Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Women's Economic Equality--The Next Frontier in Women's Rights

Legal Momentum and Cornell University ILR

present
Women's Economic Equality
The Next Frontier in Women's Rights

Click Here to Register

Thursday, April 2, 2009, 6:30 p.m.
Cornell University ILR (NYC Campus)
16 East 34th Street, 6th Floor (between Madison and Fifth Avenues)
New York, NY

(NOTE: Building security requires photo ID)

SPEAKERS

Mimi Abramovitz

Mimi Abramovitz, DSW
The Bertha Capen Reynolds Professor of Social Policy
Hunter School of Social Work and The CUNY Graduate Center

Mimi Abramovitz, DSW Columbia University School of Social Work is The Bertha Capen Reynolds Professor of Social Policy at Hunter School of Social Work and The CUNY Graduate Center. Widely published in the area of women, poverty and the welfare state, she is the author of Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy From Colonial Times to the Present; the award-winning Under Attack, Fighting Back: Women and Welfare in the US; and co-author of The Dynamics of Social Welfare Policy , and Taxes Are A Women's Issue: Reframing the Debate. She is currently writing Gender Obligations: The History f Low-Income Women's Activism Since 1900

Heather Boushey

Heather Boushey
Senior Economist
Center for American Progress

Heather Boushey is senior economist at the Center for American Progress. Prior to joining the Center she was a senior economist with the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress. She was formerly a senior economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Dr. Boushey studies working families and trends in the U.S. labor market. She has written extensively on labor issues, including tracking the recession and its impact on workers and their families, women’s labor force participation, trends in income inequality, and work/life policy issues. Her work is important to understanding how women have fared in recent recessions.

She has testified before Congress and given lectures nationwide. Dr. Boushey’s research has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, as well as many regional papers, television and radio. Previously, Dr. Boushey worked at the Economic Policy Institute, where she co-authored The State of Working America 2002-3 and Hardships in America: The Real Story of Working Families.

Boushey received her Ph.D. in economics from the New School for Social Research and her B.A. from Hampshire College.

Irasema GarzaIrasema Garza
President

Legal Momentum

Irasema Garza is president of Legal Momentum, the nation's oldest legal advocacy organization dedicated to advancing women's rights. An attorney with a broad range of experience as public servant and labor advocate, Garza has distinguished career of public service, championing the interests of women and economically disadvantaged ethnic and racial groups by working for economic equality.

In the Clinton administration, Garza served as director of the U.S. Department of Labor Women's Bureau, the only federal agency mandated by Congress to represent America's wage-earning women in the public policy process. During her tenure, she worked to ensure that economic security for women was a key component of the Labor Department's political and legislative agenda. Before that, she served as the first secretary of the U.S. National Administrative Office, charged with implementing the labor provisions of NAFTA. In this capacity, she worked with the governments of Mexico and Canada to improve labor rights for working people, including women workers in Mexico's maquiladora industries.

In 2003, Garza joined the U.S. labor movement as director of women's rights for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), and three years later moved to Working America, the community affiliate of the AFL-CIO, serving first as national political director and later as director of community and external affairs.

Garza has a J.D. and a B.A. from the University of Michigan.

Linda Hirshman

Linda Hirshman
Author
Allen/Berenson Distinguished Visiting Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies (retired)
Brandeis University

Linda R.Hirshman retired as the Allen/Berenson Distinguished Visiting Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at Brandeis University.

She is a political columnist for “Double X,” the political magazine for women from the Washington Post Slate Group, www. Slate.com.

She is the author of “Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World,” (Viking, 2006). A version of the book project, “Homeward Bound,” appeared in the December 2005 American Prospect and was the subject of syndicated columnist David Brooks’ New Years Day column, “The Year of Domesticity” and syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman’s commentary, “Desperate ex-Housewives.” (Desperate ex-housewives - The Boston Globe.htm). Her most recent opinion work, “Where Are the New Jobs for Women?” appeared in the New York Times on December 9, 2008.

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Thursday, March 19, 2009

The 25 most women-friendly cities

After leafing through Women.Co's travelogue of world cities least accommodating to women workers--The list seems overly selective, not specific enough and heavily disses India. Nonetheless...--this often-informative site led me to a more hospitable ride, this one through 25 recommended locations where, if you're looking for a change of scenery or are considering a major career move, their suggestions might pan out. Limiting, though, is that they're all stateside.
Read here.

Sunday, March 01, 2009

Rihanna, muster up some dignity for your fans' sake!

I’m going to try the keep the indignation bordering on rage and the sadness I’m feeling out of my introduction to Women’s History Month you’ll find soon on the home page; I’m hoping the blog will provide catharsis and let me be warmer and fuzzier about us as independent, strong and evolving beings than my thoughts are at the moment. I’m scribbling these notes furiously between the graphics of this month’s Smithsonian magazine, riding the New York City subway uptown. It’s either scribble or scream at what I just saw.
Grumbling like a typical New Yorker at the haphazard weekend service, my monolog was picked up by a woman sitting on the bench I’d parked myself on to wait. (and wait.) She concurred with a nod about the service and then seemed eager to engage me with what was on her mind. “She went back wid ‘im,” she said, displaying an unmistakable Eastern Caribbean lilt. “Went back with who? Who went back?” I said. In explanation, she opened the New York Post to page whatever and pointed to an article reporting that Rihanna and Chris Brown had reconciled. He was repentant and of course she could forgive him. Believe me, I don’t deal in hip hop or its heavies (unless it delivers righteous and/or womanist messages), but I couldn’t help but be pulled into the pulp about the dastardly beating of this young woman. So I was kinda following the story. But I hadn’t seen the photo until my Trini companion showed it to me. Jeez!
And the Trini woman told me how she’d had a pack of kids with her husband back home. And that he beat her. And beat her. And kept beating her, as Brown will do to the either naïve or really messed up Rihanna. But my interlocutor told me that, one day, when she was out of the house, she packed herself up and her 5 kids and stole away back to her mom’s. Never went back, never looked back, she said proudly. Hard it was, she went on. But she made it and the kids didn’t have to see Mommy getting “licked” any more.
I’m still thinking, more regretfully, about the Rihanna mess on the day before we celebrate our womanhood. And how she’s the envy of so many millions of maturing or starstruck young woman, giving them the message, not of women making it or fulfilling their dreams of stardom—ultimately a skewed, unrealistic, even counterproductive and dangerous message in itself—but legitimizing a return to the glory of victimhood, of groveling, of total dependence. And I remembered the day when I stopped listening to Billie’s pathetic and shameful, “It cost me a lot…he beats me too, what can I do?…but there’s one thing that I got, it’s my man.”
Then I found Brown’s YouTube efforts and these comments:
--aww.... i love him, everyone goes through bad times, do things they shouldnt have
--if you love woman - you have to beat her )
--lalala. and so what ? support his music . SMH you must be one of rihanna fans.
--some bitches just need to get beat sorry :)

Well, maybe there is something to celebrate. And it’s that humble Trini mother who got out.