Celebrate the right to vote!

Failure is impossible
-Susan Anthony

Last night I met with a group of female colleagues who volunteer for an organization called Gather The Women. We are a self-organizing global matrix of women who support each other in the call to feminine leadership. Simple platform, lofty goal. It's easy to join and easy to participate. There are no required meetings and no dues. In many instances, we are merely joining together in circle to hold sacred space for one another's voices to be heard.

Only two hours before, I was reading the August 23, 2009 edition of The New York Times Magazine titled "Saving The World's Women." This is a poignant piece of journalism on the anniversary of American women achieving the right to vote. You see, some of the women profiled in this magazine, still in 2009, don't have the right to vote. One Pakistan woman was being beaten daily by her husband and her brother-in-law until she obtained a microloan and established a successful embroidery business to support both of them. She was not allowed to leave her house to meet with other women without her husband's permission. Another woman talked about the 1 million girls that are missing in China and India due to newborn killing or neglect because female children are considered liabilities in these countries. Yet another story told of the acid attacks on girls walking to school just last year in Afghanistan.

We sometimes forget in this country how richly blessed we are because of the rights and freedoms that our foremothers so graciously risked their lives to achieve for us. While most of the developing world is trying to figure out how to provide clean water, food and vaccinations to their children, we easily choose from the hot and cold tap for drinking water, showers and laundry; we frequent grocery stores with overwhelming selections of products; and we sit comfortably in our homes with all of the modern electronic conveniences of the western world.

As the meeting with my sisters in the circle drew to a close, I recalled all of the womens stories that I read in the afternoon. It brought tears to my eyes to think what it would be like to have to ask permission to join my friends for our little monthly gathering or to expect daily beatings by men for unsatisfactory economic or child bearing performance.

It reminded me what visionary lives Susan Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton led working together over 50 years to sow the winter wheat for suffrage they would never experience. It gave me pause to honor Alice Paul and Lucy Burns who were willing to sacrifice their lives as they led the hunger strikes that would eventually yield votes for women.

If there's ever a moment when you are feeling anything less than an absolute rampage of appreciation to be a woman living in the United States, just think of the women who worked diligently for 72 years to bring the banquet table of opportunities that are available to each of us and the two-thirds of women in the world who still do not have the fundamental freedoms that we take for granted everyday.

Last week I heard about a new book titled UNCOVERED: Baring It All by Jordon Matter. It is a breathtaking collection of photographs featuring ordinary women of varying shapes and sizes baring their breasts in different NYC settings, such as parks, street corners and parades. Those portrayed then wrote essays about this vulnerable experience of publicly embracing their feminine form. The inspiration for the project came, in part, the author/photographer explained, from his daily photo shoots with high paid NYC models who, in theory, have the ideal figure, but, surprisingly still loathe their own bodies. He observed that regardless of how skinny, how photographed, or how sought after they are, these “model” women are still not content with how they look.

This made me wonder, if these size zero, sickly thin twigs aren’t happy about how they look and this is the western iconic image that is being shoved down every woman’s throat, minute by minute, day in and day out, how are any other women supposed to be satiated with their appearance? Is “being a slave to fashion” a very literal problem in the United States and are we even aware of it?

Hopeful to learn more about the transformational experience of the female participants who bore all, I headed to the network media website promoting the book. Once there, I found a haunting milieu of headlines, “Overweight? 5 reasons it’s your fault” “Kids as young as 3 can have chronic depression, Antidepressant use doubles in the U.S.” “How to get a better butt” “Women turning to hormones to look younger” “Skinny jeans leaving women numb” and “Teens and plastic surgery.” Seriously?

If this is truly the primary focus of American women (and I have to believe it is because network media is producing what sells) and we have been free to make our own choices for almost a century, are we really conscious of what we are choosing? What messages are we absorbing that create a constant obsession with our external appearance seemingly to the detriment of developing a strong, healthy inside core. And, furthermore, what messages are we truly sending our daughters if antidepressant use has doubled in the US and teens are turning to plastic surgery at alarming rates? It appears that since 1920, skinny jeans have merely replaced corsets and we have traded diets for voting rights as the latest shackles that hold women back.
While I applaud Mr. Matter for his effort to lift women out of this new bondage that we have converted from old patterns and beliefs, it is going to take much more interior effort on the part of women themselves to shift from this exterior obsession slavery to accessing the authentic beauty and freedom found only on the inside.

Quote of the month: Alice Paul

There will never be a new world order until women are a part of it.
-Alice Paul