Gloria Steinem: It’s Not a Man’s World or a Woman’s Nation

We at WVFC have been excited about Maria Shriver’s A Woman’s Nation project, which is being highlghted this weeek on NBC-TV. (At the bottom of the post, see Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm talk to Shriver on the Today Show.) Look here tomorrow for word from our own Diane Vacca, evaluating the new report issued this week by Shriver and her team.

Now, via our sisters at Women’s Media Center, we offer some words on the project from the woman who first taught many of us to stand up for our place in the world. Read below (including the link to WMC), and then let us know in comments: Do you think she’s right? What do you hope the Shriver report will do? How do you plan to be included?  (Ed.)

You’re going to be seeing a multimedia blitz about a new national study of women’s status called The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything. Gloria Steinem gives you a preview of this project created by Maria Shriver and a D.C. think tank, and suggests ways you can use it and also judge its success.

For the first time in the history of the United States, half of all people on payrolls are women. This big landmark is the centerpiece of The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything, a newly released 400-plus page study that includes a national poll of changing attitudes among women and men, and two dozen essays from experts on various aspects of women’s status, provided free office space and other in-kind support, will make it the subject of a week of television programming.

The creators of this campaign to launch a national conversation are Maria Shriver, who lent her skill at cross-country interviewing and wisdom from running the California Women’s Conference, plus the Center for American Progress, a Washington think tank self-described as a source of progressive ideas, and headed by John Podesta, former chief-of-staff for President Bill Clinton.  The result is a freestanding project with Rockefeller Foundation and other private support, and also a very conscious echo of a government commission and report on the status of American women that was ordered up by Shriver’s uncle, President John F. Kennedy, almost 50 years ago. Headed by Eleanor Roosevelt, it set up state commissions that led to the founding of the National Organization for Women.

Will this $250,000 poll and estimated $2 million project succeed in creating real change where so many others have failed?  The report itself headlines such warnings as “Plenty of study, few results: Real family friendly workplace reform is long overdue.” It lists some of the many prestigious calls for, say, a national system of childcare; an area in which every other modern democracy has long done better than the United States. In the Nixon era when women were a third of the paid labor force, for instance, Congress passed childcare legislation, only to see it vetoed as “family-weakening.” Now that women are half of all workers with incomes that are necessary to 80 percent of families—indeed, 40 percent of babies are now born to single mothers—childcare is still nowhere on the list of priorities in Congress, and we have also become the only industrialized country without any requirement of paid family leave.

To read the rest of Steinem’s call to action, click here.

Gloria Steinem travels widely as a feminist activist, organizer, writer and lecturer. She is co-founder of the Women’s Media Center, and a board member of Equality Now, a group that advocates for women’s rights globally. She was an editor of The Reader’s Companion to U.S. Women’s History and a member of the Beyond Racism Initiative, a comparative study of racial patterns in the United States, South Africa, and Brazil.

Steinem co-founded New York magazine and Ms. magazine, where she continues to serve as a consulting editor. She helped to found the National Women’s Political Caucus and Choice USA, and was the founding president of the Ms. Foundation for Women where she helped to create Take Our Daughters to Work Day. She has also co-produced a documentary on child abuse for HBO. Her books include the bestsellers Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem; Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions; Moving Beyond Words; and Marilyn: Norma Jean, on the life of Marilyn Monroe.

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