Marie Wilson, President of the Ms Foundation for Women, founders of Take Our Daughters to Work Day
Elizabeth Debold, founding member of the Harvard Project on Women's
Psychology and Girls' Development
Judson Culbreth, Editor-in-Chief of Working Mother Magazine
EvaS: Marie, would you like to start us off tonight?
MarieWilsn: I want to know why people signed on to be here this evening.
What did you want to know?
ElizaDbld: What do you want to know from us?
EvaS: Anyone want to answer why?? :)
ZAK53: I'm doing a research paper for my high school on feminism.
JudsonCul: Where is your school?
ZAK53: Ohio.
Lone d3425: I think I have always been a GOOD girl and I hate it!
EvaS: Lone, I know exactly what you mean!
JudsonCul: What's wrong with being a good girl?
ElizaDbld: There's so much pressure from the culture to keep us in line,
good, quiet...it's hard to resist. But that's what being great is about
- resistance.
EvaS: Eliz, that was the content of my first question, actually. Why is
it so difficult for us to realize that what is personal is highly political?
That our relationships to our daughters are fraught with conflicts.
MarieWilsn: Because it begins with mothers having to go back and look at
their own good girlness and deal with it as adults.
ElizaDbld: And there is so much subtle and not so subtle violence against
women being powerful, that we learn fear and caution. But we can do something
about that together, in connection.
EvaS: Then what you're saying is that we have to be conscious of all this.
Yes?
ElizaDbld: Absolutely. And critical.
MarieWilsn: Actually, when girls organize together, they can take on the
issues that keep us in line.
JudsonCul: I'd like to know what Lone means by good.
Lone d3425: It seems to me that fear keeps a lot of us (especially older)
women prisoned.
JudsonCul: What kind of fear?
MarieWilsn: That's why it's important to take small risks at "badness"...not
smiling all the time.
EvaS: Marie, or tilting our heads.
MarieWilsn: I think just earrings that could tell us to say what we're thinking
more often would help.
EvaS: Earrings? LOL!!!!
Lone d3425: Right, Marie. Instead of worrying what others will think if
we deviate from the "norm" (ugh).
MarieWilsn: We did a big survey this year and what girls say is that they're
overwhelmed by their feelings for others so often that they don't know theirs.
EvaS: Marie, how interesting. We are taught that, for sure.
ElizaDbld: Because as girls and women, we take care of everyone, so we can't
know ourselves often as well as we know everyone else. It's a way of responding
to fear of not being connected to others. We often go too far away from
ourselves.
EvaS: Eliz, true.
ZAK53: What is your opinion on the lack of female role models in the media?
