WHAT WOULD MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE FOR WOMEN AND GIRLS?

It's Women's History Month! 

Over at the blog Newvine Growing's Blogversation 2012, I posted a series of questions about being female and making the world a better place for females.

I invite you to weigh in with your own thoughts.

What's great about being female?

It's March, Women's History Month, and I'm incredibly proud to be part of a long line of people - other females - who have taken charge of seeing that things go well on so many levels of life - in the home, in workplaces outside the home, in neighborhoods and other kids of communities, in the world at large.

I'm pleased to be part of a group of people who have figured out to make relationships a primary focus in life, and who see to it that relationships around them go well so that everything else in life goes well.

As a group, we've done and continue to do a kick-a** job of leading work for social change, including work around eliminating key forms of oppression, including racism, classism, sexism, and homophobia.  We've voiced our opinions and spoken our minds even when we've received both subtle and blatant messages to be quiet, be nice, and preserve the status quo.

We also make fantastic artists, manual laborers, athletes, comics, politicians, and community-builders.  

When I think about al the women who have come before me and the women who are living now, I beam with huge amounts of pride.

What's hard about being female?

It's been tricky growing up in a time period in our culture where there's this huge pretense that sexism does not exist any longer in the Western world. There is an accepted notion that all the sexism exists over there in the non-Western world. 

The effects of that pretense are huge. First, it justifies the oppression of peoples in these countries and the wars we wage and prop up abroad. Second, it sends a message to Western women that our fight to end sexism is over.  Our "liberation" is presented to us as endless choices, mostly consumer choices.  We're "free" because we can "choose" what we look like, different ways of augmenting our appearance, what career we can have.  

The other result of this pretense that sexism is over is that it has left us women and girls feeling like any struggles we have are purely personal and individual.  It's like any place we have a rough time - be it in our personal and intimate relationships, in our efforts to build community, in our ability to trust our own thinking, in our quest to stay on top of our health and well-being, to raise children, to balance the demands of work in the home with work outside of a home, to make a decent living - is due to some personal shortcoming, some failure to "figure it out."  Women's magazines and self-help books offer endless tips and tricks to make things more manageable, somehow implying that if we just take this course of action or that one, we should be able to work out the ways our lives are hard.

With sexism and its effects on women hidden, trivialized, and denied, it's difficult to place any of our struggles into some larger context; in turn, it's been hard to team up with other women (and men!) to challenge sexism and also where women have internalized its messages.

What would make the world a better place for women and girls to live in?

• Ending racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia would hugely improve things in the lives of girls and women. These systematic forms of mistreatment wreck the fabric of our lives and keep us separate from each other.

• Any adult who plays a role in the life of a young female (including girls, teens, young adults) needs to treat what they say and do as important and significant.  This means listening without interrupting or giving advice.

• Adults can also back young females to take risks in areas where they’ve been excluded or discouraged from participating - e.g. in math, science, and athletics.  As a preschool teacher, I've  make it a point to spend time with girls who are building things with blocks and other materials at choice time, and ask them questions about what they are doing.

• I'd love to see another identity besides (or at least in addition to) the one of "princess" that young girls can latch onto and explore. 

• When females have conflicts with each other, the people around them need to step in and lend a hand.  One of the big reasons women and girls lash out at one another is because we've internalized the ways we've been belittled or invalidated. Without tools to heal from that mistreatment, we take it out on each other.  (What's crazy to me is that popular culture, especially reality shows, capitalizes on the struggles between females and makes it into a spectator sport.)

• I want all guys to know that they can be awesome allies in ending sexism in all its forms, and that their lives, also, are better without it.

• So much of the work that women do, especially domestic work, is unpaid or underpaid.  That needs to be changed!

FROM BLOGVERSATION 2012: SOME ARTISTS WHO INSPIRE ME

Over at Newvine Growing, Colleen Newvine is running Blogversation 2012.  Each week, six women (myself included) write a response to a question posed.  This past week, the question we wrote about was "Who or what inspires you?"  Here is my response.  Please check out Newvine Growing for other responses, and feel free to add your own thoughts to the original post!

Eleanor Traubman Says:
February 9, 2012 at 1:31 pm

There’s a bunch of artists who inspire me. Here are some of them:

Faith Ringgold – maker of storyquilts and children’s books
Keith Haring – pop artist
Missy Elliott – rapper, singer-songwriter, record producer, dancer
Maira Kalman – designer, writer, illustrator
Eva Zeisel – design legend
Women Film Directors – Nancy Savoca, Allison Anders, Karyn Kusama, Gurinder Chadha, Kasi Lemmons
Jim Henson – King of the Muppets, tv and film pioneer
Questlove – drummer for The Roots and King of Twitter!
Julie Taymor – Director of theater, opera, film
Rokafella – Female breakdancer, Director of the documentary of “All the Ladies Say”
All the women in Creative Conversations, the women’s artist group that I help lead

BLOGVERSATION 2012: HOW I GET IDEAS FOR BLOG POSTS

Over at Newvine Growing's Blogversation 2012, Colleen Newvine has asked a group of folks how we get ideas for blog posts. Here's my response:

1. I see an interesting person on tv, in a magazine, or in the newspaper and I think “I gotta meet this person!” So I ring them up and talk to them or to their people and see what I can do. This is how I got to meet design legend Eva Zeisel. I saw her on a tv show, then I learned she lived not too far away, and I called her. It can be nerve-wracking and also take persistance, but I always go forward based on the thought “Wouldn’t it be great if my readers and I got to know this person a bit better?”

2. I skim lots of different publications – newspapers and magazines, mostly. I look at everything from Fast Company to Ebony to Travel & Leisure to Transworld Skateboarding to local newspapers from different New York neighborhoods. I keep my eyes peeled for interesting arts and cultural people, trends, venues, and launches.

3. When I walk down the street, in a shop, in a museum, I am looking at everyone and everything. What’s interesting? What’s new? What’s been there a while already but now needs some attention?

MY TAKE ON NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTIONS

Over at Newvine Growing's Blogversation 2012, Colleen Newvine has asked a group of us "Do you make New Year's resolutions?"

Here is the response which I posted on Newvine Growing. I encourage you to hop on over to Colleen's site to read the rest of the responses!

Let’s face it, this is how New Year’s resolutions go for a lot of us: We set goals, we go after them, we run into a hard spot, we get isolated in that spot, we give up, and then we criticize ourselves for abandoning the dream.

I think there’s a different way to go about goal-setting and goal-pursuing, and my idea of that alternative path emerged about fifteen years ago.

I went to Barnes and Noble to listen to Barbara Sher, author of Wishcraft and other books about going after your dreams. During the evening, Barbara said something that stuck with me: “Isolation is the biggest dream-killer.” She encouraged us to start up Wishcraft groups with other folks in the audience. And so I did, with the woman sitting next to me. We formed a group that set goals and met every couple of weeks to keep each other on track.

Ever since that experience, I’ve done goal-setting differently: I do it in the community of other people. Here’s some examples:

• I started off this year by going to a Vision Board Workshop with a small group of people. It was so much fun and so inspiring to be in a room full of people who all selected magazine images and made gorgeous visual representations of what they wanted to bring into their lives in 2012. I walked away from the experience with my vision board, feeling so energized, happy, and less alone in my mind with my hopes and dreams for the year ahead.

• Two and a half years ago, my friends and I started a group for women visual artists and writers. We are Creative Conversations, and we meet about every six weeks. We are a group of women who tracks each other’s hopes and goals, and our struggles and victories along the way. We cheer each other on and brainstorm solutions for times when someone runs into an obstacle, be it internal or external.

Goal-setting and goal-getting is so much more enjoyable and energizing when done in the context of solid relationships with people who know you and want you to have all that is good in life. At this point in my journey, I wouldn’t do it any other way.

HOW AND WHY I BECAME A BLOGGER (A RESPONSE TO BLOGVERSATION 2012)

Over at her blog, Newvine Growing, my friend Colleen Newvine is running Blogversation 2012.

Every week, she poses two questions and five women answer each question in the comments section.

So far, Colleen has asked us "How and why did you become a blogger?" Here is my response:

For the two weeks that followed my launch of creativetimes.blogspot.com, I had the writer’s version of stage fright; I barely slept or ate and I walked around with heart palpitations. The idea of being that visible scared the bejeezus out of me.

In the five years prior to starting a blog, I had been sending out an email newsletter to keep in touch with clients, friends, family, and colleagues. I titled and dedicated each issue to a topic that caught my fancy – Creativity, Using Your Hands, Generosity, Getting to Know Your Neighborhood.

Meanwhile, the list of email newsletter recipients grew and grew until one day my husband (then boyfriend) said to me “You know, there’s this thing called blogging that would be a great vehicle for your writing.” I didn’t know anything about blogging at the time, but I heard that a well-known blogger, Louise Crawford (Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn), lived nearby in Brooklyn. I called her up, she looked at my newsletter, and confirmed that, yes, I had the makings of a blog.

So I went for it, and my life has not been the same since.

I’m now in my 7th year of blogging, and there are a few key reasons why I keep on keepin’ on.

First: Blogging is a huge passport to adventure. I approach people I want to interview for Creative Times who I probably would never go towards without the blog. I got to meet Maira Kalman, one of my favorite illustrators and writers of children’s books. I’ve had the honor of sitting across from international design legend Eva Zeisel, who just passed away at age 105. I interviewed Elmo Muppeteer and Sesame Street Co-Producer Kevin Clash, and then went on to collect the stories of a whole bunch of other Sesame cast and crew. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that I’d one day sit in the same Mr. Hooper’s store that I saw year after year as a child who watched Sesame Street on the television. But that’s where I was just a month ago, watching a shoot before interviewing Mr.Snuffleupagus Muppeteer Martin Robinson.

Second: There are so many amazing artists, as well as art venues, projects, and performances out there in New York. I want to know about them, and I want my readers to know about them. I want us to have more and more reasons to fall in love with and be inspired by the New York arts scene on a daily basis.

Third: Blogging is a fantastic tool to build community. When I first started blogging, I helped organize monthly gatherings of Brooklyn bloggers, as well as an annual event called The Brooklyn Blogfest. Doing so was a great way to bring people together and forge lots of different relationships between and amongst folks. Although I no longer organize those events, I treasure the people that I met during those days and continue to meet kindred spirits through my work as a blogger. Although it’s relationships, and not technology, that build community, blogging has certainly facilitated opportunities to bring people together and make my life rich with a wealth of friendships and folks to collaborate with on all sorts of projects.

I am truly grateful to my blog for making life such an exciting adventure!