Wellesley Underground

Thanks to Wellesley Alum Dana Rudolph for this AWESOME article!

• Roberta Achtenberg, Commissioner, U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and the first openly lesbian or gay public official appointed to a Senate-confirmed position (as as Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development)
• Alison Adler, TV producer
• Diane Anderson-Minshall, author; editor in chief of Curve magazine
• Susan Arnold, former vice chair and president of global business units at Proctor & Gamble, and Diana Salter
• Meredith Baxter, actor, and Nancy Locke, general contractor
• Amanda Bearse, actor and director
• Elizabeth Birch, LGBT-rights advocate and former head of HRC
• Mary Bonauto, GLAD Civil Rights Project Director, and Jennifer Wriggens, law professor, University of Maine
• Lisa Brummel, senior vice president for human resources, Microsoft
• Eliza Byard, executive director of the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), and Eva Kolodner, film producer
• Beth Callaghan, co-founder of Our Chart; director of Web operations, for technology site All Things D, and former editor-in-chief of PlanetOut
• Greta Cammermeyer, Colonel, Washington National Guard (ret.) and LGBT-rights activist, and Diane Divelbess, artist
• Rea Carey, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and Margaret Conway
• Jane Castor, Police Chief of Tampa, Florida
• Ilene Chaiken, creator and executive producer of The L Word
• Debra Chasnoff, Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker
• Mary Cheney, public relations executive, political campaigner, and vice-presidential daughter, and Heather Poe, former U.S. Park Ranger
• Lisa Cholodenko, film director, and Wendy Melvoin, musician
• Cathy Connolly, Wyoming state representative
• Cat Cora, “Iron Chef,” and Jennifer Cora
• Judy Dlugacz, founder and president of Olivia travel company
• Karla Drenner, Georgia state representative
• Amy Errett, partner, Maveron (a venture capital firm), former CEO of Olivia, former chief asset gathering officer, E*Trade, and Clare
• Melissa Etheridge, musician
• Jodie Foster, actor (I’m adding her name with the caveat that it is debatable whether Foster’s thanking of “my beautiful Cydney” during a speech in 2008 was meant as a coming out. Their children bear the names of both Foster and Cydney Bernard, however, which to me is indicative enough to warrant her inclusion here. The couple is no longer together.)
• Jenny Fulle, founder, The Creative-Cartel, former executive vice president of production and executive producer of Sony Pictures Imageworks, and pioneer in opening up Little League to girls
• Sara Gilbert, actor
• Judy Gold, stand-up comedian and two-time Emmy Award-winning writer and producer of The Rosie O’Donnell Show
• Lisa Henderson, general manager, Olivia, and partner
• Sue Hyde, director of Creating Change at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and Jade McGleughlin
• Delores A. Jacobs, chief executive officer of The San Diego LGBT Community Center, and Heather Berberet
• Nina Jacobson, film producer, currently at DreamWorks SKG, and formerly president of Walt Disney Motion Pictures Group
• Cheryl Jacques, administrative judge for the Massachusetts Department of Industrial Accidents, former head of HRC, and former Massachusetts State Senator, and Jennifer Chrisler, executive director of the Family Equality Council
• Lorri Jean, CEO of the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center
• Jolie Justus, Missouri state senator, and Shonda Garrison
• Ellen Kahn, Family Project director for the Human Rights Campaign, and partner
• Elaine Kaplan, general counsel, U.S. Office of Personnel Management
• Kate Kendell, executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, and Sandy Holmes
• Honey Labrador, designer, television personality, and former model, and Nikki Flux, actor
• Annie Leibowitz, photographer
• Barbara Lenk, nominee to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, and Debra Krupp, attorney
• Jennifer Levi, director of GLAD’s Transgender Rights Project and professor at Western New England College School of Law
• Dr. Susan Love, president and medical director of the Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation, and leader of the breast cancer advocacy movement, and Dr. Helen Cooksey, surgeon
• Jane Lynch, actor, and Lara Embry, psychologist
• Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin (d. August 2008), activists
• Jenna Lyons, president and executive creative director, J. Crew
• Mary Beth Maxwell, senior advisor, U.S. Department of Labor and founding Executive Director of American Rights at Work
• Robin McGehee, professor and LGBT activist, and Kathy Adams, professor
• Kelly McGillis, actor
• Tammy Lynn Michaels, actor
• Susan Miller, executive producer/writer of Anyone But Me, Guggenheim Fellow and two-time Obie award-winning playwright
• Mary Carolyn Morgan, judge of the San Francisco County Superior Court
• Sherri Murrell, head coach of Portland State University, and the only out coach in NCAA Division I women’s basketball
• Alison Nathan, Judge, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, and Meg Satterthwaite, law professor
• Cynthia Nixon, actor, and Christine Marinoni, education activist
• Rosie O’Donnell, actor and television personality
• Kelli Carpenter, founder of R Family Vacations and former Nickelodeon marketing executive
• Annise Parker, mayor of Houston, Texas, and Kathy Hubbard
• Nancy Polikoff, professor of law at American University
• Jen Rainin, founding partner of lesbian travel company Sweet and president of the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, and Frances Stevens, editor in chief of Curve magazine
• Cathy Renna and Leah McElrath Renna, managing partners, Renna Communications
• Hilary Rosen, political commentator and former head of the Recording Industry of America (RIAA)
• E. Denise Simmons, city councilor and former mayor, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Mattie Hayes
• Nadine Smith, executive director of Equality Florida, and Andrea Smith, executive director of Green Florida
• Kara Swisher, Wall Street Journal columnist, co-executive editor of technology site All Things D, and Megan Smith, vice president of new business development at Google
• Sheryl Swoopes, professional basketball player and three-time Olympic gold medalist, and Alisa Scott, former basketball player and coach
• Wanda Sykes, comedian, and Alex
• Christine Vachon, film producer, and Marlene McCarty, graphic designer
• Linda Villarosa, author, journalist, public speaker, former editor of the New York Times and former executive editor of Essence magazine, and Jana Welch, marketing executive
• Karen Williams, comic
• Marie Wilson, founder and president of The White House Project, co-creator of Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day, and former president of the Ms. Foundation for Women, and Nancy Lee

You won’t allow me to go to school.
I won’t become a doctor.
Remember this:
One day you will be sick.

—

Poem written by an 15 year old Afghan girl 

This poem was recorded in a NYT magazine article about female underground poetry groups in Afghanistan. An amazing article about the ways in which women are using a traditional two line poetry form to express their resistance to male oppression, their feelings about love (considered blasphemous), and their doubts about religion. 

One of the best articles I’ve read all year. Here’s the link

(Source: katyuno, via azaadi)

I asked a young White woman why she was studying social anthropology. She replied that she was hoping to go to Zimbabwe, and felt that she could help women there by advising them how to organize. The Black women in the audience gasped in astonishment. Here was someone scarcely past girlhood, who had just started university and had never fought a war in her life. She was planning to go to Africa to teach female veterans of a liberation struggle how to organize! This is the kind of arrogant, if not absurd attitude we encounter repeatedly. It makes one think: Better the distant armchair anthropologists than these ‘sisters’.

—

African feminist Ifi Amadiume

(via lord-kitschener)

I’m worried Wellesley is heading in this direction with Women In Public Service and with the Albright Institute.

(Source: newwavefeminism, via azaadi)

You might not expect a rural Alabama mother with a felony conviction to have in her corner a national army of feminists, civil libertarians and gynecologists, but Kimbrough’s case has attracted the interest of groups like Planned Parenthood, the A.C.L.U. and the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, who all maintain that her conviction sets a dangerous precedent. Emma Ketteringham, the director of legal advocacy at the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, a New York-based reproductive-justice group, has been following Kimbrough’s case closely. She has drafted “friend of the court” briefs for Kimbrough signed by groups like the National Organization for Women-Alabama and the American Medical Association. She argues that applying Alabama’s chemical-endangerment law to pregnant women “violates constitutional guarantees of liberty, privacy, equality, due process and freedom from cruel and unusual punishment.” In effect, she says, under Alabama’s chemical-endangerment law, pregnant women have become “a special class of people that should be treated differently from every other citizen.” And, she says, the law violates pregnant women’s constitutional rights to equal protection under the law. Ketteringham also recruited two prominent Alabama lawyers, Jake Watson and Brian M. White, to take Kimbrough’s case pro bono. “I love babies, too, but I don’t like locking up their mamas,” Watson told me.

Many of the dozen or so people I interviewed for this story pointed to the rise of the brogrammer—a term that seeks to recast the geek identity with a competitive frat house flavor. The essence of it comes through in comments on the question-and-answer site Quora. “How Does a Programmer Become a Brogrammer?”: Brogrammers “rage at the gym, to attract the chicks and scare the dicks!” They “can work well under the tightest deadlines, or while receiving oral sex.” And they have their priorities straight: “If a girl walks past in a see-through teddy, and you don’t even look up because you’re neck-deep in code, expect to spend a lot of time celibate no matter how bro you go.”

The phenomenon has drawn media coverage and generated a Facebook page, a satirical Twitter persona, and YouTube videos demonstrating the Natty Light-loving, popped-collar-donning lifestyle. Some developers insist that it’s all just a big joke and doesn’t represent any actual streak in tech culture. But apparently it’s real enough for social-media analytics company Klout: The high-flying Silicon Valley startup came under fire last month for displaying a recruitment poster at a Stanford career fair that asked: “Want to bro down and crush code? Klout is hiring.”

But recruiter beware, warn some veteran observers: A bros-only atmosphere will hurt no one more than the startups that foster it. “We simply cannot afford to alienate large chunks of the workforce,” notes Dan Shapiro, a tech entrepreneur who sold his comparison-shopping company to Google and now works there as a product manager. Shapiro, who has blogged in the past about sexism in the tech industry, notes that “it is a widely understood truth that the single biggest challenge to a successful startup is attracting the right people. To literally handicap yourself by 50 percent is insanity.”

As it is, women remain acutely underrepresented in the coding and engineering professions. According to a Bureau of Labor Statistics study, in 2011 just 20 percent of all programmers were women. A smaller percentage of women are earning undergraduate computer science degrees today than they did in 1985, according to the National Center for Women in Technology, and between 2000 and 2011 the number* of women in the computing workforce dropped 8 percent, while men’s share increased by 16 percent. Only 6 percent of VC-backed tech startups in 2010 were headed by women.

fuckyeahfeminists:

From ThinkProgress:

Students in Missouri are speaking out against a proposed “Don’t Say Gay” bill to ban discussions of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people in public schools and a coalition of progressive groups — Progress Missouri and PROMO — has formed OKtoSayGay.org “to tell the extreme politicians why this proposal is so, so, so wrongheaded.” Some of those students spoke with a local affiliate earlier this week and argued that the measure could prohibit teachers from interfering in instances of anti-LGBT bullying and further discrimination. “That’s what we will be teaching them is discrimination,” one student said. Another gay student added, “It makes me feel horrible- less than human– that I’m not as good as my peers.”