This week’s blog treasures include reflections on Anita Hill 20 years after the Thomas hearings, the key challenges of midlife reinvention, and early gender wars in Elizabeth Warren’s race for the U.S. Senate.
We’re only halfway through Breast Cancer Awareness Month, so there’s still plenty of time to make a “pink purchase.” Kari Solyntjes’s Fab Over Forty offers a shopping list for us, ranging from modestly priced — “Smashbox O-Gloss (100 percent of the $22 purchase price will be donated to The Breast Cancer Research Foundation) — to splurge-worthy, like Ralph Lauren Pink Pony Cashmere Throw($495; 10 percent of which will go toward the Pink Pony Fund).
The Feministing Five marks a sobering anniversary this month: 20 years since Anita Hill, now a a professor of social policy, law, and women’s studies at Brandeis University, testified about sexual harassment in the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Anna at Feministing interviews Hill about her new book, Reimagining Equality: Stories of Gender, Race and Finding Home,and asks her about the biggest challenge for feminists today: “We’ve so long relied on rights, saying, ‘well, you can just sue if something goes wrong.’ If we do that, then we haven’t focused enough on making sure these things don’t happen so that we have to sue.” Click over for the rest — and look out for more coverage on this anniversary from WVFC.
We were waiting to see when we’d trip over Huffington Post 50, Rita Wilson’s new vertical for boomer women. This week, psychologist Vivian Diller offers a look at “The Three Rs of Midlife Reinvention,” which she characterizes as resilience, reliance, and renewal. The second can be bumpy, Diller notes: “Some people reluctantly admit that initial attempts at midlife reinvention left them feeling very alone. Recognize that it takes time to re-establish a new course in life, settle into unfamiliar surroundings and find comfort with new people. Leaving poor relationships or dead-end jobs can propel us in positive directions, but these changes almost always require leaving behind those who provided us safety and comfort.”
At WVFC we’ve long been fans of consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren, though now we’re charged with neutrality as she begins her run for the Senate. Still, we were surprised to see sexism rear its ugly head in the race quite so soon, in the form of some misogynistic comments from her opponent, Senator Scott Brown. Tennessee Guerrilla Women has a statement from Terry O’Neill, president of the National Organization for Women: “I really think that the biggest apology he owes is not to Elizabeth Warren — she is strong, trust me, she can take it — he owes an apology to the women of Massachusetts.”
And in the week that three women win the Nobel Prize, we’re particularly excited to learn from Indiewire’s The Playlist news of an upcoming feature film about another female laureate: “The Lady will be making its way to theaters courtesy of a deal between Cohen Media Group and Europacorp, reports Deadline. Director Luc Besson‘s latest, which stars thespians David Thewlis and Michelle Yeoh, follows the relationship between pro-democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi and her writer husband, Michael Aris, after Aung has been locked away for years. The film apparently received a standing ovation after its screening at the Toronto International Film Festival on Monday, and much of the praise it has garnered has been aimed at the film’s leads. The Lady is now slated for an Oscar-qualifying release come winter, with a wider release expected in 2012.” We can’t wait.
Last week, we called on WVFC contributors to look back on the high (and low) points of 2010. Then we asked them to look ahead to 2011, and what they think is worth our keeping an eye on in the new year.
