You are growing up in a house with no mirrors.  That’s right, no mirrors.  But wait a sec, it’s not just your house!  As you venture out into the world, you discover there are no mirrors anywhere.  You can’t see what you look like and must rely on other people to tell you about yourself.  

You are growing up in a family, a church, a school, a community that corrects you every time you speak for yourself, even if it’s only an idea in development or a dream or a wish.  They know what’s best for you to undertake as well as what’s best for you to think.

You are confronted with this education and advice so pervasively that ultimately you don’t know what you think.  You can’t tell what you really feel or what you really want and you have no authentic connection to a sense of self or agency.  You might even be angry but you can’t be sure because you can’t feel your own feelings and, anyway, you’ve been taught that angry women are ugly and will end up as lonely spinsters.

You are growing up in a family where the policy for misbehaving is to whup all the children in the family no matter who may have misbehaved and no matter what the cause of the misbehavior.  When something goes awry, all the children get a whupping right there, together.  It’s a family ritual.  It seems to really cut down on the hijinks of those kids, alright.

You are a member of a losing team and nobody on the team can figure out why they keep losing.  How can this be?  The team members practice, practice, practice.  They are perfectionists, trying so hard to please their coach, their school, their parents!  They scrutinize their performance and themselves so harshly that the sport is no longer fun. Feeling like losers has taken over their lives and they’re so desperate they’re ready to settle for one win!  Just one!  Is that so much to ask?  But no, this is a jinxed team.  This team never wins.  As the losing seasons roll on, the teammates begin to silently and secretly hate themselves.  They would never admit it, but they hate each other, too. Somebody on the team has to be the culprit, the one responsible for losing every game.

Do you have a metaphor for Internalized Misogyny?  Share it here!

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In this interview we discuss how it’s possible for an educated and skilled woman to fear her husband, to lose her confidence or the right to discuss dysfunctional dynamics in their marriage and to develop Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.  In hindsight, Patty has come to understand some of the warning signs of the cycle of abuse and the traps victims can fall into, such as believing that "I had let it happen to me."  Through therapy and self-education, she now knows she didn’t deserve the abuse she received.  Patty hopes that by speaking out she can help other victims realize that there is nothing they did to bring abuse upon themselves, nothing they can do to mollify a husband’s need to control them, keeping them fearful and dehumanized, why it’s hard to leave and how it’s possible to get help.

Go to Pickle Player or CyberEars to listen (41:50 min.).

Cross-posted with permission from Interview4Obama.

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For the past ten and a half months she’s been in solitary confinement in Evin prison, Iran. Before that she was traveling in Syria, Yemen and Ethiopia, writing about women in these cultures, struggling to understand them as she says in her blog title "Through Unfettered Eyes:  Dispatches from Addis Ababa to Damascus." Before that, as a 20 year old, she traveled to Chiapas to learn about women in a revolutionary state, as well as to confront issues of femicide in Mexico.  She was a student at Berkeley becoming sensitized to global issues. Her now husband-to-be, Shane Bauer (they got engaged while in prison), and friend Josh Fattal, are writers, activists and global citizens with a sense of responsibility to the world beyond the United States.

A few days ago I received a mailing from The Women’s Media Center asking that people blog about Sarah, Shane and Josh. It said that the mothers had reached out to women’s organizations asking for this. It said that Nora, Sarah’s mother, was available for interview. Interviewing is my bag — I like to understand people, their stories, the decisions they made along the way, what it was like for them, how it changed them, what they will do with the new person they’ve discovered in themselves. It turned out that Nora was looking for that kind of interview, a place to tell the story of her daughter Sarah so that people will care about her imprisonment and work toward her freedom. I spent a day getting my head around the story and then we did the interview on Saturday. I had the interview up on Sunday and as of [yesterday], Tuesday June 15, 435 people have listened to the interview.

You can help get Sarah, Shane and Josh out of prison and back to work as global citizens by listening to this interview and passing it on to your networks. There are other ways to help — see freethehikers.org. I’m invested in Sarah’s freedom not only as a human being but also as a feminist; I’m eager to see what Sarah Shourd does when she’s back in the free world, unfettering her eyes. I think she’s a global feminist to watch.

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I’m waiting for Tipper Gore to talk about why she ended her forty-year marriage to Al Gore.  I’d be surprised to discover that he’s the one who needed a change, not that I know anything about Al Gore’s inner life but mostly because I can well imagine how a woman who is married to a public figure and has played the helpmeet role for four (count ‘em four) decades would like a new job.  Or maybe she’d like a husband who pays attention to her.

I’m a married woman going on twenty years with the same man and I like our private economy just fine but I think what I’ve got going here is probably unusual.  It wasn’t always so, but at this stage of our negotiations of how to live together it has worked itself out so that my husband does all those domestic chores typically assigned to the wife.  He does them because 1) he does them better than I do and 2) they are more important to him than to me.  He shops and cooks, I pay the bills.  I went through a period of cooking for the whole family, which consisted of my husband and my three stepsons, and it was like putting on a performance every single day.  One of the kids would come home from school and shout "What’s for dinner?"  At the time I thought I was winning the war to be accepted by my new family, but as the years passed it became clear that my presence in this broken family was cook or be shunned entirely.

I can cook but I don’t like to cook when I don’t feel like cooking and most days I don’t.  Crack open a can of tuna, stick a spoon into a jar of peanut butter, grab an apple and I’m good.  Books to read, thoughts to think, blog posts to write, videos to make, podcasts to upload…I’m BUSY!  I’m also 56 and aware of the window of opportunity gently closing on my ability to have an impact on patriarchy and its disorders, so please don’t take up my waning years with spaghetti and meat sauce or lemon chicken or any of the other brilliantly improvised dishes I served when I was gunning for the distinction of The Good Stepmother.  I’m the Bad Stepmother now and wearing it not proudly but realistically and taking advantage of the greased lightning lifestyle suddenly available to me.

Have you ever known a woman freer of relational brakes?  Get this:  no children (although I am sometimes a surrogate mother to a niece), no parents, no pets and a husband who shops and cooks, and shops and cooks extremely well, better than I ever did or ever hoped to.  I am FREE to read, think, make art.  I have never felt freer and when I stop to wonder what it must be like to be sandwiched between children, husband and elder parents needing care, I stop breathing in terror.  I am free.  I didn’t plan it to turn out this way but then again I didn’t have children, probably the defining reason that at age 56 I am free.  If I had had children in my 40′s as so many of my contemporaries did, I’d still be raising a teenager.  Been there done that with my stepsons.  Maybe it would have been lovelier and sweeter with a daughter of my own, but I’m not spending time yearning for what can’t be.  I’m free of menstruating, too, free of painful periods and erratic floods of blood that made me afraid to go out in public.  I’m free, even, of a sexual appetite ruling me.  Sure, sometimes it’s nice, but let me just say that I don’t gotta have it and I like it this way better. 

I like it just fine that I can decline and my husband not only understands but gets it, because, after all, his testosterone is also on the wane.I like it just fine that nobody but my husband has a claim on my time, my attention, my empathy, my listening, my feeling that I must help in any way that I can.  I like it.  I like feeling the freedom and the road stretching out before me to be determined only by the expression of unfettered me-ness.  It might be the first time in my life that I know this place, not just because I got married and helped to raise stepsons, not only because my four orphaned cousins came to live in my nuclear family when I was ten, not only because my mother counted on me to be her helper, but because I was raised to believe that it was my role as a woman to be there for everyone else.  And I’ve been trying, in all kinds of ways, to figure out how to fulfill that expectation and at the same time discover me, my SELF.  Lemme tell ya, it’s been confusing.  Very.

But I have just simplified my life enormously and decided not to continue a few relationships where I am seen as the Giving Tree.  Remember The Giving Tree?  Yeah, well, I’m NOT.  I’m keeping the husband because his mother trained him well and he has never expected me to be his servant in any way.  I trained him to tolerate a messy house. And then I trained him to leave me alone when I’m thinking/writing/researching.  He likes to chitty-chat throughout the day, which is sweet, actually, but NOT when I’m really cranking out the feminist theory or chasing an artistic imperative.  It’s taken some training but he really understands that my work is important to me and that no, I can’t multitask when I’m really really really thinking.  So, we get along, the Mister and I.  I wish he were more interested in my work, to be honest, but he does try.

So, Tipper, I hope you’re feeling free, like me.  I look forward to hearing from you because I suspect you have quite a bit to say…

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It’s St. Patty’s Day tomorrow, my mother’s birthday, and I’m feeling it. Today, while paying bills, which my mother carried out so much more efficiently than I ever have, I used my solar calculator to figure out that, if she were alive today, she would be 83.  When she died at age 55, I had no idea how young she was because I was 28 and clueless. 28 plus 28 = 56, which is how old I am today. There’s a lot I don’t know about being an adult woman with an alive, aging mother. My mother was no saint,but she had moral courage. She tried to do the right thing, she wanted to do the right thing. When my very young cousins (listen to me! I was 10!) were orphaned, she wanted to take care of them like a mother. She wanted simply to open her wings a little wider, breathe a little deeper and find the way to step in to make a devastating abandonment go away.  She didn’t, exactly.

She had never had her own needs met. A person who is invisible, taken-for-granted, seen as her husband’s "helpmeet" rather than as a full, complex, mysterious human being, cannot be all things to all people without breaking down. Chances are she would have broken down even without adding four orphans to her own brood of three with their own problems of stuttering, obesity and depression. She had not been a wanted child and she had been orphaned by age sixteen. She did not go to college. She was working as a salesgirl in a department store when she met my father, who was studying for an advanced degree. She was beautiful (though never thin enough by some cultural standards), she could really really really sing, and she was desperate to be recognized in ways I didn’t realize until her deathbed. She was angry and became angrier; she was bitter and became disfigured by embitterment. She was lonely and demanding and sometimes disconnected from the present moment.

Toward the end of her life, when she would spill to me about everything that had turned out not to be what she thought it would or should or could, she would say "I did my best." But nobody believed that she had done her best, and nobody cared, including me. She was a terrifying woman to all that knew her, one minute warm, gracious, giving, compassionate, and the next…we never knew when she would explode in rage. I believe it ate her up. I believe she died of cancer at age 55 because she had never been seen as a person.

On the day she died I stood by her in the ICU as she scrawled notes on a pad. She was yellow and swollen beyond recognition, intubated so that speaking was impossible. I have never seen such fear in a human being’s eyes. She scrawled GOLD. GOLD. GOLD. I didn’t understand. Her maiden name had been Goldberg. She jammed her pencil stub against the pad in my hand. Why didn’t I understand? How could I not understand? I had always been the one to understand. In fact, she’d dumped way too much of it on me when it was inappropriate, when I was still a child. Entirely inappropriate. But here she is 55 and dying and I am 28 and surely nothing is inappropriate now.

Then I got it. "You were gold," I said. Yes. Yes. Yes. There was a fluttering, a release of solitude, a whole body sigh, a gratitude. That I understood meant everything. I understood everything in that moment. A woman who did the right thing for the children of relatives who committed suicide, who knowingly sacrificed her own children in order to do the right thing, only felt her own innate worth while facing death, an early death, a sudden death. Only in the terrifying retrospect of sudden separation from everything that had mattered did she receive validation of the essential quest of her life: to be valued for her SELF.

It matters that she tried to do the right thing, but it’s not her story alone. Many women have mothered past their capacity, have dug so treacherously into their own emotional reserves that there is nothing left. Many women have mothered the lost children of dead sisters, sisters-in-law, even strangers. Historically, women have been morally courageous, generous with their love and resources, self-sacrificing and expecting little in return. They have had to be. I want this to change. I want the burden for compassion, caring and giving to shift. I want it to be shared by all human beings. I want women to be freed from valuation for the services they render to their husbands, their mothers-in-law, their children, their fathers-in-law, their fathers, even to their mothers, and to organizations that prey on their ability to hurt for others. I want all women to feel the value of SELF, to feel it long before the deathbed reckoning. I want them to know it before birth, at birth, during infancy, during childhood, during adolescence, during young adulthood, during adulthood, during maturity, during the aging years, during the breakdown years, surrounded or not surrounded by grandchildren, lauded or not lauded for their "good works." I want it, period. I want it for all women, worldwide. I want it, goddammit. I want it now.

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Pray the Devil Back to Hell, film about the women’s peace movement in Liberia, led by Leymah Gbowee, who remembered her mother-tongue and used it.

This morning, during my usual twirl around the femisphere, I got news of Mark Dorlester’s HuffingtonPost piece about the 31st article of the Iraqi Constitution. Says Dorlester, the George W. Bush administration hammered universal health care, single payer, into the Iraqi Constitution. Yes, he says, American government was assertive in placing universal single-payer health care into Iraq’s new democracy, while here in the U.S.A. the idea of such a system has pushed the alarm buttons of right-wingers with rifles, young women comparing Obama to Hitler, older women wanting their country back, older people up in arms about death panels, and if you’ve tuned into the asylum only one time in the last month, you took the temperature of blowhards whipping up a firestorm.  It’s hard to put out a fire in a group brain if you don’t have leaders with integrity.

On my way to the fact-check, I realized I had already entered matriarchal mode, fired up and fearless about calling out the bullshit.  Somebody needs to do some ‘splainin here!  Tonight is the big deal speech President Obama is giving on his vision for health care reform and already I’m under-impressed.  I’m not holding Barack Obama alone responsible for the lies and the bullshit and powerful people making themselves rich at the expense of nameless, faceless sick people like those Wendell Potter met at a "health fair" he stumbled upon.  He got shocked into shame-with-his-name on it.  Deserved shame.  Shame.  Shame.  Good for Mr. Potter that he owned up and that he’s speaking out.  But what will the President do tonight?  What can he do?

This is where he needs to call in Molly Goldberg to teach him to put his hands on his hips (maybe that’s the problem?  he ain’t got none?) and stand his ground, aiming a double-beam taser gun of motherly "What the hell were you thinking?  Were you thinking?  Do you even have a thought process?"  President Obama and Congress need to tag along behind General Leymah Gwobee, who led a women’s peace movement in Liberia.  They need to apprentice themselves to a woman drawing on ancient mother-right, down in the veins of necessity, down deep in the geo-sphere of universal human resources.

Why do we not see more women with hands on their wide hips, planted in the paths of tyrants, liars, thieves and war criminals?  Go see Pray the Devil Back to Hell and you will understand why not.  Women in too many parts of this world are running for cover every day, every day from out-of-control warlords and warlord-wanna-be’s who have scorched the earth so massively a mother can’t give her child the illusion of a meal.  She has nothing.  She cowers in her shack or her tent in terror of being raped or worse.  And yes, there is worse in Liberia.  No road is safe.  No one is safe. Children are conscripted into war at young ages; the air is violent. 

Why did Gertrude Berg (aka Molly Goldberg in her TV show), empress of a media empire, mother-figure to a nation, disappear from TV, film, and the American mantle of desperately loved stars keeping it together for everybody? When you watch Yoo-Hoo Mrs. Goldberg, you’ll learn that it was the Lucy-wife who knocked the Molly-mother off the mantle. Unless you grew up in the 1950′s watching I Love Lucy every day, you may not remember the scene (scenes?) of Ricky turning Lucy over his knee, administering a fatherly spanking. Lucy off the set was known to be a brilliant comedian, a tough negotiator and a creative genius, but Lucy in the show was uncorked, ungrounded, childish as well as childlike, impulsive, compulsive, and if she wasn’t on the trail looking for trouble, was just too much the space-cadet to size up a stampede. 

It’s comedy, right? Somebody’s got to play the fool, and that was Lucy’s gift. Sure, sure, sure. Just go see Yoo-Hoo Mrs. Goldberg (it’s in theatres now, and the New York Times gives it a star, so go!), and tell me if you can even imagine Mr. Goldberg turning Molly tush-side up and whacking her a few "bad girls" while Molly flutters her legs, bleating like a goat sold at market. Don’t get me wrong–if consenting adults want to spank each other (do it in private, huh?…it’s great that you’re cool with your bondage thing, but I don’t want to parade down Castro Street next to whole contingents of people getting spanked and whipped…I mean, you know, I didn’t consent to that violence, so keep it to yourself…), I don’t care as long as it’s safe.  NU?

Pray the Devil Back to Hell is a powerful film, but I was disappointed not to see the one scene I was waiting for, the moment when Leymah (that’s General Gwobee to you), can only convey the force of her outrage and her uncontainable fury by standing on the tracks to stop the train. We learn by her narration, after-the-fact, that she broke through the madness when she warned the soldiers and bureaucrats ringing her, that she was ready to take it on Liberia-style. She would show them the inversion of morality they’d caused. Leymah, herself, in her naked body, was ready to render visible the shame, the sorrow and the pity, created by war-crazed soldiers and insurgents.  

In Liberia, it’s a shaman’s curse for a mother to remove her clothes in repudiation of men who deserve the lashing of her mother-scorn. She calls down a power that is understood and that holds up the earth. When she announces her intention to rip off her dress, warning them of the imminent, inevitable ripping she is powerless to prevent–by her own hand stripping off her dress, shoulders back, holding her brazen pelvis out for war-boys and war-men to behold–the curtain of shame drops. It’s over. Nobody doubts that she will do it. Nobody doubts that a curse will ensue. Nobody shrugs off the meaning of mother-shame. Nobody misunderstands that tone of voice. Nobody can escape the flashback to complete dependence on his mother and the memory of owing her your life.

The appropriate use of shame, incarnated in the universal mother who gives life and protects life, began a women’s peace movement, led by General Leymah Gwobee of Liberia. There was much more to the successful waging of peace–many other tactics, many other brave women. Without the standoff between the lost war-boys and the protectress of life, what was at stake could not have been made visible. General Leymah called on her mother-tongue. 

Go see these two films and, if you can arrange it, see them back-to-back. You will see two very different, equally inspiring women, one rich, one poor, one Jewish-American, one Liberian, one white, one black. I see them side-by-side, glorious glints of a lost language.

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A note from MadamaAmbi, author of this letter.

August 2009

As the wife of a powerful legislator, you also have power. You can be the ultimate persuader. If you have always had good health care, good luck and the kindness of strangers, you may not know how some women in the United States suffer. We put before you the voices of a doctor as well as a small sample of stories from women who belong to Feminist Advisory Board for Obama (FAB), and we ask that you advocate for these women merely by discussing these issues with your husband.

In American Forum’s nationally distributed op-ed., Dr. Ralph Riviello cautions us against separating comprehensive reproductive healthcare from a woman’s overall health and welfare. Dr. Riviello is a board member of Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health, as well as an attending physician at Hahnemann University Hospital in Philadelphia.

"Recently I saw a pregnant woman I will call Lillian, a 22-year-old who brought her two children with her to the ER. Lillian has a full-time job whose health insurance doesn’t cover pregnancy. She can’t afford to cover herself and her family on the individual market, and she makes too much money to qualify for Medicaid. Lillian came to the ER because she wants to make sure her baby is okay. A friend with better insurance advised her that she should have an ultrasound.

I discharged Lillian with worry. I know that she will have a difficult time finding standard prenatal care. Without that help, she and her baby are at much higher risk for complications, like low birth weight, that can turn into tragedy. Or Lillian’s health might suffer. I am embarrassed by how many women die in childbirth in the U.S. — at 15.1 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births, our rate is higher than most developed nations.

Most women in America will spend roughly 35 years of her life preventing pregnancy, trying to become pregnant, having children, or recovering from pregnancy. She might also face a sexually transmitted disease — or a common condition of the reproductive system, like fibroids or polyps. Her health insurance will not help her with any of these basic needs, yet we still call it health insurance. Although women comprise more titan half of the U.S. population, many insurers treat their medical care as an exception to the rule, charging them more, to stay healthy than men and refusing to cover basic reproductive services.

When women do not receive gynecological care, they get sick when they could have easily and inexpensively been kept well. Just as she needs to be in good cardiovascular health, a woman must be in good reproductive health whether or not she is trying to got pregnant. An undetected problem in the reproductive system can have devastating consequences. Two of my colleagues have had patients who went without ob/gyn checkups because they could not afford health insurance. By the time they saw a doctor, their cervical cancer had already spread too far to save their lives. One of these women was in her 50′s. The other was 28. A woman’s reproductive health affects her throughout her life; it is inextricable from her overall well-being. Reproductive health care is a necessity that too many women have gone without for too long. And when women get sick and die, their children feel the impact, as do their spouses, employers, and everyone else who depends on them.

I was disappointed but not surprised by the following survey finding: 52 percent of women in our country did not visit a doctor when they had a medical problem or went without a needed prescription or follow-up care because they could not afford these services. I have worked in Philadelphia’s emergency rooms since 2002. where I have treated women of all ages who have nowhere else to go for fundamental care. Every day our department treats at least 10 women who come to the ER for pregnancy tests and ultrasounds. These women have to pretend that they have emergency stomach pain or bleeding so that they can get a little bit of obstetric attention.

In the rush to develop legislation for health care reform, our senators and representatives must not forget the health of half their constituents. Every private and public insurance plan must guarantee the same set of reproductive services to every woman. We can’t keep Lillian and the rest of the women in this country healthy and alive without taking care of their reproductive health."

Ralph Riviello, MD, quoted with permission from American Forum.

Lynn Morris, a mother and grandmother writes:

"My daughter was diagnosed with breast cancer when she was pregnant with my first grandson five years ago. Thank God both are healthy today. Cancer is something that is occurring in many young women. If this pregnancy had not been in the second trimester they couldn’t have saved my daughter’s life or the life of the baby. She had to undergo chemotherapy while my grandson was in the womb. At the time it was a nightmare.

We need think of abortion in this context. What if it was necessary to save the life of the mother? I think some of these young women need to go before Congress, No one has the right to make decisions for women like this. Can you imagine the health care bills these young women have already? My daughter’s bill is like a house payment that never ends. These young women would die because they can’t be treated."

Lisa Nicholson on the difference between a therapeutic abortion and an illegal one:

"Back in the late sixties, I worked at the University of Alabama in Birmingham Hospital as a candy striper. I was going to nursing school and wanted to get some experience. One of my assignments was the admitting office.

A diagnosis that, came in fairly often was TAB.  They were always white women, well-dressed, beautiful hair and nails, usually a fur coat if it was winter, and always a private doctor. I never could find out what that acronym stood for. No one wanted to share. Eventually, an intern on the ob-gyn floor told me it stood for therapeutic abortion. He also explained it didn’t necessarily mean something was wrong with the mother or the fetus (I asked, because the woman I had just admitted wasn’t sick looking).

I thought about all the poor women, white and black, that I had gone with to the ER to get admitted after a coat hanger back alley abortion. There are moments in a life that are never to be forgotten, and learning about class differences and health care differences in that way was one of those moments. My daughter has tried for years to have a child. She has had five unsuccessful IUI procedures. She has used fertility drugs. I have lost children to miscarriage and used fertility drugs to conceive. I understand the value of a pregnancy on many levels, both as a parent, a grandparent, and a labor and delivery nurse.

Abortion is not for me, BUT, I will defend to the death anyone’s right to have a safe and legal abortion and a doctor’s right to give someone that abortion and have it covered by insurance. The lies and scare tactics being used make me sick and angry. I just wish that everyone would remember that there were abortions before they were legal. There were also many, many tragedies—hemorrhaging to death, septicemia, ruptured uterus, etc., because they didn’t have insurance or a doctor to do a TAB."

Lisa Nicholson, mother, grandmother, labor and delivery nurse.

Thank you for listening to our stories.

MadamaAmbi, Activist Artist, Feminist Advisory Board for Obama
Joanne Bamberger, Founder, PunditMom
Gloria Feldt, Activist and Author
Stephanie Himel-Nelson, Lawyer Mama
Jen Nedeau, Women’s Rights Activist, Change.org
Amie Newman, Managing Editor, RH Reality Check

Also published on RH Reality Check and Change.org

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Therapists who work in private practice are smart to have a consultation group of their peers where they can discuss difficult cases as well as feel understood and supported in the work. Therapy is hard work for the client and hard work for the practitioner, and therapists who plan to thrive in the profession know that they must take care of their emotional needs outside of their practice. Without support in one’s life, going to work everyday against gigantic odds can be crushing to the soul.

In my current work as an activist feminist, I have blamed my burnout on fibromyalgia and depression, but I’m thinking that this is not the whole story. Ironically, I have never felt more connected and supported as a feminist than I am right now with my online feminism. But it isn’t enough, even with a husband who is the most supportive partner I can imagine. Recently I discussed burnout with a friend who works in public education, the profession possibly most likely to burn through your soul in the shortest span of time. We chewed over what we were each going through and then it hit us both: we each need a support group. She needs one of her peers in her profession and I need one of my peers in my profession.

My friend will create a face-to-face support group because she is able-bodied and hostessy and not into technology. She loves to cook and entertain people at her home. I am her opposite, preferring quiet space, experiencing social events as the most draining activity on earth. But hey, if I can be an effective activist feminist via web platforms, then surely I can get a support group of my peers to meet me online. Right? Of course right!

Proposal: that a regularly scheduled, drop-in, online support group be held and that membership will be open to activist feminists/womanists who have encountered burnout and who want to inoculate themselves against it by discussing how hard it is to do the work. I will facilitate the group to start, but if other people want to do it, that’s fine by me. I think it’s important to make it a drop-in group so that members don’t feel that this is another job to add to their already overcommitted feminist/womanist/activist agenda. Drop-in is also a good way to accommodate people who suddenly realize, hey, I could sure use a place to vent and get support…hmmm…wonder if that support group is worth a try…???

Proposal: that a regular time and meeting place be established. Also, I suggest we make this open to listeners, maybe via blogtalkradio. How/whether we want to integrate listeners into the group is an interesting question and I don’t know how this would work. I’d like to hear from people who see themselves using this group on a regular basis.

Proposal: that anyone interested in this support group post this to their blogs, get feedback and suggestions for the best online platform and the best time. Please drop me a line either by comment or Twitter or Facebook or email (madamaambi at g mail dot com) to let me know if you are interested. Let’s convene in a few weeks to see if there’s sufficient interest to take it to the next step.

(also published at Feminist Advisory Board for Obama)

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I used to live in the Bay Area but am now retired in Phoenix. I am a longtime feminist now getting very vocal in "cyberfeminism." Although there are many capable leaders in women’s movement, none of them have the moxie you do, or the leverage. I’m writing to tell you that YOU’RE IT!

Yes, dear Senator, You Are It. You are the obvious person to step forward and speak for women when current events focus worldwide attention on issues that disproportionately affect women and girls. In my review of the landscape, there is no one else who can take the podium or the microphone or the spotlight and do it as skillfully, as eloquently, and as powerfully as you can.

I’m going to mount a campaign to put this idea out to online feminists, and I’ll update you on where I’m posting and who else is weighing in on the issue. If you think that other members of Congress should take the podium with you, like Maxine Waters or another woman of color, I hope you will recruit them. If you think that there are men in Congress who should stand with you, please recruit them. Speak for women, Senator Boxer. You’re it.

(also posted to FAB/FB, FAB/OFA, http://feministadvisoryboard.blogspot.com, http://patriarchaldisorder.blogspot.com)

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