUCH much more!

Amid the busy conference schedule, we managed to catch a few conference participants here and there to get their thoughts. Check out what they had to say below:


The Monday Congressional Visit Day was also a success, and we were thrilled to see how many people came out, but we'll save more tidbits on that for later - keep an eye on the blog to find out more.

Anyway, that's all for now, but thank you all again for coming out and helping us make this conference as amazing as it was! Keep in touch with your organizers - we'd love to have a copy of any photos or videos you took during our conference and also hear about how you're doing on campus! Send pics and videos to us at campusteam@feminist.org and we'll include them on our YouTube and Flickr pages!

A successful end to the 2009 NYWLC

Our 2009 National Young Women’s Leadership Conference has come to an end and in the words of one of our great participants, “the only thing that I am upset about is that it is over.”

The two-day conference was filled with some of our country’s leading feminist voices of all generations and backgrounds and ended on a high note. As student activists filed out of the last plenary session, there were many great discussions about what needed to be done next. The energy was high and everyone seemed fired up and ready to go bring what was discussed at the conference back to their campuses.

Thank you to all of our engaging speakers and participants, you really made this year a huge success!

NYWLC's Day Two’s Opening Plenary, Feminism Without Borders, Just Wrapped

Day two’s opening plenary, Feminism Without Borders, here at the National Young Women’s Leadership Conference has just wrapped. With increased economic globalization there is an increasing need for women worldwide to come together to fight for the rights of all our sisters.

The plenary speakers did a wonderful job of explaining the historical context of the Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), an international treaty aims to give women equal legal standing according to the laws of each nation, and the current situation of Afghan women and girls with the first hand accounts of courageous Afghan activists of various ages.

Did you know? Even though Americans helped to author CEDAW, they are among a handful of nations worldwide including Sudan, Somalia, and Saudi Arabia that have not ratified the treaty. We need to push now for the Senate to ratify this treaty!

We were also shocked to learn that 1 in 6 women in Afghanistan die during childbirth compared to 1 in 2,500 in the US. Afghan women have had acid thrown in their faces while trying to go to school and dozens of schools have been destroyed to prevent women and girls from attending, all while about 85% of the country’s women can not read or write.

The daily atrocities faced by women both domestically and internationally cannot be addressed unless women step up and speak out for themselves. Plenary speaker Mavis Leno summed it up very well by saying, “If women don’t speak up for women, no one speaks up for women. It’s us or no one!”

We will be continuing to blog from the conference and tweeting. Make sure to follow us on the conference twitter widget; we will be using the hash tag #nywlc for all conference-related tweets.

Day Two Schedule for Conference

Welcome to the second day of our National Young Women's Leadership Conference. WOOHOO! We are Showing this morning's plenary live today on UStream -- same link as below for yesterday's plenary. It will be live from 10am-11:15am and available after for viewing anytime.

I hope you all were able to catch part of yesterday's Opening Plenary on UStream, or the fantastic tweets from the attendees via Twitter. If not, here are some links to see what you missed:

*See who tweeted the conference: feministcampus.org/follow
*Watch yesterdays opening plenary: www.ustream.tv/channel/feminist-majority-foundation-2009-nywlc
*And don’t forget to read yesterday's blog entries!

Once again we will be tweeting and blogging all day. Enjoy your second day of the conference.

For those of you who are coming to the conference today or following us virtually, here is the line-up:

10:00 – 11:15am - Morning Plenary: FEMINISM WITHOUT BORDERS
Eleanor Smeal, President, FMF; Anushay Hossain, Global Programs Coordinator, FMF; Lorraine Sheinberg, Board Member, FMF; Producer of “CEDAW: The Secret Treaty”; Susan Rubin, Writer and Narrator, “CEDAW: The Secret Treaty”; Lisa Cohen, Chief of Staff, Office of Congresswoman Diana DeGette (CO-1); Mavis Leno, Chair of FMF Campaign for Afghan Women and Girls; FMF Board Member; Atossa Leoni, Actor, The Kite Runner; Feroza Yari, Women For Women International, FMF Afghan Scholar; Tamana Naveed, High School Student, Kabul, Afghanistan ; Dr. Sima Samar, Chair, Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission; Founder, Shuhada Organization and Clinic

11:30am – 12:45pm - Workshop Series 3
Standing With Our Sisters Around the World
Exposing Fake Clinics
Debunking the Myths: Women’s Health and Contraception
Change Has Arrived, But There’s Work to Be Done!
Connecting the Dots: Women, Population, and Climate Change

2:15pm - Closing Rally: STAND UP, SPEAK OUT, TAKE THE LEAD!
Wendy Matheny, Campus Program Director, FMF; Grace Mulenga, Vice President, University of the District of Columbia Student Government Association; Shelby Knox, Feminist Organizer, The Education of Shelby Knox; Dolores Huerta, Founder, Dolores Huerta Foundation; Cofounder, United Farm Workers; National Campus Organizers Olivia Ortiz,Emily Kadar, Val Vilott, Allie McDonald, Patrice Guillory, Danielle Geong, and Tania Stewart

4:00 pm - Regional Caucuses

Find out what NYWLC participants said about day one!

Day one of the National Young Women's Leadership Conference: From Campus to Congress has ended and it was amazing! Here from conference participants about how they felt the first day went:



We are blogging and tweeting live from the conference. Follow us on the conference twitter widget; we will be using the hash tag #nywlc for all conference-related tweets. You can also follow us on the campus blog.

What a start to NYWLC!

The 2009 National Young Women’s Leadership Conference has started off incredibly! The opening plenary has just finished up – I cried, I laughed, I cheered. You could feel the energy in the room as we had the opportunity to hear from some of our country’s most influential women!

If you missed it, here are some highlights:

- Dolores Huerta, confounder of the United Farm Workers and current president and founder of the Dolores Huerta Foundation, spoke about her close work with the new Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis. She specifically recollected Solis’ campaign for the California state legislature and their work with women workers in Juarez, Mexico.

- Solis took the stage and energized the audience, reminding us that there is a place at the table for everyone and that young women need to keep the fight going until we see all discrimination ended. She talked about a plethora of issues ranging from increasing the number of women in math and science to sex trafficking to the importance of unions to green jobs and the economy. She challenged women everywhere to take leadership, step up, and speak out in many forums.

- Feminist Majority Foundation President Ellie Smeal moderated the opening plenary and revved up the crowd by listing off some of the great victories for women since President Obama took office, such as:

o The repeal of the Global Gag Rule
o Passage and signing of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act 2009
o Passage and signing of the Omnibus Spending Act of 2009 that included a provision to restore subsidized birth control pricing to low-income and college campus clinics and also a provision that released money held up by the Bush Administration for seven years that withheld authorized funds from the United Nations Population Fund for women’s maternal health.
o The creation of the White House Council on Women and Girls

- Tina Tchen, the Executive Director of the White House Council on Women and Girls and the Director of the White House Office of Public Liaison gave some the details about what the new administration is doing for women and girls. She encouraged dialogue and engagement with the new administration on all topics by e-mailing public@who.eop.gov.

- Lilly Ledbetter gave first hand accounts of her experiences as a victim of pay discrimination – she was paid 30-40% less than her male counterparts for nearly 20 years as a manager at Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. She underscored how the discrimination impacted not only her salary, but also her retirement savings, social security, and overtime pay. Ledbetter pursued her wage discrimination case all the way through to the Supreme Court, where she lost in a decision that gutted the Title V of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Fortunately, President Obama has signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act – although it can’t help Lilly recoup her damages, it gives future women a chance to protect themselves from such discrimination.

Check out the opening plenary on UStream. Keep watching for new posts all weekend, and follow us on Twitter @feministcampus. Tweet your responses with the hash tag #NYWLC! Here’s to a happy feminist weekend!

Feminist Networking Night on Saturday!

The FMF campus team and attendees of the National Young Women's Leadership Conference will be gathering this Saturday, March 21, from 7-9 pm at Vapiano M Street for an evening of dinner, drinks, good conversation, and feminist fun. This will be a chance for feminists around the country to meet each other in a casual setting to share ideas and just have a good time.

Vapiano M Street is located at 1800 M Street N.W., conveniently near the Farragut North (red line) and Farragut West (blue and orange lines) metro stops.

Countdown to the National Young Women's Leadership Conference

The National Young Women's Leadership Conference will begin this Saturday, March 21, at 8:30 am. Check out our countdown here.

Not able to attend the conference? Check out the opening plenary, livestreaming at 10 am on Saturday at http://www.ustream.tv/. You can also follow participants on twitter by using the hashtag #nywlc

Join the feminist network, even if you can't make it to DC!

NYWLC Update!

Greetings, Feminists!


We know everyone is going on break for the holidays shortly, but we wanted to give you all some quick updates on the National Conference!

• We've created a facebook event, and we will endeavor to keep it up to date with new developments! RSVP here to be sure you stay in the loop!

• We've added an exciting Congressional Day of Action on Monday, March 23rd at no additional cost! This is an opportunity for your group to truly take your action from Campus to Congress by joining us on Capitol Hill! The day will include training and actual visits to your Representative and Senator's offices.
  
  
• Registration will open on January 12th, 2009. Early-bird registration will be only $20 per person or $15 for groups of 5 or more for the conference and day of action. Financial Assistance is available - call your Campus Organizer for more information.

Go RSVP to the facebook event and keep an eye on www.feministcampus.org to make sure you're getting all the most up to date info about this exciting conference. Let us know if you have any questions at all, and we're looking forward to seeing you there!

Happy Holidays!

SAVE THE DATE! National Young Women's Leadership Conference

Calling all young feminist leaders!!

We've selected a date for the 3rd annual National Young Women's Leadership Conference this Spring! Mark your calendars now to join us for an incredible opportunity to come together and meet other feminist student activists, national leaders, and to discuss feminist issues and activism as they pertain to YOUR life!

The conference will take place on March 21 and 22 in Washington, DC. Further details will be coming your way soon - check back here regularly for the latest scoop!