Valerie Deering: 'Destruction of Personal Property'

The Ms. Foundation for Women is celebrating Women’s History Month with a blog carnival featuring the voices and profiles of women across the country. This Month of Action is generously supported by our friends in Seattle. 

By Valerie Deering

I am a survivor of domestic violence.

It started with my family of origin and culminated in one brave act to call law enforcement after I had been thrown down stairs by a man who “loved” me.

During my month-long stay with him, while I was being treated for breast cancer, he said and did many disturbing things to me. Luckily, once the police were called, the situation became a state matter.

Like many women, I began to feel guilty about calling the police because the man became even more abusive and threatened to throw me out if I didn’t recant my story. So I did, on paper.

The man became even more violent. It was as if the paper were a permission slip to treat me as an object, his property.

Finally, I escaped – but only after he made more threats to my safety, causing me to experience an enormous moment of clarity.

Despite the evidence of cuts and bruises and the police testimony, this man was exonerated from domestic violence. However, he had broken a piece of my furniture in his rage.

The final verdict?

Guilty of destruction of personal property. 

I’m glad to hear that he was handed some sort of consequence for his violent behavior. But how telling is it that his consequence was for destroying a piece of furniture rather than tossing a woman down the stairs?

Surviving domestic violence taught me that I have power. I just gave it away for so long. Now I use it for good in the world, helping others realize their own power. A year ago, I started a women's foundation for the education, empowerment and rehabilitation of women and girls who have been touched by domestic violence – which is way too many, as you know.

Valerie Deering lives in Overland Park, KS.

Rayna Holley Letterman: The Life of an Overqualified Military Wife

The Ms. Foundation for Women is celebrating Women’s History Month with a blog carnival featuring the voices and profiles of women across the country. This Month of Action is generously supported by our friends in Seattle.

As the wife of a soldier, I might as well wear a big, red scarlet letter on my chest when I go in for an interview because there are actually businesses out there that refuse to hire military wives. Is it unfair? Yes. Am I being labeled for no reason? Absolutely. Are those businesses missing out on some of the most qualified, dedicated, reliable employees out there? You betcha, and here’s why.

There is a stereotype associated with military wives that prevents companies from taking a chance on women like me. Hiring officials automatically assume that as a military wife you’ll be moving in two to three years to a new base or that your personal life will interfere with your work if your husband deploys. Job interviews always seem to take a turn for the worst whenever I’m asked, “So, what brought you to Hawaii-Texas-Washington?”

There are very few military wives who I’ve come across who haven’t attended college or some type of trade school. In fact, a heck of a lot of us have or are working toward getting our master’s degree because our husbands have signed over their GI Bill to us. And, when we’re rejected from job after job after job, we decide if we’re not working, we might as well go to school. In other words, we’re educated.

Military wives are also amazing at multitasking. We can do laundry while finishing up a paper for grad school while cooking dinner with a 3-year-old hanging off our leg while talking to our husband long distance from Afghanistan. You think we can’t handle writing a few press releases? In other words, we get stuff done.

And finally, military wives are the most dedicated employees you’ll ever hire. We’re so used to being rejected because of our husband's career choice that when someone does take a chance on us, we’re extremely grateful and will do whatever we can to stay at that duty station so we can keep that job – which means you never have to worry about us jumping ship or not making a deadline.

When I met my husband, I was working as a news producer in a top-50 market. I gave up my career, my friends and my family to be his wife. It took me five years, two moves across the world, lots of volunteer work to keep my skill set current and thousands of hours spent filling out applications online before someone finally took a chance on me.

I’m happy to report that I’m working full-time again as an editor for a public affairs office near Seattle. I’m excelling in my career, and my boss tells me every day how lucky the office is to have me. My hope is that more corporations and businesses will realize what an untapped resource the military spousal community is. There are thousands and thousands of overqualified military wives out there who are unemployed. They’re just waiting for someone to take a chance on them like my boss did on me.

Rayna Holley Letterman lives in Seattle, Washington.

Molly Gaebe: Using Comedy to Highlight Absurdities

The Ms. Foundation for Women is celebrating Women’s History Month with a blog carnival featuring the voices and profiles of women across the country. This Month of Action is generously supported by our friends in Seattle. 

Pick any weekday in the past couple of years and there is a pretty good chance I was sitting alone on my couch, watching the nightly news, on the verge of crying about the state of politics and women’s issues in the U.S. Election years were particularly trying on my tear ducts and neck muscles, as I strained my head back and forth to no one at all with an expression that said, “Are you guys seeing this?!”

Now, instead of lamenting to my couch, I get mad, I laugh and then I write. I moved to New York to become a comedian and realized, after working at a reproductive health non-profit, that I could make a positive contribution by using comedy to highlight the absurdities of a political system that was wreaking havoc on women’s rights.

My anger and passion now have a positive outlet. Comedy has always been the common denominator, and I found that, by framing some decidedly unfunny political topics in a humorous way, I reached far more people that normally would not be inclined to pay attention.

On a more personal level, as a doula for abortion patients, I've been able to connect with women from all kinds of backgrounds. To be able to offer support to these women is a privilege, and I am continuously blown away by the strength and beauty of every woman I encounter.

I don’t have any extraordinary talents or smarts, but goddammit, I've got timing. And if that’s one thing that I can offer to this world to make a positive impact, I will.  

If you need me, I’ll be on my couch, trying to change the world. 

Julia Bluhm: A Peek Inside My 15-Year-Old Mind

The Ms. Foundation for Women is celebrating Women’s History Month with a blog carnival featuring the voices and profiles of women across the country. This Month of Action is generously supported by our friends in Seattle. 

By Julia Bluhm

Okay, so I’m 15, and I know I haven’t lived most of my life, yet. But I feel wise. Since I think a lot, I have been able to relate most of my problems back to the mass media’s stupid standards.

I’m super lucky that I go to a ballet school that encourages healthy, fit dancers instead of just super-skinny dancers. The “being thin is better” motive still seeps into everyone’s minds, though, through the mass media and through the pressures of the ballet world. It’s kind of scary for me because I really want to be a ballet dancer. But although there are ballet companies that pressure dancers to be really thin, there are also companies that appreciate strong, healthy, muscular dancers. So that makes me feel a little better.

I also have plenty of friends (dancers or not) who are unhappy with their bodies. I have known of several girls with eating disorders, and many of my friends try “diets” and attempt to lose weight. Of course, I always encourage them that they don’t need that and that they’re awesome the way they are… but I guess they all assume that I’m just trying to make them feel better. Seeing my friends like this makes me feel really useless and upset.

Why does this happen? Why are we all programmed to hate our bodies? I’m pretty sure you know the answer to that, but I’ll tell you anyways. The mass media. We ingest thousands of images every day featuring an unrealistic and impossible idea of beauty, and it affects us all, whether you realize it or not. Stereotypes and judgment are also super common, and those ideas come from the media, too. I actually wrote a blog about my realization having to do with the media’s influence.

Now here’s the good part: What are we doing? How are we changing these problems, to make my life, your life and a bazillion other people’s lives better? Well, we’re doing a lot. Slowly, but it’s happening. There are thousands of organizations working to smash stereotypes and redefine beauty. Protests and petitions are being started, and giant online actions are occurring. Yay! Even in the ballet world, we are beginning to break down the barriers. There are ballet dancers like Misty Copeland (a soloist at American Ballet Theatre) and Kaitlin Jenkins (a dancer and star of the ABC show “Bunheads”) who have been very successful and haven’t needed to be unhealthily thin to do it.

I hope that women of all varieties will be given the amazing opportunities that they deserve without stereotypes or judgment getting in the way. I think it’ll happen. Yeah. It will. 

Summer Starling: Shaping Public Discourse on Sexuality

The Ms. Foundation for Women is celebrating Women’s History Month with a blog carnival featuring the voices and profiles of women across the country. This Month of Action is generously supported by our friends in Seattle.

By Summer Starling

To say today that I study sex still feels strange. I’m the hybrid first-born of a feminist mother and a conservative father, both from the South, where the active silencing of discussion about sex and sexuality is as entrenched into the social fabric as chicken after church on Sundays. And it is a burdensome hush.

Feminist poet and activist Audre Lorde relayed advice she got while preparing her 1977 speech “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action”: Her daughter simply said that you’re never really a whole person if you remain silent. Silence is oppression.

A culture of voicelessness around sex – from slut-shaming to parental discomfort to counter-productive sex education policies on down – makes it that much harder to truly understand disparities in STD rates, choices young people make about condoms and how they communicate about sex. Fighting sexual health disparities begins with authentic voices.

Training to become a research scientist to address adolescent sexual health is allowing me to refine my voice in public discourse about sexuality from an informed place. I see this as my biggest personal triumph and the way I’m most suited to help make a difference. I hope my work helps girls in some small way to actualize and voice what matters most to them for their (sex) lives. Isn’t that what feminism is all about?

Summer Starling lives in Berkeley, Calif.

Rossana G. D’Antonio: Silence Is No Longer Golden

The Ms. Foundation for Women is celebrating Women’s History Month with a blog carnival featuring the voices and profiles of women across the country. This Month of Action is generously supported by our friends in Seattle.

By Rossana G. D’Antonio

Many say we are currently living the third wave of feminism. I agree, although this time around we seem to be moving in slow motion and more quietly. Long gone are the days when housewives and mothers fought against all odds for our right to be heard through an electoral vote. The activists of the 1960s marched loudly, keeping our voice alive by tackling issues of gender inequality and discrimination. Yet, modern-day feminism seems to have lost its momentum, and there’s a tinge of apathy in the air.

In this 21st century, we are still facing off-base opinions of those who absurdly conclude that the way we dress invites rape, attacks on our reproductive rights and the unresolved issue of pay inequity. Is it me, or does it seem like we are regressing? Have we forgotten the courageous and outspoken women of yesteryear who fought long and hard against all odds for a better future for all of us? What happened to us?

I’m not proposing setting ourselves on fire, radical demonstrations or hunger strikes. We can be more creative than that. Perhaps it’s unfair to ask that we act on behalf of all women. That’s a heavy burden to bear. But each one of us has a moral responsibility to ourselves first. If we cannot speak out for what is right for our individual self, then how can we demand equality as a group?

We can no longer sit on the sidelines as passive bystanders, waiting for others to take action, nor can we rely on the Hillarys of the world to bring about change. We must be that change. Silence is no longer golden. Until we learn to exercise our responsibility to speak out, sit at the table, raise our hand, lean in or simply use our voice to proclaim, “Enough!,” progress will continue to inch along. Only when we amplify our voices can we experience the cataclysmic wave of change we’ve been awaiting. Only then.

Rossana G. D’Antonio is a civil and geotechnical engineer who, up until recently, had limited herself to technical writing. Most recently, she discovered the unexplored potential of her right brain through memoir, personal essays, poetry and short fiction. Along this journey, Rossana embraced the healing power of writing as she completed her memoir, Tailspin, the heart-wrenching experience of losing her younger brother in a tragic airplane accident. She finds peace in Malibu, where she lives with her husband, Freddie.

Ashley Blanchard: Ms. Foundation Board Member, Donor, Seattleite

The Ms. Foundation for Women is celebrating Women’s History Month with a blog carnival featuring the voices and profiles of women across the country. This Month of Action is generously supported by our friends in Seattle.

Can you tell us a little about yourself and why you are committed to supporting women and girls?

My interest in addressing the inequities facing women and girls was catalyzed while I was in college, volunteering at a domestic violence crisis center. It was the era of welfare reform, in the mid-to-late 1990s, and the effects of those policies on the women I was working with were going to be huge, keeping many of them in violent relationships they couldn’t afford to leave. I just couldn’t get my head around the idea of a policy that would force women into jobs far below subsistence wages and provide them few viable options for child care. It seemed like a recipe for disaster: Women forced to work multiple jobs that still weren’t going to pay their bills, while also struggling to find affordable care for their children. It was one of the first times I’d been confronted so head-on with the extent of the inequities facing women and the underlying racism and sexism of the policies to address poverty.

I’m now a working mom myself, with a whole lot of advantages that most women in this country don’t have. It’s important to me that my kids grow up in a world in which the gap between the haves and haves-nots is less stark than it is today. And, as we all know, poverty adversely affects women and kids, and women of color, in particular. But the flip side of that is that all evidence suggests that investments in women and girls—women-led organizations and organizations that work on the issues affecting women and girls—can have a huge impact on changing individual lives, families and communities.

Why is the Ms. Foundation important to you?

The Ms. Foundation’s approach really resonates with my personal understanding of how positive change happens. The Ms. Foundation identifies these grassroots organizations doing amazing work on the ground, in communities across the country, on critical issues that can have a national impact. It makes grants and provides support so that these organizations can strengthen their own work, come together and build a movement, and we’ve seen it work time and again—changing sex education policies at the local and then the national level, building a movement for domestic workers, first in New York and now nationally. And then the Ms. Foundation works directly to advance policies to benefit women and children, amplifying grassroots voices and catalyzing broad support. For me, as a donor, it’s an amazing opportunity to provide support for these highly effective grassroots groups, which I would likely otherwise not know about, and to leverage my dollars by pooling money with other donors and amplifying that investment through the Ms. Foundation’s national voice.

What do you wish for the Ms. Foundation, 40 years after it was founded?

Continued perserverance: Our work isn’t done. Unfortunately, many of the same issues that were facing the Ms. Foundation when it was founded remain on the table, in one form or another, today. We’ve seen progress on a lot of fronts, certainly, but then we find the nation debating “legitimate rape,” and I’m reminded that there’s a long way to go.

What do you hope to see happen for women over the course of the next 40 years?

A continued and positive cultural shift toward women’s equality, on all fronts. In January, we celebrated the 40th anniversary of Roe V. Wade, but unfortunately we’re still fighting for reproductive justice. It shows you that while it’s important to win policy victories, they won’t be sustained if you don’t change hearts and minds. So I want to see subtle changes—in the way women are portrayed in the media, in the way we talk about the “49%.” And as a mom to young kids, I really hope this country can start taking the idea of affordable, accessible, high-quality child care seriously—for parents, for children and for care givers.