Women, Power, and Roller Skates: Connecting Across the Generations

Check out this interesting guest post by Carla Goldstein, the director of the Women’s Institute at Omega, on the feminist progress within her own family. This is one more voice to our continued exploration of generational issues, leading up to the conference this fall at the Omega Institute. We are publishing a series of guest posts as a fun way of initiating some of the speakers–who are generally new to blogging–into our exciting online community. Please make them feel welcome. And don’t forget to turn in your scholarship applications! They’re due June 1st.

My day began with bringing my pouting 8-year-old daughter to school, mad because we were late again. I felt sympathetic, remembering what it was like to always be the last kid at drop off and pick up. My mom, who was a single parent in the 1960s and 70s, was constantly juggling work and caretaking.
As I drove home I remembered that I had nothing in the fridge to feed my mother, now 70 and visiting from Florida for my daughters’ dance recital. I made a quick detour to the supermarket. Walking into the store, I realized I was still wearing pajama bottoms. After a moment of panic, I decided whatever! I shopped anyway. Back in the car, I felt a well of gratitude towards my mother for her “whatever!” attitude that mortified me as a child, and turns out to be an essential source of my strength as an adult.
While unpacking groceries, I asked my mom what messages her mother had given her about being a woman. She had trouble finding something on point. Then out came a sequence of two short memories. The first was about her mother (my grandmother) who grew up in an orthodox Jewish family in the East Bronx during the early 1900s. When my grandmother had been a little girl, her mother (my great grandmother) had insisted she get a pair of roller skates because all children should have skates, not just the boys!
My mother’s second memory was about her father refusing to let her take driver’s ed in high school. He believed women had no need to drive. My grandmother tried to persuade him, but lost the argument. Years later, at age 55, my grandmother taught herself to drive and then helped my mother learn to drive who was then 35 years old.
Upon hearing these two stories, I had a new way of understanding my matrilineal heritage. Until this telling, I had always attributed my adolescent hobby of roller skating to be a happy accident and my early driving as a necessity. It never occurred to me that my mother’s enthusiasm for my skating or her permission to drive as soon as I hit the age limit was connected to a family through-line of liberation. The personal stories that connect to the history of women’s mobility reminded me that social change is an ever intertwined process moving between our private, day-to-day lives and larger political forces.
Over the past century, women’s lives have changed so radically — and unevenly! Some women still have no freedom of mobility, and even worse are stuck in slavery, violence and racking poverty. The promise now, aided by a global communications network, is that we can share information, knowledge, inspiration, and resources, as we build stronger coalitions to take the next leap in liberation for ourselves and the planet so desperately in need of women’s leadership.
At this year’s Women and Power conference at Omega Institute we will be talking across the generations to reflect on and celebrate how far we have traveled, to examine things left undone, and to inspire each other to take the next leap forward in building a world where women’s dreams are valued and realized.
We are hungry to hear your intergenerational stories — online at feministing, and in September at Omega in Rhinebeck, New York.
With love, Carla Goldstein
Carla Goldstein’s complete bio is after the jump.

Carla Goldstein, JD, is Omega Institute’s external affairs director and director of the Women’s Institute at Omega. Carla is an attorney with 20 years of experience in public interest advocacy and has worked extensively in city and state government on issues related to women’s rights, poverty, public health, and social justice. She has contributed to more than 100 city, state, and federal laws. Carla has appeared on local and national radio and television and makes public presentations to a wide range of audiences on issues related to women’s empowerment and activism. Carla serves on the Advisory Board of Feminist.com and was featured at the New York State Bar Association’s “Women on the Move: Successful Women in the Know.”
Before joining the Omega Institute, Carla was the vice president for public affairs at Planned Parenthood of New York City (PPNYC), where she directed the agency’s advocacy and strategic communications work. She also served as the founding director of the PPNYC Action Fund, the political arm of PPNYC. Before joining PPNYC Carla worked for the speaker of the New York City Council, where she helped craft and advocate for the City Council’s state and federal legislative agendas. She joined the council after working as a public defender at the Legal Aid Society, where she represented clients in criminal proceedings. Before that, she worked for the speaker of the New York State Assembly as a policy analyst of human services issues. While in law school at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Carla was a cofounding editor-in-chief of the state’s first women’s law journal, which just celebrated its 12th year of publication, the Buffalo Women’s Journal. For her work with the journal, Carla won the Dale S. Margulis award, which recognizes the student who makes “the most significant contribution to the law school and the community.” She was also the First Place Winner of the Desmond Moot Court Competition.
For the past eight years, Carla was an adjunct professor at CUNY Queens College, where she taught a course called Law and Social Justice, which was designed to empower students to be effective advocates for progressive social change. As part of Omega’s Core Program, Carla teaches Introduction to Spiritual Activism, a workshop designed to help people develop their activism in creative ways that align with the rest of their lives.