March is Women's History Month, and
I'm being asked the same question -- a lot:
"Whatever happened to the
women's movement? Where are the feminist freedom fighters today?"
I guess if people don't see women
marching, they don't think they're moving. But they need to remember that the
marching, the protesting, of the Sixties and Seventies opened the door for a
generation that we hoped would come after us. And it has.
It's exciting to see three women on
the Supreme Court. It's exciting to see three women Secretaries of State and
even women leading other nations.
It's exciting to see women anchor the nightly news, and it's exciting to know
that the chief operating officer of Facebook -- the one who helps you connect
with your hundreds of 'friends' -- is, in fact, a woman.
But what's most exciting is that
this woman of power -- and a billionaire to boot -- is not satisfied with how
far women have come.
"The world is still run by
men," Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg said in a recent speech. "We're not
teaching our girls and women to have professional ambition. We're not
encouraging women to lean into their careers and aim for powerful jobs. With
only 3% of Fortune 500 companies run by women, we have a real problem."
Hearing Sandberg's words, I couldn't
help but flash back to when I was 23 years old, producing my own television
show, and people would say, "You're so ambitious!" And I would cringe,
feeling the sting of their contempt. What they were saying was that I was
"aggressive" and "assertive" and needed to be "in
control." It would take me years to feel these words as a compliment, not
as the pejoratives they were meant to be.
"We don't teach our girls to
have power," Sandberg told me a few months ago. "We teach them to
'get along.' And if they get too loud or forceful, we call them 'bossy.'"
That made me laugh. What spirited
young girl hasn't heard that word? Even Tina Fey titled her memoir
"Bossypants."
Sandberg puts it simply. "I
want my daughter to have the choice not to just succeed," she says,
"but to be liked for her accomplishments." Nobody said that to me in
the Seventies. That's why I created Free to Be...You and Me. I wanted to tell
girls and boys what I hadn't been told. I didn't want them to take half their
lives to figure out that, whatever they wanted, they should go for it all the
way -- and not worry about doing what everyone else does, just so they would be
liked.
That's why I love the posters on the
wall at the Facebook offices that read, "What would you do if you weren't
afraid?" I'd like to hang those posters in the hallways of every school in
the country, to remind kids -- and their teachers, too -- that the barriers we
face are mostly internal, not external.
Women's History Month is not just a
time to celebrate where we've come from, or how far we've opened the door. It's
also a time for us to express our dissatisfaction that the doors aren't opened
wide enough. As always, it's the agitation that creates the pearl.
So where is the women's movement
today? It is in the powerful hands of leaders like Sandberg, who, having risen
to the top of their careers, feel the responsibility to reach out and inspire
those women who follow them -- the college graduates, the women who are
struggling at the first rung of their careers, the women who are stalled and
frightened.
"Fortunes favors the
bold," Sandberg told Barnard's graduating class. "Think big. Dream
big. We will never close the achievement gap until we close the ambition
gap."
With leaders like Sandberg, we will.
So in honor of Women's History
Month, we've assembled this special slide show of women who are leading the way
-- in different fields -- all headed in the same direction, all part of the
same march.
Sheryl
Sandberg
1 of 20
Even before Sheryl
Sandberg left Google to become the COO of Facebook in 2008, she was ranked
number 29 on Fortune magazine's "Most Powerful Women in Business,"
and she was the youngest woman on that list. Since then, she has emerged as one
of the most influential executives on earth, and has been named one of Forbes
magazine's "100 Most Powerful Women" and one of the "25 Most
Influential People on the Web" by Business Week.
28 minutes ago ( 3:18 PM)
1)
Ask Yourself why does the Huffington
Post have a banner that say's STOP THE GOP's WAR on WOMEN
2) Ask Yourself....Why is it OK to have Conservative women demonized by folks
like Bill Maher, David Letterman...etc ?
3) Ask Yourself.....What happen to all the brave women of Code Pink.....now
that A Democrat is in office ?
4) Ask Yourself....I have to balance a budget, I can't spend MONEY I don't
have, why do I think my Gov't shouldn't have to....just because there is a cute
little D next to their name !
When
you can answer these question you will NO LONGER allow yourself to be used by
the Liberal Democratic Leftist in this country !
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marlo-thomas/womens-history-month_b_1333011.html