The Women We Know

I wrote this before the Shriver Report came out- but I think what I’m feeling is universal?
Cross posted from the Huffington Post

We don’t talk about the ways we support each other very often, even though it is so important to recognize. Recently on this blog we’ve debated why women are unhappy. Pollster Frank Luntz told me last night, the majority of “Americans are mad as hell and they’re not going to take it anymore.” Well, yes. We’re unhappy and we’re angry but we want so deeply to connect. Something positive is also happening. It’s happening among American women, and it’s largely happening online in “micro communities,” and then in large gatherings. Micro communities of powerful women are working together on blogs and list-servs to make change happen.

This is our 21st Century consciousness-raising. Women want that kind of collective experience- I saw it last year when 5,000 women swarmed the Boston Convention Center at the Massachusetts Conference for Women. We see it in the incredible popularity of everything Oprah does, and in the success of Maria Shriver’s Women’s Conference. This hunger to take action and make change spans class, race, geography and marital status. And unlike past women’s movements, the ability to make change is more equitably distributed, and that’s because of the Internet.

This week, in the midst of frenzied online organizing to promote gender equity in health care reform, I had a family crisis. And when I had to bow out of action, Jodi Jacobson wrote “Don’t apologize for anything…that’s what a movement is for….”

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/morra-aaronsmele/the-women-we-know_b_321213.html