Weekend Maintenance on IMDiversity

http://asianamericanvillage.blogspot.com/2007/03/weekend-maintenance-on-imdiversity.html:
Our site servers will be undergoing maintenance this weekend, starting midnight Friday. During this period there may brief outages on our sites at IMDiversity.com and the Multicultural Villages, the IMDiversity Career Center and Job Bank, and THE BLACK COLLEGIAN Online Job Bank. We apologize for any inconvenience to our visitors and thank you for your patience."

Was Leni Riefenstahl an Alpha Girl?

This week's New Yorker contains a chilling article about Leni Riefenstahl, the icily stunning superwoman who was Adolph Hitler's sidekick and official cinematographer. She was a formidible woman who demonstrated great strength, intelligence, and ability. She was also a woman whose protean ego would crash, from time to time, into breakdowns, and whose narcissism would preclude her ability to form enduring relationships (though what a trail of takers she left in her wake!).
As more and more biographical details emerged in Judith Thurmon's overview of recent Riefenstahl bios, Riefenstahl seemed like a prototype for Dan Kindlon's Alpha Girls, a book I recently critiqued for the Professional Woman's Village. Kindlon's alpha girl is poised to become the defining force in American culture and economy in the short years to come. She's determined to advance her career at all expenses, has an overblown image of her ability and accomplishments, and is taken to boastful swagger.
"I am the marathon," Riefenstahl said before she even put a camera to the 1939 Berlin Olympics. It sounded all too recent, as the alphas' overflow of hubris:--“I will get what I want because I am aggressive” and the like--was still rankling in my brain.
My review seriously questions whether we, as women, want to see our young become super women in the alpha mode, and whether "arrival" means stepping onto and getting stuck in the sorely amiss blueprint for the alpha male, rendering quaint all notions of feminine, and of feminism. Or, should we support in our Generation Next a new paradigm of pride, limelight, and accomplishment that's celebrated in humility and wholeness, with room left over to flaunt our wiles and ways?

Find Is Today’s "Perfect" Seriously Flawed? on the Professional Women's site.

Chinese politician wins in N. Ireland - Yahoo! News

A fitting story following up on International Women's Day, and for our Women's History Month edition, moving toward St. Patty's Day -- this reported by By SHAWN POGATCHNIK of the Associated Press:

Chinese politician wins in N. Ireland

Anna Lo being called the first Chinese elected lawmaker in Europe

"Lo, a Hong Kong native who has lived in Northern Ireland for 32 years, on
Friday became the first ethnic minority to be elected to political office in
this almost exclusively white British territory. Chinese media reports also
described her as the first Chinese person to be elected as a lawmaker anywhere
in Europe."

and this...

"Lo, the 56-year-old chief executive of the Chinese Welfare Association in Belfast, said many of the approximately 10,000 Cantonese-speaking residents of Northern Ireland have lived here for more than three decades — and had never voted before her candidacy."

WHM and Hillary Clinton

Commentary from Hispanic American Village Editor Carol Amoruso, traveling abroad and mulling over...

Thoughts on WHM and the Candidacy of Hillary Clinton
Since 1940, more than 30 women have been elected or appointed heads of countries, often where one might not expect it. Can it happen here? Maybe it depends on our images and stereotypes of women leaders -- and if we want an alpha or nurturer.

March 8 is International Women's Day

Reminder: March 8 is International Women's Day. This year's theme is tackling the problem of violence against women, and organizations both private and public are getting involved globally.

A wonderful, courageous woman to celebrate

I just had to post this uplifting article found in this morning's LA Times amidst the seamy stories of our military hospitals and candidates capitalizing on the civil rights struggle of the '60s (How do you like that Hillary refinding her southern drawl in Alabama?)
Here we have a resilient, resourceful and immensely creative young Sudanese woman who's invented her own way of reporting the news of her country's, and her gender's struggles:
A Darfur Tree is her Newsstand

Women's History Month 2007

From release by the U.S. Census:

National Women’s History Month’s roots go back to March 8, 1857, when women from New York City factories staged a protest over working conditions. International Women’s Day was first observed in 1909, but it wasn’t until 1981 that Congress established National Women’s History Week during the second week of March. In 1987, Congress expanded the week to a month. Every year since, Congress has passed a resolution for Women’s History Month, and the president has issued a proclamation...

Women's History Month: March 2007
Census release paints a statistical portrait of women in the U.S. today at work, school, home, business and beyond