Manifesta : Young Women, Feminism and the Future
Language: English
Pages: 0
ISBN: B0032ZO7CW
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Organizing Students (SOS). Ms. Foundation for Women launches the National Girls Initiative. Mark Lapine guns down fourteen female engineering students at a Montreal university, screaming, “You’re all fucking feminists.” 1990 Twenty-year-old Ani DiFranco launches Righteous Records, which becomes Righteous Babe Records in 1994. Two young women in Olympia, Washington, Kathleen Hanna and Tammy Rae Carland, look to each other for truth after reading a Newsweek article about feminism being bad
access and humility, and an understanding that the world isn’t so neatly divided between the haves and the have-nots. My first dose of actual activism came in April 1992, a few days after the Rodney King verdict was handed down. South Central Los Angeles was on fire, and I was a twenty-two-year-old sitting in a small New York City apartment with eight other people, trying to figure out what we could do to make the world a better place. I was about to graduate from college and was still insecure
Geis and Associates, where Sex and the Single Girl was being published. “It pretty much blew me away,” Pogrebin recalls of the advice book. “I felt I was suddenly hearing the truth.” Pogrebin, a petite blonde with the body of a teenager and the voice of an eight-year-old, hadn’t yet become the radicalized married feminist who would become one of the first editors of Ms. magazine, and instrumental in creating the book and record Free to Be … You and Me. “I was a different person then, not
into a conversation that was itself political, but was being called objective,” she said. Therefore a different voice is heard the minute women enter into the conversation—“the conversation shifts, because things that had been held inside of us as women came out and gave a different resonance, which changed the conversation for everyone.” She considered the work she was doing with women to be political because, as she puts it, “If you don’t have a voice, you don’t have a choice.” Like
of the spectrum, the allegiance was not originally met with great kudos for Girls Inc. In fact, some of the affiliates and board members were enraged when they heard that a group for girls would prostitute itself to the doll we love to hate, no matter how much of a donation is involved. But the five steps forward for the girls’ movement can’t just come after cues and money from corporate America. Women have got to start listening to what the girls want—and to what they already have. OPHELIA