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By Womens Voices • 13 years ago

Video Pick: For Equal Pay Day, Lilly Ledbetter

Originally posted on Women’s Voices for Change.

Today, April 12, is Equal Pay Day in the United States — a way to address the fact that U.S. women still make 77 cents for each dollar that men earn. We can’t make it to the flash mob on Capitol Hill or join the women from 9to5 and AAUW lobbying for the long-stalled Paycheck Fairness Act. But we can bring you Lilly Ledbetter, from an Equal Pay Day two years ago, talking about how her fight against Goodyear Tire Co. taught her that we still need to fight.  Have you called your Senator yet?

Click through to the original post to watch the video.
By Womens Voices • 13 years ago

Theater Review: Anna Deavere Smith in “Let Me Down Easy”

Originally posted on Women’s Voices for Change and written by Chris Lombardi.

A few years back, actor-scholar Anna Deavere Smith was about to appear at Carnegie Hall. She’d already been nominated for Tony and Pulitzer awards for her signature one-woman shows, but this was a little different. She was nervous, she told a friend, Brent Williams, who called her from Idaho the night before.

The answer from her friend is something she tries to remember, Smith told an audience last week at Philadelphia’s Lucille Roberts Theater. Williams answered deep from his vocation as a rodeo bull rider:  “F***k the form,” he told Smith, “just hold the horn.” By which ...

Originally posted on Women’s Voices for Change and written by Chris Lombardi.

A few years back, actor-scholar Anna Deavere Smith was about to appear at Carnegie Hall. She’d already ...
By Womens Voices • 13 years ago

Geraldine Ferraro Helped Me Crack My Glass Ceiling

Originally posted on Women’s Voices for Change and written by Diane Vacca.

Taking her place at the podium, the vice-presidential nominee looked out at a sea of smiling women’s faces. Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman nominated by a major political party to national office, was momentarily taken aback as she gazed at the ecstatic delegates. “It was the most amazing thing. There were women all over.” She wondered why that was so, and proceeded to give her acceptance speech at the Democratic convention of 1984. Afterwards Ferraro found out that many of the male delegates who had female alternates had given the women their floor passes so that they could fully participate in ...

Originally posted on Women’s Voices for Change and written by Diane Vacca.

Taking her place at the podium, the vice-presidential nominee looked out at a sea of smiling women’s faces. ...
By Womens Voices • 13 years ago

Vivian Maier: A Photographer Discovered

Originally posted on Women’s Voices for Change.

What did Mary Poppins do on her day off after jumping with Bert into one of his chalk pictures? Extremely protective of her privacy, Ms. Poppins kept secret her doings while away from her young charges. Now imagine the extraordinary nanny slinging a camera round her neck, her bag loaded with film, making her own pictures as she set off for a day of shooting people and street happenings.

Vivian Maier, a real-life nanny, did just that for decades. She became a street photographer on her days off, going out accompanied only by her Rolleiflex and returning with images of the streets ...

Originally posted on Women’s Voices for Change.

What did Mary Poppins do on her day off after jumping with Bert into one of his chalk pictures? Extremely protective of her privacy, Ms. ...
By Womens Voices • 13 years ago

Embedded in Afghanistan

Our society emphasizes youth. This is no surprise to anyone over the age of 48; especially those that want to do something new or different. If you’re young and somewhat talented, you can get a mentor to give you sage advice and introduce you to who you have to know. You are forgiven for all your foibles, mistakes, and digressions because you are young, and you can afford it because you have time.

But when you are older—let’s use the magic age of 48—most successful women in your field are younger. And they don’t want to hang around their mothers (or in my case, grandmothers). In fact, the younger women make you feel like you must be some ...

Our society emphasizes youth. This is no surprise to anyone over the age of 48; especially those that want to do something new or different. If you’re young and somewhat talented, you can get ...
By Womens Voices • 13 years ago

In Egypt’s Uprising, Women’s Voices Emerge

by Chris Lombardi

This week was one of stirring scenes from Egypt, spellbinding even to those of us who don’t follow public affairs closely: it careened from the January 25 Facebook-organized protests, with hundreds of thousands converging in Cairo, Alexandria and elsewhere to demand that their leader relinquish power after 30 years; to the harsh, government-inspired “Days of Rage” of February 2; to Friday’s “Day of Departure,”with redoubled protests and open negotiations for the future. The names most often associated with these world-changing events were, of course, those of prominent Egyptian men, such as President Hosni Mubarak, nuclear scientist and popular opposition figure Mohammed el-Baradei, Army strongman and vice president Omar Suleiman and Mohamed Beltagui ...

by Chris Lombardi

This week was one of stirring scenes from Egypt, spellbinding even to those of us who don’t follow public affairs closely: it careened from the January 25 Facebook-organized protests, with hundreds of thousands ...
By Womens Voices • 13 years ago

Despite Oscar Predictions, Black Swan Refuses to Soar

by Alexandra MacAaron

Many years ago, a friend and I took our husbands to see the Bolshoi Ballet’s “Swan Lake.” A better choice of words would probably be “dragged them.” Their enthusiasm at the final curtain call had more to do with the evening’s being over than with the breathtaking score and extraordinary technique we had seen onstage. (The other couple later divorced, but I don’t think the two events were related.)

How different the reaction might have been if we could have promised a “Swan Lake” with psychotic hallucinations, bloody self-mutilation, a graphic masturbation scene, and ecstasy-fueled girl-on-girl action.

Black Swan is not your grandmother’s ballet movie.

The story centers around a dedicated young dancer, Nina, who has been ...

by Alexandra MacAaron

Many years ago, a friend and I took our husbands to see the Bolshoi Ballet’s “Swan Lake.” A better choice of words would probably be “dragged them.” Their enthusiasm at the ...

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