Recently in Thank You Thursdays Category

Jay Smooth said it pretty damn well, but I still feel a feminist obligation to talk back to the Republicans who made fun of community organizing last night.

Thank you to all the community organizers, past and present, who have recognized the ways in which the personal is the political, hearing--in the individual stories of ordinary people--a common thread of struggle deserving of action and resolution. Thank you to those who jump started whole movements (feminism, civil rights, labor) with their audacity and daily, hourly, minute-by-minute courage to knock on doors, sit down with friends and strangers alike, educate, and most of all, listen. Thank you to the community organizers who have targeted environmental racism--making sure that folks aren't poisoned in their own neighborhoods just because they don't have the resources to fight back. Thank you to the community organizers who have targeted civil rights, educational failures, classism, racism, sexism, ableism etc. etc.

Thank you to my friend Daniel, who has done community organizing from Harlem to LA to Boston. Thank you to Biko Baker of League of Young Voters, who I once interviewed and was immediately impressed by. Thank you to Saul Alinsky, largely considered the father of community organizing (pictured above). Thank you to all of you I don't know, who every day, make the choice to listen to ordinary people's stories and help them link these stories into a template for honest-to-goodness social change.

And, yes, thank you to Barack Obama, for making the choice to be a community organizer so many years ago and for continuing to be proud and loud about the importance of the role of the community organizer for our nation's wellbeing.

Since Courtney is on vacation, I'm stepping in this week to do my first Thank You Thursday post!

This week I want to dedicate to graphic novels, and particularly the bad-ass women who write them. In the pretty male dominated world of comics and graphic novels, these women rock their content. I love the way reading a graphic novel makes my brain work differently, giving visual context for the words and characters on the page. Two women in particular stand out for me: Alison Bechdel and Ariel Schrag.

I've written about Alison Bechdel's stellar book, Fun Home, before. It's gotten TONS of well deserved attention, and I've read it at least five times. She has such a witty and thoughtful style and tells the story of her own coming of age and coming out, as well as her dad's own struggle with his sexuality. She's also the author of the favorite comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, which is coming out in a collected edition this fall.

Ariel Schrag is a newer find of mine, but she's also a fantastic contributor to the lesbian graphic novel world. She wrote a series of graphic novels while in high school in Berkeley, one about each year. It's really cool to watch her skill and style develop and really fun to delve back into the world of high school through Schrag's eyes.

Both these women write with such honesty and humor it makes my life feel just a little less foreign.

Who are your favorite female graphic novelists?

This incredible Congressional leader is gone, but her legacy will live on in the fierce stand she took against the war and repressive Bush-era policies, her unflinching support of reproductive justice, and her insistence on speaking out often.

Tubbs Jones chaired the House Ethics Committee. In 2002, she voted against the use of military force in Iraq. And again, when most of our nation's leaders were hoodwinked by faulty testimony about WMDs and fear mongering, she was one of only 11 House members to oppose a resolution supporting U.S. troops in Iraq in March of 2003.

Tubbs Jones also opposed President Bush's tax cuts and the privatization of Social Security and spoke out against election fraud in 2004.

And by all personal accounts, she was a joy to be around. She will be missed, but modeled after for years to come.

We ask you to contribute to our redesign project, and you donate money with generous abandon. We create a community blog and you fill it full of fascinating analysis, personal experiences, and media debunking. We ask you to fill out a reader survey, and you do, in absolute droves.

Not to kiss your asses, but we really do want to thank all of those in our feministing family for being such involved, dedicated readers and writers. You make us smarter everyday. You confirm, for the millionth time, that feminism is obviously not dead. And you have a great sense of personal style. Well, we don't really know, but we can imagine.

We showed you McCain stumbling over the question of whether birth control should, indeed, be covered by insurance companies in the same way Viagra is (answer=hell yes). But who asked the question?

Many news outlets have alluded to "the woman from the LA Times," but we wanted to name her and thank her for doing what journalists are supposed to do--ask the hard questions and demand answers from our nation's political power players. Thank you Maeve Reston!

By the way, I love that community blogger JentheFem and others have started to write their own Thank You Thursdays. The best form of flattery!

Okay, so it's obvious that the feministing ladies have a bit of a crush on this dude, but don't you also?

I've long felt like calling people "racist" was the most pointless shit ever. It allows those who are doing the labeling to pretend they're not--even though we're all socialized in a racist society, and therefore, a little bit racist (in the words of Avenue Q). And it allows those who are the people being labeled to grow irate and not have a real conversation about race.

Thanks to Racialicious for the heads up.

On a related note, I'd like to personally thank Nicole Anderson, a history professor in Florida, who I met at the National Women's Studies Association conference this year. She and I resolved to do some serious frank dialogue on race and feminism after sitting through a heated session at the conference. I've already learned so much from our back n' forth. Stay tuned for the fruits of our shared labors...

Saunter over to your women's studies bookshelf and open up that first flap to discover who published your favorite feminist tomes. Chances are it wasn't Random House or Simon & Schuster, or one of the other major biggies (with a few exceptions). Instead you were probably introduced to feminism thanks to the ingenuity of publishers like the Feminist Press, Seal Press, or one of the other many, many small, independent publishers that takes a chance on feminist lit.

I just sold a new book (stay tuned for details), so I've been thinking a lot about ye ole publishing industry and the way it works. It is an industry that started out with a deep commitment to Ideas--to giving people the goods on how to live a great life, to challenging the status quo, to the development of long careers of writing, reading, and editing. But because of market forces hard to explain in one little blog post (Barnes & Noble, Amazon, the rise of less literary forms of entertainment etc.), the publishing industry is not heavily dependent on dollars and cents.

This isn't to say that some books aren't published simply because they contain brilliant ideas, but it is to say that we would naïve if we really bought the idea that publishers aren't primarily interested in the bottom line these days. Did my editor at Simon & Schuster buy Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters because she felt a moral obligation to spread the word about food and fitness obsession? In part. But in truth, she was able to convince her publisher to buy it because they thought it would sell. Point blank.

Feminist presses, on the other hand, still strain to juggle the bottom line with a higher calling. They are committed to spreading the feminist gospel, to challenging traditional notions of gender, to finding new voices who are marginalized and/or left out all together by mainstream publishers. For this--and for Listen Up: Voices From the Next Feminist Generation, Riverbend's books out of Iraq, and Brown Girl, Brownstone etc.--we thank them from the bottom of our big, feminist hearts.

If there is a book, published by a feminist press, that changed your life, please let us know in the comments.

With all of this talk of potential first ladies in the news these days, it's got me thinking about one of my favorite feminist heroines of all frickin' time, Eleanor Roosevelt.

Not only did she chair the committee that created the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but she can be thought of as one of the catalyzing forces that ushered in the second wave of feminism. Her personal life was also fascinating--from a love-starved childhood to her consistently contentious relationship with her mother-in-law, to her later alleged affairs with women and men alike (Franklin obviously had his lovin' on the side). Reading about her life is like peering into the history of women's transcendent public works alongside their tumultuous private lives.

Thank you Eleanor, for your incredible spirit, visionary leadership, and fiercely unique example.

So yeah, there's sure a lot of work to do in this damn country if we really want to eradicate institutional sexism, racism, classism etc. Yeah, we've got major media bias and a real problem with corporate conglomerates owning everything and people being consumer-obsessed. We're still involved in a deadly, unjust war and have a "big daddy" for a president.

BUT, I want to take this opportunity--the day before hot dogs and fireworks--to acknowledge that we also live in a country where a lot of shit is done really right, a country where there is a democratic process (though it doesn't always run smoothly) where people can change laws, get help, fight injustice. A country this is constantly striving to be better, that is made up of incredible immigrant stories, that has been transformed by feminist movements in innuberable ways. Here are five things I thank America for. Please feel free to add your own:

1. Title IX
2. Eleanor Roosevelt
3. The freedom of the press
4. Roe vs. Wade
5. Hot apple pie with cold vanilla ice cream on top

I had a really incredible experience a few weeks back and I wanted to write something about it for the feministing community because I hope it inspires others to do the same.

For many years my extended family on my mom’s side, which is mostly located in Colorado—with some outliers on the east and west coasts—has had a hard time getting everyone together. When I was growing up our Thanksgiving celebrations were legendary—kids everywhere playing board games and falling in the snow during touch football, parents laughing and reminiscing about old times, my grandmother pulling out her amazing pumpkin pie and drinking scotch on the rocks. But since we’ve all become adults, it’s gotten harder and harder to make this happen.

And let’s be honest, it’s not just a logistical difficulty. My family is really diverse, not in the ethnic sense, but in the political, cultural sense. We’ve got cousins who still think George Bush has been a great president, that abortion should be illegal, that homosexuality is an abomination. And then we’ve got my mom, for example, who uses words like “goddess” and “patriarchy” with ease, drives a Prius, and talks to animals in the backyard like they are her little friends. When the two meet—especially in these contentious political times—things can get ugly.

The women in my family—however—have a way of working with these differences that has always been more compassionate, more resilient, less fraught with black and white thinking. So, in the spirit of the amazing women who have come before, we decided to try an all lady reunion at my mom’s house in New Mexico.

It was amazing. It was actually more than amazing. I would sit around a table in the backyard and feel stunned by how unalike we all were, yet how wildly similar. It turns out that though we have traveled very different paths, so many of us have been traveling them in the same way.

We are a family of women with indistinguishable empathy and tireless work ethics, what my Christian cousins would call “servant’s hearts.” Among the “momma generation” we’ve got a psychiatric social worker, an emergency room nurse, a missionary nurse, a teacher in a poor, urban school, a business owner with a collaborative, cutting-edge ethic, and a bartender (aka another therapist). I’d never really seen all these women (at least with an adult consciousness) as a quilt of where I come from. I’d never felt my roots so deeply and profoundly as I did over this weekend.

It wasn’t easy to get everyone together. A lot of us, in truth, barely knew one another before showing up for this familial leap of faith. But I cannot tell you how grateful I am that we did it. I encourage you—especially if you come from a family like ours, where political tensions run high—to try to cut out the guys for a weekend (not forever, just for a weekend) and see what transpires. I have a feeling you’ll be as moved as I was…

(And if it’s something you’ve been thinking about doing, but just having gotten around to it, do it. Today. Email everyone or call and say, “Okay, let’s get a date on the books.” That’s what we had to eventually do to make it happen.)

Lorde's been on my mind as of late, I guess because I'm always thinking about the old master's tools/master's house dilemma (if you don't know, check her essay, "The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” in Sister/Outsider). I can't help but wonder WWAS (What Would Audre Say)? so often when I am faced with modern day conundrums of politics, identity, power etc.

She was such an extraordinary human being, such an incredible thinker--one of the brave ones who spoke truth to power, who addressed the racial divides within feminism, who insisted that sexual orientation be part of the feminist conversation. Among other things, she was also an amazing educator--teaching at my own old stomping grounds, Hunter College.

We thank you Audre, now gone for over 16 years, for your legacy of truth-telling and, in particular, your profound exploration of power. I leave you all with Audre in her own words:

Love is word, another kind of open.
As the diamond comes into a knot of flame
I am Black because I come from the earth's inside
Now take my word for jewel in the open light.

It sort of goes without saying that Hillary deserves our love this week. As you may know, from reading my writing elsewhere, I'm an Obama voter, but a Clinton supporter. I'm deeply touched by her courage, her grit, and her grace here at the end. I thought her concession speech was beautiful. She really led with her feminist identity--referencing Seneca Falls, invoking her grandmother, mother, and daughter, addressing race and social change. I especially loved these lines:

Although we weren't able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it's got about 18 million cracks in it, and the light is shining through like never before, filling us all with the hope and the sure knowledge that the path will be a little easier next time.

I wrote a letter in thanks, which you can read here, but this is an excerpt:

I thank you for weathering this storm of anxious masculinity and outright sabotage, but even more, for creating a moment where the kind of subtle sexism that women experience everyday—in boardrooms and courtrooms, in college classrooms and dining halls, on city streets and in small town bars —was brought to undeniable light. Your campaign was a perfect flashpoint to finally get us talking about the tangled knot of leadership and gender, our society's obsession with looks and youth, the double-bind that so many women in positions of power are forced to face—either you're a bitch or a doormat, no in-between. You made sexism newsworthy in a way it hasn't been since Anita Hill. No doubt young minds have been shaped and older minds have been changed by watching you over the last year.

I saw Top Girls last night with the ladies on my intergenerational feminist panel and it got me thinking so much about women's lives, childbirth, sacrifice, our feminist legacy etc. It started out with a crazy theater version of Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party, where all these women through out history had dinner together and told the stories of their lives (while sometimes interrupting, crying, screaming, and drinking a lot of wine). While it definitely confused me (she's all post-structuralist and Brechtian in this one), it also made me want to give a big ol' shout out to Caryl Churchill, the playwright, and other women playwrights over the years who have helped us look at some of our deepest issues through artful lenses.

Some of my favorites are Paula Vogel, Wendy Wasserstein, Nzotkae Shange, Margaret Edson, and Winter Miller.

Who are yours? What plays by women have changed the way you look at the world?

This might strike y'all as painfully obvious, but I just wanted to make sure that we officially devoted a little gratitude (or, make that a whole lotta) to the suffragettes. We wouldn't even be getting in all these Clinton/Obama shananagins if we didn't have the power to influence who was elected.

We don't normally link to Fox in a favorable light, but their's a first time for everything. Reader Amanda told us about this incredibly touching story that, we agree, deserves some serious play (ah, sports puns).

When Sara Tucholsky of Western Oregon University scored her first home run ever (whoooo-hoooo!) it looked like life was golden, but as she rounded first base, she cranked her knee and ended up on the ground, writhing in pain. Her opponents, who you think might have rejoiced, actually did the exact opposite:

Members of the Central Washington University softball team stunned spectators by carrying Tucholsky around the bases Saturday so the three-run homer would count - an act that contributed to their own elimination from the playoffs...As the trio reached home plate, Tucholsky said, the entire Western Oregon team was in tears.

Every awesome sports movie song of triumph and sports(wo)manship is playing in my head right now. So awesome.

As Madonna celebrates the launch of another album today, I thought it would be appropriate to reflect a little bit on her influence on the way that we (or at least those of us born before, like what, 1985) think about our bodies and ourselves.

When my friends and I made dances in my living room, sliding down walls seductively, moving our hips in circles, donning those fingerless gloves, it was Madonna we were channeling. In a fairly frigid suburb, she was one of the only experiences we had of a girl/woman who seemed resolutely in charge of her own sexuality and the expression of it. I think amid all the virgin/whore thinking that permeates too much of most American girl's childhoods, she's was always an interesting anomaly, a woman who couldn't quite be pinned down, someone who disrupted all of those categories with a certain sinful glee (think "Like a Virgin" and "Like a Prayer").

Her legacy is confusing. After all, she is also the material girl--urging total conformity to conspicuous consumption. And as she says in the above clip, she can be "spoiled and petulant." But who can't? And how awesome is it that she is honest about herself? She did smooch Britney Spears during the VMAs in what seemed like a totally flagrant display of "kissing for boys' titillation." Her lyrics have sometimes been incredibly boring, but they've also been awesome: think "Express Yourself" and, one of my personal favorites, "Human Nature"--"Did I say something true? Oops, I didn't know we couldn't talk about sex. Did I have a point of view? Oops, I didn't know I couldn't talk about you?"

And as Latoya so thoroughly points out over at Racialicious (thanks for the heads up readers), she's got a really bizarre and possibly colonial mindset when it comes to race and the entire continent of Africa. Major grounds for pause.

Nevertheless, it's fascinating to me that this working class gal from the Detroit suburbs, who had dreams of becoming a ballerina and studied with Alvin Ailey, who dropped out of the University of Michigan and hopped on her first plane ever to New York City with $35 in her pocket, ended up changing the way just about every young woman of a certain generation understood sex. Thank you, Madonna, for being someone who complicated the idea of female sexuality on such a grand scale.

As sparks flew this week about intergenerational feminism and the current election circus, there was one thing that continually buoyed me: my girls. I got emails from Michelle at Lehigh and Debbie at Girl with Pen, I got calls and texts from my feministing co-editors and feminist friends offline, and, of course, Jessica's awesome post and Ann's great editing officially allowed me to feel "in cahoots" (best word ever?).

No matter what intergenerational misunderstandings may arise, it is so heartening to know that women my age stand in solidarity. We respect our elders, but god damn it's awesome that we also support, lift up, and value one another. I think we're getting better each generation at perfecting the psychology of abundance--the idea that one of us having success doesn't preclude anyone else's, and that in fact, the more young women's voices we get into the public debate and into positions of influence and power, the more all of us will be heard.

I know there are complexities within our generation of feminists--one can just look at recent blogosphere controversies for evidence of that--but I think it's important that we also recognize how much progress we have made in forming supportive friendships across class, racial, and other sorts of divides. We are down for the cause, but even more beautiful and radical, I think we do a pretty powerful job of being down for one another.

If you haven’t seen this amazing video of Jill Bolte Taylor, neuroanatomist, speak at TED about her experience of having a stroke and discovering nirvana, um, you should. (My mom sent it to me…momma, I promise to stop talking so much shit about the things you forward.)

Today I want to thank Jill, who was moved to study the brain because of her schizophrenic brother. That original love led to a whole career of critical research, and in this wild twist of fate, a stroke that led to a whole different understanding about the way our brains work, not to mention consciousness and life’s meaning as a whole.

At a time when brain research has become so trendy, and reductive female vs. male brain analysis particularly “sexy,� it’s moving to hear a female scientist (Larry Summers bite us) explore the brain and its interworkings in such a revolutionary, non-gendered way.

And while we’re at it, why not thank our sturdy, little, stupendous brains. Sure, sometimes they freak out, break down, burn too bright, but most of the time they are frickin’ miraculous.

This might seem sort of ridiculous, but this Thursday I’d like to take a moment of gratitude that I get to wear pants. It blows my frickin’ mind that there was a time when women like me—smart, ambitious, creative—were stuck wearing skirts seven days a week. Don’t get me wrong, I love me a princess-sleeve dress with a bell skirt, but I love it because I get to choose it.

Women first started wearing pants during World War II when they also filled in on jobs traditionally held by men. But when the men returned and the gender backlash commenced, women were back in skirts until the 60s when feminism’s second wave started to take hold and Audrey Hepburn made those black capris famous in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961).

As I’ve been on the road speaking at colleges, I frequently get a question like, “Can you be a feminist and wear lipstick or high heels?� Hell yeah, and you know why? Because you can CHOOSE to wear those things. Or CHOOSE not to wear those things. Or CHOOSE to wear them on every second Sunday.

Now if we could only expand the clothing options open to men…

New Moon: The Magazine for Girls and Their Dreams was one of the first magazines I ever published in...I think I was about 16 and it was an essay about an old woman named Ana Lucia that I met while spending a summer in Costa Rica. She rocked my world and I immediately wanted to write about the experience, but what's a girl in the middle of Colorado Springs, Colorado to do with a lot of ambition and a cheesy personal essay? Send it to New Moon, it turns out.

New Moon has encouraged so many young voices over the years, many of whom I'm sure have developed into bonafide journalists and editors and poets as the years wear on. Part of this is due to the fact that the magazine recognizes that wellbeing and authenticity go hand in hand. You don't have to sanitize the content just to make it safe and you also don't have to dumb it down to make it attractive to girls. Let girls create their own media, and enlightenment follows.

Thanks to Nancy Gruver and all the other visionaries behind New Moon's founding and all those that continue to keep it alive and thriving.

*In this month's issue, by the way, is an interview with DJ Rehka alongside an essay with "examples of artists who bring positive messages to the airwaves while maintaining the true essence of hip-hop." See what I mean?

As anyone who listens to the music knows, it tends to be a man's game, but there are a few brave women who have shown that MC-ing isn't sex-linked to the Y-chromosome. In my book I talk about the negative affects of growing up listening to a music that essentially told me: "Your role in the music of your generation is as eye candy, the cute girl at the party who gets freestyled about [thanks Che DeLeon], not the one who does the freestyling. Your body is your voice." There were some spit-kickin' women, and more to come, who give young women a different message, that they have every right to make their voices and lyrics and stories heard within hip hop communities. Big ups to Jill Scott, Bahamadia, Jean Graye, Lauren Hill, Queen Latifah, Roxanne Shante etc. etc. (please free to add names in the comments section). And a personal shout out to Kate and Christina, Lengua 4 Eva.

I was on a panel of intergenerational feminists early this week and we were all charged with telling the stories of how we became feminists. You might expect to hear about Gloria Steinem, or workplace harassment, or some other galvanizing force. And there was a little of that, but you know what was an almost universal thread? Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. How amazing and unexpected is that?

I remember being totally blown away by this book, and the rest of Morrison's deep, intricate, challenging work, starting in high school. I've read The Bluest Eye almost every year since that first time when I was 15 or 16 and every time I am reminded of why it broke my heart and made me understand social change and the human psyche better. She weaves body image, sexual incest, racial segregation, class issues, and so much more together in this tiny little tome on what it means to be human.

Thank you, thank you, thank you for Title IX, which states:

"No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance."

Passed in June of 1972, you all know what a huge difference this legislation has played in the lives of women and girls. The most celebrated benefit has been women's involvement in sports (amazingly, an unintended side effect of the original foremothers). In 1972, one in 27 high school girls played sports. Today 1 in 2.5 does.

I used to hear my grandmother's stories about only getting to bounce the ball three times in gym class and laugh my ass off. I--a two-sport captain--couldn't imagine such a limit! Sports were where I learned resilience, teamwork, risk-taking, and discipline, among so many other lessons. My sports moments were some of my most joyful through out high school. How did Title IX affect your life?

Check out this profile I wrote of the godmomma of Title IX, the AMAZING Bernice Sandler.

Thank you to the brave women of the feminist movement for making it normal for girls and women to entertain a range of career options. When my grandmother was young, she knew she could either be a teacher or a nurse. She chose teacher. When my mom was young, she thought she might be a secretary because she'd heard that if you did your work very quickly, you could read the rest of the day. She never thought she could go into publishing or be a writer or other fancy man jobs that involved books. Despite being brilliant and dynamic, she only saw a very narrow range of options open to her job-wise. (She later would become a superstar social worker/community activist).

By the time I was five-years-old I told my parents that I would like to be a part-time waitress and part-time doctor. Then it was ballerina. Then it was vet. Then it was lawyer (until my dad took me to work and made me watch him talk on the phone all frickin' day...it ain't no Law and Order people). Then it was, finally and forever, writer.

As intergenerational tensions started flaring up again around these primaries, it got me thinking about the claim that young feminists aren't aware of their legacy, that we take all the change that has happened for granted. I don't think that's true, but hearing the claim enough times has me wondering if it is one way of older women asking younger women..."Hey, could we get a little credit here?" This column is, in part, my way--feministing's way--of saying "Hell yeah, you deserve lots of praise and thanks. There are things about the previous waves of feminist thought and action that we disagree with, but there is SO much we are deeply thankful for."

Further, I think gratitude is just about the most delightful emotion on earth. Give me a thank you note to write and I'm instantly happy. Seriously.

And finally, it is hard to remember how much has changed, in part, because things have changed so dramatically in some spheres. I hope this will be a place for all of us to really take in how amazing and wildly effective feminism was and is (we hear the opposite message so often from mainstream media). Think of it as your weekly dose of proof that daily activism makes monumental social change.

So...

Today I want to express my deepest gratitude for birth control. For a nice little history, look here. I was interviewing Gloria Feldt once and she told me this amazing story about how the legalization of birth control in 1965 changed her life. She was living in Texas, struggling with a car full of kids that she loved but found draining, and then she got access to birth control, and in essence, the rest of her life. Of course she would go on to be the national president of Planned Parenthood (oh man, am I thankful for PP) and help secure so many women's access to safe and cheap birth control. I can't even begin to imagine--at 28--how my life would have been different if I didn't have reproductive control. For starters, I would have had a lot less sex. Just sayin.

Thank you to so many, but especially Margaret Sanger, Dr. C. Lee Buxton and Estelle Griswold, and Gloria.