Wilma Mankiller: An Appreciation

All of us at the Ms. Foundation are deeply saddened by the passing of Wilma Mankiller, who died April 6 from pancreatic cancer. Wilma was the first woman elected chief of the Cherokee Nation, which she led from 1985-95. Throughout her life, she made indelible contributions to social justice in the US, particularly within Native and women's rights movements. Her vision, leadership and activism will be felt for generations to come.

Wilma was also active in philanthropy, and we were extremely fortunate to have her serve on the Ms. Foundation board from 1986-1990. While she made many contributions, Wilma especially helped us strengthen and advance our new (at the time) work in women's economic development. She was our keynote speaker at the first Institute on Women and Economic Development, held on Thompson's Island in Boston Harbor in 1988. Some 90 leaders of grassroots women's organizations gathered for three days, including, because of Wilma, seven Native women. When Wilma spoke to the gathering on the first evening, she included all of the Native women, inviting them on stage to tell their own stories of how women on their reservations were leading the way to local economic and community development that benefited individuals, families and whole communities. You could have heard a pin drop in the auditorium as the rest of us listened in rapt attention, learning about communities and experiences that we knew almost nothing about.

In ways like this, Wilma always made Native people and their lives more visible. She lived by values that the Ms. Foundation also holds dear: lift every voice, and trust those most impacted by an issue or a problem to have the solutions. We will miss her very much.

Sara K. Gould
President & CEO
Ms. Foundation for Women

Read this Indian Country Today article for more from Sara and others about Wilma's life.

Ms. Foundation Celebrates Sotomayor Confirmation

The Ms. Foundation for Women celebrates the historic confirmation of Judge Sonia Sotomayor as the next Associate Justice on the Supreme Court, truly a defining moment for the nation. In particular, we commend the leadership of both President Obama and the U.S. Senate in increasing the diversity of our nation’s highest court. We believe that Judge Sotomayor’s life story, her deep involvement in her community, and her strong commitment to public service will inspire countless young women of color across the country to fulfill their aspirations and reach their dreams.

Sara K. Gould
President & CEO

HIV/AIDS: Placing Women—and Women's Solutions—Front and Center

*At the end of 2007, women accounted for 50% of all adults living with HIV worldwide, and for 61% in sub-Saharan Africa.

*The number of women in the United States living with HIV has tripled in the last two decades.

*Today, HIV infection is the leading cause of death for African-American women aged 25-34 years.

These statistics [PDF] are just the tip of the iceberg—the face of HIV/AIDS has changed irrevocably throughout the world and it's beyond time that prevention, education, and health care policy caught up. Women are being disproportionately affected and, as such, they are on the cutting edge of creating solutions to end the epidemic—solutions that should be front and center, both abroad and here at home.

Finally, some legislators are starting to catch the drift. This week, 175 members of Parliament in the UK signed a motion highlighting the critical importance of focusing on women as the global health community confronts HIV and AIDS. The motion calls on the Department for International Development to place women at the center of its HIV/AIDS strategies in the Global South. It also highlights "how violence, discrimination and inequality place women in sub-Saharan Africa at an increased risk of HIV"—a case study in how socioeconomic factors are intricately linked with the spread of HIV/AIDS.

This latest act in the UK—inspired by the "Women Matter" Campaign of VSO—suggests that some policymakers (however belatedly) are waking up to the fact that women are increasingly disproportionately—and uniquely—impacted by HIV/AIDS worldwide. As a result, they’ve decided any successful strategy to confront the epidemic should consider women key.

Such an approach to ending the epidemic everywhere is critical to ending the epidemic anywhere—including the United States. Indeed, this is what the National Women and AIDS Collective—the first national policy coalition led by and for women living with and affected by HIV/AIDS, and housed at the Ms. Foundation for Women—has been saying for over a year.

NWAC is in the throes of a national policy campaign which calls upon the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to revise its HIV surveillance system to more accurately capture data about how and why women are getting HIV—in effect, to update a decades-old methodology predicated on outdated understandings of the epidemic and to save thousands of women’s lives. In their own words:

“An outdated HIV surveillance data-collection system yields policies, programs and funding levels that are tragically inadequate to address the true magnitude of the HIV/AIDS epidemic among American women. As such, the current design of the CDC’s HIV/AIDS surveillance system has profound implications for women at risk of, or living with, HIV/AIDS in the United States.”

“For years, it has been widely understood among health practitioners and advocates nationwide that women—particularly women of color and low-income women—are at high risk of HIV infection," says Vanessa Johnson, a member of NWAC and Deputy Director of NAPWA. "But as long as the data doesn’t reflect this reality, women will continue to be denied life-saving prevention and testing services now reserved for other high-risk populations such as men who have sex with men and injection drug users.”

Last October, NWAC held a Congressional briefing on this subject, sponsored by Senator Hillary Clinton’s office, where they presented their position paper and policy recommendations to over sixty government officials and national advocacy groups.

As NWAC so powerfully demonstrates, women living with and affected by HIV/AIDS are the ones to whom policymakers should be turning for solutions. The Ms. Foundation, one of the first to put funding dollars in the hands of HIV-positive women, has long believed that women living with and affected by HIV working in prevention, intervention and care at community-based levels are best positioned to identify policy solutions that will meet women's needs and curb the epidemic—nationwide and worldwide.

That said, we’re pleased to see that the UK is calling on policymakers to place women front and center in the fight against HIV/AIDS. Let’s hope this means they'll commit to placing strategies belonging to HIV-positive and affected women front and center. And let’s not just hope, but demand, that legislators in the U.S. catch on—and up—very soon.

Desiree Flores
Program Officer for Health

Sexual Scandal of Another Kind

One of the positive side effects of the Eliot Spitzer scandal is that it’s created a bit of media space for oft neglected issues like sex trafficking and sexually transmitted diseases. One of the most depressing side effects, however, is that it delays the progress of everyday governance and legislative innovation. One of our grantees, The Education Fund of Family Planning Advocates of New York State (FPAofNYS), learned this first-hand last week.

As Amy Goodman reported, a group of 1,000 people—including FPAofNYS—gathered on Monday, March 10^th at the Empire State Plaza in Albany in hopes of pressuring law makers to pass The Healthy Teens Act (which would guarantee medically accurate, comprehensive sex education).

It became evident very quickly, that Governor Spitzer would not be in attendance. To his credit, Spitzer has proven to be a consistent ally in the movement to get medically accurate, comprehensive sex education in our schools; his rejection of $2.6 million of federal abstinence-only education funding indicated that he would look for more comprehensive alternatives, like The Healthy Teens Act. But, it turns out that our inadequate and unsafe national policy—one out of four young women experiences a sexually transmitted disease, according to recent studies—was not the sexual scandal most forefront in his mind.

FPAofNYS may be discouraged, but they will not be defeated. That’s because they approach social change with the trademark Ms. Foundation philosophy—widen and strengthen your movement, build your skills and celebrate your gifts, and be ready to move when the moment presents itself. It’s sort of our version of the old adage, “Give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, he’ll eat for a lifetime.” We don’t just give grassroots organizations cash; we partner with them to build movements and drive policy and culture change that will make our democracy more inclusive and just.

Plus, we suspect that the man (or woman--since women are those primarily responsible worldwide for feeding their families) famously taught to fish in that old adage knew a little something himself. We consider our grantees experts on their own communities and the kind of social change they’re enacting. It is in moments like these (and so many others)—when they’re called on to be resilient and resourceful—that we learn such a great deal from them.

We can only hope that David Paterson, Spitzer's successor, will also be an ally to the growing movement to guarantee medically accurate, comprehensive sexual education--a network of cutting-edge coalitions and organizations across the country, which the Ms. Foundation is proud to support.

Desiree Flores
Program Officer for Health

Misogyny and the elections: and it only gets worse...

Charlotte Allen’s article in last Sunday’s Washington Post, “We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get?” —a misogynistic tirade that assails women for their supposed lack of intelligence as evidenced by their behavior during the primaries—is so ridiculously enraging that it’s hard to know where to begin. Putting Allen aside for a second—what in the world was the Washington Post thinking? Did Allen’s editor think the tit-for-tat coverage of race vs. gender in the primaries hadn’t become destructive or banal enough? Do he and his colleagues think they’re at a loss for quality opinion writing to fill their pages? If this is the case, we’d be happy to suggest a long list of brilliant women writers who have insightful, substantive and genuinely witty things to say about race, gender, politics and other important issues of our time. The problem is they generally have very little access to the limited op-ed space offered by the Post and other mainstream outlets. And then they get overlooked for debasing drivel like Charlotte Allen’s?

At the very least, we were reassured to read the uproarious responses from thousands of people nationwide (including bloggers at Feministing and Broadsheet) who’ve chastised the Post’s editorial decisions and Allen’s destructive, embarrassing, stereotype-wielding pen.

We agree with much of what’s been said by this slew of outraged writers, but we wanted to highlight a particularly dangerous thread of Allen’s inane argument: that women (and gay men) are inherently less intelligent than heterosexual men. Frighteningly, her argument is zero degrees of separation from the “logic” of other pseudo-scientific rationales for inferiority. Examples that immediately come to mind are the nefarious and profoundly racist book, The Bell Curve; similarly minded comments made by Nobel Prize winner and biologist, James Watson, last year; and claims made by Lawrence Summers, the former president of Harvard, about women’s innate inferiority in the fields of math and science. These stances were widely rebuked, but they were covered extensively by mainstream media, with a sense that the logic behind them was actually up for debate.

The fact is, as a society, nearly 100 years since the eugenics movement, we’re still not able to quash attempts to justify misogyny, racism and homophobia with pseudo-scientific reasoning. And it’s not just writers like Allen—whose perspectives we might like to dismiss as fringe lunacy—but editors at mainstream publications like the Washington Post who give credence to such arguments. It doesn’t matter that Allen subsequently claimed she was writing with humorous flair, or that the Washington Post changed the title in attempts to appease angry readers. Her comments are still dangerously vile.

Sara K. Gould
President & CEO

A Closer "Look" at Women Voters

Did anyone catch the sad irony of the way the New York Times Magazine presented Linda Hirshman’s article, “16 Ways of Looking at a Female Voter” last Sunday (2/3/08)?

One of the most disturbing things about the piece—in the online and print versions, though it’s more stark in print—was that there was not one significant visual image of a woman voter alongside the text. While one could write a thesis and more about the absence, and misrepresentation, of women in the media, this was especially stunning given that the article was supposed to be a literal “look” at female voters.

For those who don’t have the article in front of them, the only visual markers throughout the piece were small photos of women’s disembodied hands placing a ballot in a box. I couldn’t help thinking that while Hirshman ostensibly sets out to address the motivations and thinking of women voters, the omission of photos of real women only perpetuates their invisibility as real political actors.

Unfortunately, the irony of the title also extends to the absence of a thoughtful and in-depth “look” at “what we know and don’t know about gender and politics.”

This is surely not all we know and don’t know about gender and politics. Hirshman’s reliance on disembodied data and minimal-to-no context—as well as her odd interpretation of some of the data—paints a pretty disparaging picture of women. After scanning the extremely short takes on how women think, readers can only conclude that women don’t think all that much. And that what they do think doesn’t really matter. According to the article’s sources, women on average have less knowledge and interest in our country’s political life than men; they read the news far less than men; they will decide whether or not to support Clinton solely on the basis of her gender; and when they do vote, their voting power won’t decide elections. As Hirshman writes, “with the possible exception of 1996, women have never voted a candidate into the White House when men thought the other guy should win.”

Then there’s the extraordinarily cursory mention of race and class—less than two short paragraphs under the heading, “Race Matters—and Class, Too”—with zero mention of the ways in which racial discrimination and economic inequality prevent women from fully participating in voting booths and at policy making tables.

As we are well aware at the Ms. Foundation, women—especially women of color and low-income women—continue to be marginalized in the political arena and widely excluded from centers of power and decision-making. How can an article about women voters ignore this fact? In any analysis of women’s political participation, the relationship of race and class to gender is key. And this speaks not just to Hirshman’s article, but to the majority of coverage of this year’s primaries which has consistently sought to analyze gender, race and class in isolation, or worse yet, to pit them against one another.

So, while giving a nod to women’s power by conceding that “when women do come forward they alter the political landscape,” the article’s less than one-dimensional picture of a “female voter” further marginalizes women’s participation in the political arena—particularly women of color and low income women—and undermines the crucial role women play in developing and implementing policy solutions on grassroots, state and national levels.

The Times, as is true for media nationwide, owes it to all its readers to provide a more in-depth, sophisticated and nuanced examination of gender, race, class, public policy and civic engagement. It must also commit to incorporating a full range of women’s voices and perspectives—throughout the election season and beyond.

And one more thought: If you read this issue of the Magazine cover to cover, aside from a couple of advertisements, the only images of women you’ll find are in a 14-page fashion spread of young, white women in surreal, nymph-like dress. Is this the only way we’re permitted to look at women—even if the title of an article on women voters suggests otherwise? Meanwhile, the same issue of the Magazine profiles Bernard Kouchner, the foreign minister of France, and includes no fewer than nine pictures of him in action, touring the world! What’s wrong with this, well, picture?

Sara K. Gould
President & CEO