Reflections on TEDWomen

It will take me a long time to truly digest everything I experienced at TEDWomen this past week. It was all things that TED claims to be—chock full of bright and spreadable ideas offered by dynamic and diverse speakers and an engaged audience of smart, humanitarian-minded, mostly very privileged women. The music, as pictured above with the Ahn Trio, was phenomenal.

On the most personal level, it was a massive honor to speak alongside such incredible human beings and heroes—Elizabeth Lesser, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Naomi Klein, just to name a few. I was honored to be able to talk about my own story and ideas, highlight the work of our collective at Feministing, and some of the work of the activists in my book on such a “big” stage. The icing on top was that my dad came, and the whole audience gave him a big round of applause for being a feminist papa. It was one of those moments that you know you won’t forget for the rest of your life.

I’ll certainly be writing about various activist efforts and charismatic leaders that I heard or met over the explosive day and a half, but for now, here are just some of the highlights that I wanted to share with the Feminsiting community:

• Twenty-year-old Sejal Hathi, talking about her organization Girls Helping Girls.
• Blogger Mona Eltahawy talking about how much she loves to confuse people with her progressive, Muslim, feminist identity and ideas.
• Irish social entrepreneur Caroline Casey telling her inspiring journey of “coming out” as legally blind and becoming her whole self.
• Landscape architect Kate Orff talking about the regenerative powers of oysters and her experiment in the Gowanus Canal.
• Cyborg anthropologist Amber Case talking about how human technology really is.

I’ll be posting the first couple of talks that they’ve released through out the day. Stay tuned.