During the General Election, Republican candidate for Vice President Sarah Palin inadvertently did social justice movements a favor when she said, “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.”
(see related article: www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/2008-09-04-community_N.htm – 56k -)

While trying to take a jab at her opponent’s former occupation, she turned the spotlight on folks who work hard often for little pay to bring people together to do what they couldn’t do individually.

President Obama’s win further highlighted the work of community organizers everywhere. With the rise of a former organizer to the role of President, we at WMN asked ourselves if Community Organizing might be a model for accomplishing the things we want to see done in ’09.

WMN has always been community organizer-friendly, but during our first meeting of the year we took time to learn a little bit more about what goes into the work of an organizer by talking to Dawn Shirreffs of Clean Water Action. In the process, we also learned more about the issues that Clean Water Action works on, and followed up on what WMN members were doing around the issue of the Parkland Development and the Urban Development Boundary (UDB).

Dawn identified some key questions and points that anyone thinking about taking on an issue in their community should keep in mind. Here is some paraphrasing of the steps she outlined at the meeting

1. Identify a problem
2. Decide what you want. What is the ‘ask’?
3. You don’t have to be an expert. Instead, tap someone who is an expert. Enlist their help.
4. Who can help you? Who has power?
5. Choose the right message and make it matter.

To learn more about Clean Water Action in Florida visit http://www.cleanwateraction.org/fl

To find out more about the UDB and the Hold the Line Campaign visit http://www.udbline.com/campaign.htm

We all know that procrastination is truly an art form, plus you have been really busy lately, you have a headache, family in town, you haven’t gotten around to it yet…. your goldfish has been sick whatever…  the road to ruin is paved with good intentions!

Ok granted that was a little heavy and melodramatic but I feel I must remind you all that:

TODAY OCTOBER 6th, 2008 IS THE LAST DAY TO REGISTER TO VOTE.

http://www.miamidade.gov/elections/

SO- Look left and look right … and tell everyone that today is the last day to register… luckily registration is just a post office away!

http://www.miamidade.gov/elections/how_register.asp 

You can go online print out the form and then get your butt to a postoffice near you - make sure it is postmarked by 5 pm today!

Seriously this is it – if for some reason you have missed the door to door canvassers, the last day to register parties or somehow failed to notice that there is in fact an election going on today is the day to snap out of it!  oh and do your civic duty… pass this missive on to everyone you see!

Voting Vixens

Check out this article, Summer Voter Drives Target Younger Women – featuring our own Sophie Brion:

“One of the things we think is cool about the Voting Vixen is that we were using consumer tactics that are used against us in terms of creating need and desire to purchase things, so we tried to use that and harvest that power for good,” said Sophie Brion, director of the Miami Women’s Movement Now.

Only about two months to go before the general election. Let’s get out the vote!

August 26 is Women’s Equality Day and also Florida’s primary election, with important issues like the Children’s Trust on the ballot.

Our friends MI-LOLA have created a Get Out the Vote campaign: Call. Email. Text. For Women’s Equality Day.

Check out their super cute video:

What’s Women’s Equality Day?
Women’s Equality Day commemorates the passage of the 19th Amendment, which gave U.S. women full voting rights in 1920. More.
What’s in this August election… Isn’t all the important stuff in November?
No! If you’re concerned about education, healthcare, the economy, or local or statewide issues, there will be something on the ballot that should matter to you.
Where do I find information about what will be on the ballot?
Miami-Dade County
Broward County
Palm Beach County

We admit that we have neglected this lovely bloggy blog for the past month or so… the “quiet” summer, filled with time to “catch up” never materialized. We’ve been busy. Please send some links to wmnblog@gmail.com – so we can start adding some new info!

Also – check out www.votingvixen.com (under construction at the moment!) and Voting Vixen’s new group on Facebook.

How’s your summer going?

and vice versa…

Interesting article (“Gay Unions Shed Light on Gender in Marriage“) on nytimes.com…

This video is a montage of cable news clips called “Sexism Sells – But We’re Not Buying It,” produced by the Women’s Media Center. It is amazing.
Found via Judith Warner’s Domestic Disturbances column for nytimes.com… a lovely critique of the “bubbling idiocy” of Sex and the City “sugar-coating it all in Blahniks and Westwood, and yummy men and yummier real estate” and the media coverage of Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

Is this why I keep getting emails about smart women’s husbands running for office? Check out the Brookings Institution report: “Why Are Women Still Not Running for Public Office?”. (How scholarly of us… thanks, Emily!)

Check out the following 05/27/08 commentary by Caryl Rivers from Women’s E-News and let us know what you think.

(WOMENSENEWS)–The presidential campaign of Sen. Hillary Clinton has some disturbing messages for uppity women in the United States.

The reality that a woman is so close to the top political post in the country–perhaps even the world–has stirred up old ideas about the danger of female power and about woman’s proper place in society. The backlash is sending a retro cloud across a number of fronts.

I’d been hearing from female friends–some of whom do not support Hillary–that the backlash surprised them.

Apparently, they missed the Wall Street Journal story on April 9 by Jonathan Kaufman and Carol Hymowitz, who wrote about the slurs and inflammatory language that many women encountered when the topic of the campaign came up at work, and which they thought had been banished from public discourse.

“Some women worry that regardless of how the election turns out,” they wrote, “the resistance to Senator Clinton may embolden some men to resist women’s efforts to share power with them in business, politics and elsewhere.”

If Hillary were male, and had garnered so many votes, no one would be calling for a pullout.

Worrying Signs

Are we heading into a new era of resistance to female gains? There are worrying signs to suggest that the answer is yes.

They are not only found in the dust of Hillary’s campaign trail, but also in the college admission practices, votes in Congress, Supreme Court decisions.

Elite schools are quietly instituting affirmative action policies for white men, so top-scoring women may not be getting into their colleges of choice.

U.S. News and World Report, using undergraduate admissions rate data collected from more than 1,400 four-year colleges and universities that participate in the magazine’s rankings, found last year that over the previous 10 years many schools are maintaining their gender balance by admitting more men with lower scores than women.

“The fat acceptance envelope is simply more elusive for today’s accomplished young women,” Jennifer Delahunty, the dean of admissions at Kenyon College, wrote in a New York Times op-ed last year.

Most disturbing, Delahunty told Time magazine, “was the reaction of young women. By and large they just assumed this is just how things work. Why aren’t they marching in the streets? It isn’t fair and women should be saying something about it not being fair.”

What’s the Message?

What message are girls–and boys–being given? That men and boys will always be allowed to step ahead of women, no matter how accomplished the latter?

The U.S. Congress could not even summon enough votes in April for a bill that would allow a woman to sue for sex discrimination at the time she discovered it was happening.

Pressures, meanwhile, are intensifying for women to work longer and longer hours as family-friendly policies stall. An ongoing media narrative says that women in good jobs are deserting the workplace because of a traditional pull toward home and family.

In a time when affirmative action programs for blacks and other minorities are under attack–limited by the Supreme Court and challenged by new activist groups–special privileges for white males are on the rise. Parents are seeing their high-scoring, talented girls losing out to less able boys, and this comes not just from a few isolated anecdotes.

At the same time, the political powers-that-be are sending out a message that discrimination against women in the workplace is no big deal.

When an Alabama woman sued Goodyear because she had been paid less than men doing the same work for two decades, the Supreme Court (just after the departure of Sandra Day O’Connor) ruled that she had waited too long to sue. The court said she should have brought her case within six months after her first unequal paycheck–that is, 20 years before she discovered it.

You’d think the Congress, which pays lip service to equal pay for equal work, would come racing to remedy this injustice.

What happened? The House countered the high court ruling by passing a bill that would permit lawsuits by victims of discrimination when they discover discrimination, not when the discrimination occurred. But it couldn’t make it through the Senate. George Bush threatened to veto such a bill if it passed, and John McCain said he opposed it.

Media Embraces a Narrative

Meanwhile, a media narrative persists that the best and the brightest women are simply going home. They are “opting out” and becoming more traditional, feeling the pull of kids, hearth and home, their “natural” place.

Signs hoisted by hecklers at Clinton rallies –”Stop running for president and make me a sandwich,” “Iron my shirt”–show the ugly underside of that sentimental version.

What’s really happening, says New York University sociologist Kathleen Gerson, is that full-time paid work has come to mean 50 hours or more. That overload is what working mothers are rejecting. Women, overall, aren’t “opting out” of full-time work, but are getting pushed out by an increasingly inflexible workplace. That story is not being told.

Just ask Joan C. Williams. In a report in the American Prospect in March she found the vast majority–more than 70 percent–of the newspaper stories she and others analyzed emphasized pulls rather than pushes. Women were following the pull toward home, “with little mention of how the workplace pushes them out.”

This is true even though a 2004 study by researchers Pamela Stone and Meg Lovejoy found that 86 percent of highly qualified women surveyed said work-related reasons, including workplace inflexibility, were key considerations in their decisions to quit. Only 6 percent of newspaper articles that Williams reviewed identified workplace pushes as key reasons why women left work.

Put these disparate items together and you see the clear message: Women have gone too far, and they shouldn’t be running for president. They belong at home, and in fact are choosing to stay home. So why shouldn’t males get the college spots, and who cares about workplace discrimination?

As president Hillary Clinton could change at least some of this. That’s why it’s so hard to listen to the delegate-counters say her prospects are fading.

Some women are fighting back.

On May 20, the Women’s Media Center launched a “Sexism Sells, But We’re Not Buying It” campaign against the pervasive sexism in the media’s election coverage. The group’s Web site offers a petition for you to sign, chiding media outlets for their performance. “Sexism isn’t a partisan issue,” it says. “We’re not going to let anyone hit the snooze button on this important issue!”

To which I say, “Amen!”

Boston University journalism professor Caryl Rivers is the author of “Selling Anxiety: How the News Media Scare Women.”