Washington Post Letter: Who’ll Defend Michelle Obama?

Letters to the Editor:

We take exception to Mary C. Curtis’s implications that feminists and feminist organizations have not engaged in a spirited defense of Michelle Obama when she has received biased treatment from the media. We also have an answer to her wondering what Gloria Steinem is doing about it.

The Women’s Media Center, a feminist media advocacy organization founded by Ms. Steinem in 2005, has been a consistent voice for fair media treatment of women, including Michelle Obama. We have been vocal from the first “proud of my country” flap through the current campaign to cast her as anti-white and un-American. As media monitors and advocates, we’ve written about bias, issued statements and given interviews protesting the insistence that she be “made over.” We fight sexism in the media wherever we find it.

Feminists are no more a monolith than women are. Many feminists supported Barack Obama in the primaries — hundreds signed petitions and wrote commentaries — and many posted these declarations on our Web site. And they support Michelle Obama now.

Ms. Curtis may indeed have a complaint — not necessarily against feminists but against mainstream media outlets that often do not let these voices demanding fair coverage be heard.

CAROL JENKINS

 

President

The Women’s Media Center

 

New York

Boston Globe – The best revenge: Get even

The best revenge: Get even

By Ellen Goodman June 13, 2008

SO IS THE glass half full or half empty? Or to pick a better metaphor, is the “highest, hardest” glass ceiling now half shattered by the 18 million cracks or does it look as impermeable as ever after this unsuccessful battering?

This has not been an easy week for ardent Hillary Clinton supporters, who are being told to move on and move over to the Barack Obama camp. The woman who looked improbably energetic and strong as she bowed out last Saturday reinforced both the respect and disappointment of her core supporters.

Mourning is not too strong a word to describe what I’ve been hearing in the last few days. No sooner had the speech ended than a Clinton fund-raiser received an e-mail from the Democratic National Committee asking her to raise money for Obama. She said, tersely, they didn’t even wait for the body to cool.

“Women have had the idea of her being president in their heads for a decade or more. So the level of disappointment, anger, discouragement is that much stronger,” said Marie Wilson of the White House Project. As Dianne Feinstein said, “the nerve endings have to be healed.”

Well, fair enough. But in the early stage of the mourning process, those supporters who have been dismissively pegged as Angry White Women should take another adage from politics: Don’t Get Mad, Get Even.

This is not a revenge fantasy, especially not against Obama. I cannot imagine the core of Clinton’s female supporters turning to McCain, a man who voted against equal pay, let alone abortion rights. So I’m not talking about payback; I’m talking about pay it forward. I mean “get even” in a very different sense: Even the playing field, even the odds.

Get Even in the Media. Every Clinton supporter I talk to heatedly brings up the media. Women who have never let the word “misogyny” slip from their lips now pair it alliteratively with media. If you have five minutes, go to the website of the Women’s Media Center (womensmediacenter.com) and be aware that this is just a Whitman’s Sampler.

NY Times: Woman in Charge, Women Who Charge

Woman in Charge, Women Who Charge

By Judith Warner

Is it a coincidence that the bubbling idiocy of “Sex and the City,” the movie, exploded upon the cultural scene at the exact same time that Hillary Clinton’s candidacy imploded?

Literally, of course, it is. Figuratively, I’m not so sure.

And before I set off an avalanche of e-mails explaining why Hillary deserved to lose, I want to make one point clear: I am talking here not about the outcome of her candidacy – mistakes were made, and she faced a formidable opponent in Barack Obama – but rather about the climate in which her campaign was conducted. The zeitgeist in which Hillary floundered and “Sex” is now flourishing.

It’s a cultural moment that Andrew Stephen, writing with an outsider’s eye for the British magazine the New Statesman last month, characterized as a time of “gloating, unshackled sexism of the ugliest kind.” A moment in which things like the formation of a Hillary-bashing political action group, “Citizens United Not Timid,” a “South Park” episode featuring a nuclear weapon hidden in Clinton’s vagina, and Internet sales of a Hillary Clinton nutcracker with shark-like teeth between her legs, passed largely without mainstream media notice, largely, perhaps, because some of the key gatekeepers of mainstream opinion were so busy coming up with various iterations of the nutcracker theme themselves. (Tucker Carlson on Hillary: “When she comes on television, I involuntarily cross my legs.” For a good cry, watch this incredible montage from the Women’s Media Center.)

Lifetime Networks, CosmoGIRL! and Declare Yourself Launch the Future Frontrunners Contest to Search for Tomorrow’s Madame President

Lifetime Networks, CosmoGIRL! and Declare Yourself Launch the Future Frontrunners Contest to Search for Tomorrow’s Madame President

NEW YORK — Lifetime Networks, CosmoGIRL! and the nonpartisan, nonprofit organization Declare Yourself, today announced the launch of the 2008 Future Frontrunners contest to identify and inspire the next generation of women leaders. The contest offers 16 lucky winners the once-in-a-lifetime chance to meet the country’s top women in politics at a Future Frontrunners summit during the Democratic National Convention in Denver or the Republican National Convention in Saint Paul, MN.

To enter, contestants must submit either a written or video entry at myLifetime.com answering the question, “What would you do if you were president?” Winning entries will be selected by a distinguished panel of judges, including: