Running for Congolese Women to End Violence

Chris Jackson is running 12 marathons this year for Run for Congo Women to raise awareness about violence against women and children in the Congo. Here he is running the Congo marathon with Congolese children beside him.

Last Sunday morning, Team Congo Paris raced from Paris to Versailles for Run for Congo Women. It was a 15K journey heavy with French history, because King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were brought from Palace Versailles to Palace Tuileres at the start of the French Revolution. Around two miles into the race, came Île des Cygnes along river Seine housing a small version of the Statue of Liberty erected by Americans living here in France. It is a replica of the original standing in New York Harbor given by the French to America as a sign of international friendship in 1886.

The race had authentic historical depth to say the least. Yet, I spent it thinking how all last week while reporting on the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), I noted that media did not acknowledge that violence against women and girl’s (VAW/G) is not one of the eight goals specified by the MDGs. In the World's Women at the Center of Achieving the MDGs conference during the UN Summit, one of the first points addressed was that very issue.

In August, Post-AIDS 2010 Conference Her Blueprint highlighted how tied the issue of violence against women and girls to the violation of a plethora of human rights in Health Versus Harm: Zero Tolerance on Violence Against Women and Girls. Yesterday, the International Violence Against Women Act (IVAWA) was up for a critical vote in the United States Senate but was postponed until November. However, Ritu Sharma, co-Founder and President of Women Thrive World Wide published her thoughts about her own grandmother's death in East India in hopes of sharing why the bill should pass when voted on.

“I never met my grandmother. She was burned alive with kerosene doused on her sari and lit on fire. Some think it was suicide, some think it was a dowry murder since her mother-in-law was not pleased with what my grandmother brought into her new husband’s family. She had four children; one of them my mother, the other my uncle, who was just a few months old when she was killed. I cannot imagine her shock, grief and pain in the moments before she died…Regrettably, her story is not uncommon.”

In the United Nation's special meeting World's Women at the Center of Achieving the MDGs, Denmark's Minister of Health noted that women of the Democratic Republic of Congo have to ask their husbands before they can sign a contract or start a business. After citing this statistic, he asked, "Can you imagine?"

To be honest, I cannot imagine any of the previous scenarios. Yet, I know they are happening daily and consistently and have been for a very long time. On Sunday while racing Paris to Versailles, I began reciting statistics in my head about Congolese Women that I know by heart because right now they are who I run for.

“Congo presents one of the world's deadliest emergencies to date. More than 5.4 million people have died since 1998. Gang rape and brutal torture are a daily reality for the women and children of Congo. Women as old as 80 and as young as five have been victims of rape and other forms of sexual violence. 38,000 continue to die every month, 1200 a day. Half of these deaths are children under the age of 5 years.”

At moments I was not sure what to do with all the emotion.

One Man’s Admirable Effort of Support

Chris Jackson, a London lobbyist pictured here running the August 18th marathon in Congo for Run for Congo Women and Women for Women International, is well acquainted with the intensity of emotion and action Congo can provoke because he has devoted himself, utterly, to raising awareness about violence against Congolese women and children as part of his year-long endeavor to run 12 marathons for Run for Congo Women. Already successfully completing nine marathons, including an Ironman as well as an Olympic Triathlon along with a smattering of 10Ks, Chris is someone who is exceptional and sincere in his endeavor -- so much so he will actually be running 13 marathons just to make sure he completes one every month in 2010.

Chris can also voice what most of us can only imagine because he has run Congo. He went. He ran. He returned. And, now he shares why the Congo race was the hardest one so far for him.

BOOKS: Do It Anyway

Quick test: How would you describe yourself? What are the first three words that come to mind? Friend, Mother, Writer, Doctor, Caretaker...

What about "Activist"?

It's a loaded title, right? An identity that certainly comes with a lot of baggage. I can think of several angsty questions that run through my mind that make me hesitant to call myself an activist. "Am I really doing enough? Is what I'm doing important? What if I mess up? Or worse, what if all the work I do results in nothing?"

In Courtney Martin's new book, Do It Anyway, Martin (who, full disclosure, helped with the launch of Her Blueprint and is a friend of IMOW) profiles eight young people in the U.S. who she describes as "breathtakingly ordinary" and who are, despite setbacks, criticism, struggles, doing what they believe in to make a change in the world. She features everyone from Raul Diaz, a case manager who helps formerly imprisoned gang members in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles re-enter society, to the actress Rosario Dawson, who uses her celebrity status to call attention to movements such as Voto Latino, which encourages the Latino American population to get to the polls.

Martin acknowledges that, in the wake of the gamechanging activists of the 60s and 70s, this generation's activism can seem less passionate, less hands-on, perhaps less effective. But she says that's a misconception. Instead, this generation's activism "exists in defining moments--usually far from the glare of the television camera's eye or the flashing red light of the journalist's voice recorder." And indeed, the eight portraits in this book exhibit that the current activists are no less dedicated, no less passionate, and no less willing to sacrifice.

I see Do It Anyway as a call to arms for a new generation of activists, of people who want to make a difference in the world despite knowing how hard it can be, how maddeningly impossible it is to Completely Change Everything. And my favorite lesson in Do It Anyway is what's called "Good Failure." Martin says that after talking to the many young activists profiled in the book, she learned "that failure is, indeed, usually inevitable." Instead, she encourages the embracing of good failures:

"Good failures are what you achieve when you aim to transform an entire broken system and end up healing one broken soul. They are the small victories ... It's not that we shouldn't aim to transform the prison industrial complex, reduce wealth disparity in this country, cure HIV and AIDS, fix public education. It's that we must hold these large-scale revolutions in our hearts while tackling small, radical acts every day with our hands. We must wake up wondering how we might fail at changing absolutely everything in such a way that we manage to change a little something."

It's an inspiring message, a reminder to give yourself permission to put your all into it, perhaps fail, wake up again despite a record of setbacks and failures, put on the cloak of Activist, and do it anyway.

THEATER: Swimming Upstream

SWIMMING UPSTREAM from V-Day Until the Violence Stops on Vimeo.

In New York earlier this month, I had the opportunity to see Swimming Upstream, a vivid and moving play about women’s experiences post Katrina, written by sixteen New Orleans women. My experience at the theater that night was a powerful reminder of how the arts can touch us and bring experiences, ideas and emotions to life. Through the words and songs of the women of New Orleans I was able to begin to grasp the pain, frustration and sheer rage – and finally the optimism – of living through Katrina and the enormous impact on the women there, who truly knit the local community together.

Swimming Upstream was presented by V-Day, Ashé Cultural Arts Center and The Women Donors Network and directed by IMOW Global Council member Eve Ensler. The play is a testament to Eve’s passion for telling the story of Katrina through women’s eyes. The play not only provoked me to learn more about supporting women’s role in recovery post Katrina, but reminded me that unlocking an audience’s empathy and imagination is imperative in building not only awareness but whole social movements.

Learn more or buy tickets to Swimming Upstream [V-Day]

UN Women and MDGs: Moving Forward with Acknowledgment

Nicolas Sarkozy, President of the French Republic and the future president of the G20 and the G8 Summits, spoke at the UN Summit about focusing on Africa.

Part 3
MDGs Politically Revitalized By UN Summit?

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of UN Women and MDGs.
On Wednesday the high-level plenary session in Manhattan to assess the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) ended with elites heading back home to their respective countries having firmer knowledge of budgetary and country-specific concerns. Overall, the take away was acknowledgment: the MDGs are not tracking to success.

As reported earlier this week in UN Women and MDGs: UN Summit Assesses Progress, MDG No. 5 to reduce maternal deaths by 2015 is still seen as the most lagging, and UN leaders such as Secretary General Ban Ki-moon were openly acknowledging it as the most hindered goal of the eight proposed MDGs.

On September 22, BBC's UN Launches $40bn Woman and Child Health Plan reported that Ki-moon said, "Progress on women and children's healthcare has been slower than on some of the other goals discussed at the three-day summit," but Mr. Ban said the coming century "must be and will be different for every woman and every child."

"We know what works to save women's and children's lives, and we know that women and children are critical to all of the Millennium Development Goals," he said in a statement.

Yet Women's eNews Bachelet's U.N. Debut Brightens MDG Summit reports that budgets are still incredibly lacking for MDG No. 5, around $120 billion or so, in that "donors' answer to the United Nations' request for a $169 billion women and children's health plan fell predictably short at $40 billion, with about half of that committed at previous events."

Those events were the G8 Summit as well as private aid. One of the greatest hopes, according to
Women's eNews, however, is that "U.N. Women might be able to make up some of the shortfall in money to improve girls' education and women's health through an integrated approach. Supporters think this approach will work better than one that separates "women's" targets into the specialized areas of health and education."

Sarah Brown, Britain's First Lady, wrote in her Huffington Post article Sign Up to Play Your Part for Girls and Women about how in "the New York Times best seller Half the Sky, we learned that....Healthy, educated girls break the cycle of poverty. Healthy women work more productively and earn more for their families. Children whose mothers have been educated for at least five years are 40% more likely to live beyond the age of five."

Yet even with such solid statistics, even those who are experts in the landscape of female health and advocacy already voice how much work lies ahead. As Women's eNews reported, Under-Secretary General Bachelet shared her thoughts about upcoming actions in a press conference.

"I'm a very realistic person and I am completely aware of the challenges for UN Women," Bachelet told a Sept. 22 press briefing, speaking for the first time in her new role. "But on the other hand, UN Women was supported by an enormous number of member states and I will be calling on those political commitments to become a reality."

The hope is that all world leaders will rise to her call.

Photo credit: Christian Science Monitor

Can Sharia Law Benefit Women in the West?

Photo courtesy of Shirin Neshat

A recent article by Indiana attorney Rafia Zakaria in Guernica magazine begs the question of whether or not Islamic feminism is possible.

Zakaria takes us from her personal account of a childhood spent in Pakistan, to her experiences as a social worker helping battered women in Indianapolis, where the complexities faced by married women in the Muslim world seem without boundaries. Ironically, it was in Indianapolis that the author realized that an Islamic version of a prenuptial agreement could grant women more rights than one filed in America.

Representing a Jordanian woman whose husband divorced her by forging her signature then abandoning her in a motel room, Zakaria worked tirelessly to help the woman gain more rights than American law had allowed. In a harrowing tale fraught with many obstacles, Zakaria eventually managed to grant the woman a fair chance at financial stability in her chosen home country--by convincing the court to honor her Islamic pre-nup.

Zakaria's piece couldn't be more timely, as a handful of state legislatures are contemplating passing policies that would ban Sharia law from being practiced in the U.S. Whether or not Sharia law is in all actuality a threat to state and federal constitutions is also under debate. So far the squeakiest wheel in the "Sharia v U.S. law" debate has been Newt Gingrich, who received a standing ovation at a Values Voter Summit recently by demanding a national call to action regarding the issue.

The author's conclusion from her client's ordeal is that sometimes even traditional, faith-based laws can strengthen the U.S.'s more modern court systems. But is a breach in the separation of church and state even tenable to westerners, even if it does lift the oppression of women?

Zakaria writes, "...if things are to change, the recipe lies not in eliminating faith from the legal sphere but rather redefining it in a way that empowers women using the very tools that were used to enslave them."

I want to agree with this assessment, but is it really possible to take minute aspects of Sharia law and integrate them into the U.S. justice system in a way that is progressive and beneficial to all?

UN Women and MDGs: UN Summit Assesses Progress

Read Part 1, UN Women: A New Entity Paves a New Path.

Part 2
MDG No. 5: Where Change is Most Needed

Last week brought the news that Former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet would head UN Women with an unprecedented annual budget of 500 million dollars. Today marked the opening of the UN Summit of world leaders to assess the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Thus, politicians, ambassadors, and Ministers of Health converged on Manhattan's East Side to take on the issues that as of ten years ago were named of utmost importance to humanity's well-being.

On the eve of the summit and with five years left to meet the 2015 goals, yesterday the The New York Times published MDGs for Beginners...and Finishers from U2's known humanitarian Bono to perhaps infuse the notion that everyone would be watching from rock star to NGO. For review, the MDGs are the following:

1. End Poverty and Hunger
2. Universal Education
3. Gender Equality
4. Child Health
5. Maternal Health
6. Combat HIV/AIDS
7. Environmental Sustainability
8. Global Partnership

When the meetings opened this morning, I listened in from Paris via the UN's Live Webcast while at the same time in Times Square, Amnesty International's death clock began to count off the passing of a woman's life lost during childbirth, thereby marking that every 1.5 minutes a woman dies while giving birth.

According to Women's eNew's U.N. to Ask $169 Billion Maternal Health Question the biggest hurdle still exists for mothers. "Millennium Development Goal No. 5 -- to reduce the maternal mortality ratio by two-thirds in 2015 from 1990 global-average levels of 400 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births -- is lagging the most out of eight major initiatives on poverty, health and equality adopted by the UN."

Yet as country representatives delivered opening speeches their messages moved between realistic and uplifting to outright robust, but what continuously overrode was how profound each country's desire to meet the MDGs. Bolivia shared that sport is a guide to keeping children on the right path. Kenya pushed for sustainable business while Guatemala cited that it still remains the top four country in the world most affected by climate change. Jordan's representative shared that development depends on peace, partnership, and global opportunity while Spain spoke of solidarity.

In Huffington Post's Revitalizing the Political Will to Achieve the Millennium Goals, Former UN Secretary General from 1997 to 2006 Kofi Annan shared his thoughts on what could be the best outcomes for the meetings. "Revitalizing the political will to achieve the MDGs and scaling up proven interventions is the linchpin to success. As instigator and guardian of the MDGs, the UN has an important role to play in this process and the High Level Advocacy Group created by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is a welcome step in the right direction. The primary responsibility, however, rests with national leaders. Their challenge is to re-articulate a compelling case for global solidarity and equitable growth -- one that embraces but goes beyond aid. One that addresses the growing inequalities between male and female, rural and urban, rich and poor. One that does not measure development and progress purely in terms of GDP but also of the quality and sustainability of growth. The message must be that MDG achievement is not optional, but an essential investment in a fairer, safer and more prosperous world."

In a recent interview, women's rights advocate and AIDS-Free World Co-Director Paula Donovan shared her own thoughts on the MDG Goals, "The Millennium Development Goals are useful, in the way that any goals can be useful, but they are no more than a set of time-bound measurements that act as incentives, and keep us focused on humankind’s shared aspirations of a world free of poverty, hardship, structural inequality, ignorance, environmental degradation and preventable diseases, including HIV."

With two more days left of the summit to evaluate where the MDGs stand and how best to meet them, it seems understood so far that political will and shared unification are two elements that will prove essential.

Photo credit: Amnesty International

Read Part 3 of Kate Stence's UN Women and MDGs posts about the UN Summit.

CLIO TALKS BACK: Taking risks with Veuve Clicquot

Google images; Wikipedia; reproduction of a painting published in 1863

Madame Cliquot and her great-granddaughter Anne de Mortemart-Rochechouart, future Duchesse d'Uzes, painted by Leon Coignet

Here is the story of a audacious woman entrepreneur, who took over the business of her late husband and grew it into an extraordinary financial empire. Barbe-Nicole Clicquot-Ponsardin (1777-1866) offers a remarkable example of a business woman who made astute and often risky decisions in the early nineteenth century. She had taken over the family wine business after her husband’s death and had made experiments with production techniques, especially for removing sediment. She was not the type to let someone else run things, and worked closely with her agents and employees. And she took the business from an artisanal manufacture to an industrial level. “She was uniquely positioned to invent a new model,” claims her biographer historian Tilar J. Mazzeo.

The Napoleonic wars were not kind to businesses of any kind (except armaments) and least of all the wine business, which was, then as now, a luxury product. As Napoleon’s defeat loomed, followed by his abdication, Veuve Cliquot began to plot ways of sending a huge shipment of her prize 1811 vintage champagne to Russia by sea. She knew there would be a huge market for it there. Running the naval blockade without proper papers or any kind of official permission was a huge gamble, but she wanted to be first to arrive with the coveted French bubbly and to sell it for extravagant prices (which her agents succeeded in doing) in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) and then in St. Petersburg. Wealthy clients fell all over themselves to acquire this effervescent, strong, sweet wine. First she shipped and sold 10,500 bottles, then 12,780. None of her well-packed bottles broke on these extraordinary voyages, which required land as well as sea transport, nor did the champagne spoil enroute, despite the weather. “These two daring shipments,” records Mazzeo, “were to make her one of the most famous women in Europe and her wine one of the most highly prozed commodities of the nineteenth century.” (pp. 117-118). They also made her one of the richest women in Europe.

Other champagne producers also introduced brands labeled “Widow,” but as historian Kolleen Guy remarks, these were “fantasy widows” and not the real thing. Still, there was Veuve Laurent-Perrier and Veuve Pommery to contend with. Not to mention the other champagne producing firms: Moet, Chanton, Mumm, Roederer, and Heidsieck.

The enforcement of separate-spheres ideology in the post-revolutionary period made it more difficult for women to become entrepreneurs, but did not shut them down completely. Widows, who were no longer subject to male control in marriage, had a way of sneaking through.

The Veuve Clicquot had a great-granddaughter, Anne, to whom she wrote: “I am going to tell you a secret. . . . You more than anyone resemble me, you who have such audacity. It is a precious quality that has been very useful to me in the course of my long life . . . to dare things before others. . . . I am called today the Grand Lady of Champagne! Look around you, this chateau, these unfaltering hills, I can be bolder than you realize. The world is in perpetual motion and we must invent the things of tomorrow. One must go before others, be determined and exacting, and let your intelligence direct your life. Act with audacity. Perhaps you too will be famous. . . !!”

This great-granddaughter, heir to the immense fortune assembled by Veuve Clicquot, married a peer of France, and became the Duchesse d’Uzes. In 1888-89, a widow like her great-grandmother, she bankrolled the campaign (which was ultimately unsuccessful) to restore the Orleans monarchy, and then in the 1890s became an important supporter of the French feminist campaign to restore the property rights of wives.


Suggested further reading:

Kolleen M. Guy, “Drowning Her Sorrows: Widowhood and Entrepreneurship in the Champagne Industry,” Business and Economic History, 26:2 (Winter 1997), 505-514.

Kolleen M. Guy, When Champagne Became French: Wine and the Making of National Identity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).

Tilar J. Mazzeo, The Widow Clicquot: The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman Who Ruled It (New York: Harper Collins, 2008). The translation of Veuve Clicquot’s letter to her great-granddaughter is by Mazzeo, p. 181.

1000 WORDS: Mosuo Woman

From Lili Almog's series in Economica, "The Other Half of the Sky," which features working women in rural China. View the whole series >>

UN Women and MDGs: Toward Progress and Change?

Part 1
UN Women: A New Entity Paves a New Path

This week and next bring pivotal United Nations announcements and meetings. While the 600 page report on Rwanda’s possible act of genocide in the Democratic Republic of Congo stalled until October 1, reports are now focusing on the appointment of former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet to head UN Women, the United Nations' new agency for promoting women's equality. Also at the top of the UN’s agenda is the UN Summit, a high-level plenary meeting being held early next week in New York City to assess the progress of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG).

In July, the creation of UN Women hit major news sources. The BBC's piece, "UN to Set Up Agency Promoting Women's Rights," quoted the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moo as saying, "UN Women will significantly boost UN efforts to promote gender equality, expand opportunity and tackle discrimination around the globe."

Her Blueprint's "United Nations Creates a New Women's Rights Coalition" explained that the creation of UN Women came out of four years of intense negotiation and struggle, but was a major step toward change because it unifies four UN divisions into a single and more powerful entity to deal directly with women's issues. Paula Donovan, Co-Director of AIDS-Free World, an international advocacy organization committed to speaking up for people affected by AIDS, as well as advance the causes of social justice and promote the human rights of people, particularly women, recently asserted how important the new UN Women entity.



“This year, the international community finally came to the realization that it will never be possible to achieve peace and social justice — or any of the hundreds of targets within those broad goals — if we continue to work with and in the best interests of just half the human population. The establishment of a UN women’s agency is also global recognition that the subordination and exploitation of women are not just unethical: they are ubiquitous, destructive, tenacious, varied, complex and at this point, so commonplace as to be invisible. Therefore, we need experts who have studied gender, its history, causes and consequences, and its inescapable, prejudicial and overwhelmingly destructive involvement in every facet of our lives, from child care to macroeconomic policy formulation, from literacy and numeracy to nuclear disarmament, from cancer research to violence prevention, and from agricultural production to mining, transportation, language and the arts."

After the establishment of UN Women so began the search for its leader. Last week, the AP broke the story of the strongest candidate for the new agency with Official: Chile's Bachelet Frontrunner for UN Post. This week, on September 14, Michelle Bachelet, pictured here, was officially appointed as Under-Secretary-General (USG) of UN Women. As the former President of Chile (the country's first) and with an extensive background in health and public service, her appointment is perceived as a major triumph.

The GEAR Campaign is a network of over 300 women’s, human rights, and social justice groups around the world formed to gain UN Member States and UN Secretariat approval for creation of a larger more coherent coordinated UN agency to further gender equality. GEAR released the following statement yesterday. “Michelle Bachelet is a top notch choice and has long been one of GEAR’s dream candidates. An effective leader of great integrity, Bachelet has demonstrated strong commitment to women’s empowerment and the ability to shape gender equality policies in a variety of areas. She also has the stature to mobilize the resources crucial to make UN Women a success.”

However, even while the announcement of Bachelet as USG of UN Women is celebrated, the selection process itself is said to have continued embracing older UN protocols. AIDS-Free World's Paula Donovan her thoughts on Bachelet’s selection process and her appointment. In the positive, Donovan says, “We have an excellent, high-profile, progressive USG with the profile and experience to take on this significant role.”

But, Donovan also highlights the flawed system of choosing the highly-favored Bachelet as being made “in the same secretive, male-dominated, patronage-ridden, dangerously outmoded way that all senior appointments at the UN are made.”

Donovan further clarifies, “There will be rejoicing that in this instance, a dreadful process resulted in a great outcome, and deep concern that people not see a cause-and-effect relationship between the process and the outcome.”

None of this quells the obvious anticipation and wealth of opportunity due to finally having a strong, unified body lead on women’s issues at the UN. Yet one question on everyone’s mind is: Now that UN Women has been created, will it also be properly funded so as to ensure true change?

In a rousing statement, the GEAR Campaign shares their current hope for UN Women after the appointment of Michelle Bachelet. “This landmark decision comes at a critical juncture as the UN reforms its internal systems and has recently been seen as an exhausted and under-resourced international institution. UN Women can provide new vision and hope and will need to bridge governments and civil society as we progress into the 21st century and the GEAR Campaign will be there to support its leadership and maintain visibility throughout the transitional period and beyond.”

Monday, September 20 begins the UN Summit, a high-plenary meeting in New York City to assess the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Read Part 2 and Part 3 of Kate Stence's UN Women and MDGs.

Photo credit: Casa de America

Strength in Numbers: Mobilization, Awareness, and Health

Yesterday morning at the foot of the Eiffel Tower over 20,000 women converged ready to race in the 14th edition of La Parisienne to celebrate women's health and raise awareness for myriad causes. En route to the start line from Metro École Militaire, I thought about the passage of time. I looked to the gray misting skies of Paris and remembered that sunny day nine years ago when everything my fellow New Yorkers, Pennsylvanians, and Washington, DC residents knew, my country knew, and I knew about safety changed.

This weekend also marked the ninth anniversary of September 11, 2001, when the United States as a country and as individuals, including my sister and myself in Manhattan, experienced one day of terrorism in an act of war. One day. Nearly 3,000 victims. It took months to recover, years to fully heal. A week after the 9/11 attacks, I vividly remember my sister and me in Grand Central Station crying in front of a sign seeking two missing sisters. Out of thousands of posted missing persons signs, we cried for those sisters because enough days had passed we knew them probably gone, but also because we knew they could have been us.

 The Healers of 9/11, by Nicholas Kristof, shares the journey of Susan Retik since she lost her husband in the 9/11 attacks nine years ago along with Patti Quigley, another widow who was pregnant with her first child when her husband was also killed that day. Though devastated and suffering post-9/11, "they realized that there were more than half a million widows in Afghanistan — and then, with war, there would be even more. Ms. Retik and Ms. Quigley also saw that Afghan widows could be a stabilizing force in that country."

America has been at war in Afghanistan since October 2001, meaning Afghan women have been suffering the strife of war for almost a decade. Kristof explains that "at a time when the American government reacted to the horror of 9/11 mostly with missiles and bombs, detentions and waterboardings, Ms. Retik and Ms. Quigley turned to education and poverty-alleviation projects — in the very country that had incubated a plot that had pulverized their lives. The organization they started, Beyond the 11th, has now assisted more than 1,000 Afghan widows in starting tiny businesses."

BIG IDEAS: Economic Jargon

You're probably familiar with the metaphor of the economy as a machine--phrases like "jump-starting the economy" or "economic engine," or the idea that the economy is something that is currently broken and in need of repair. Feminist economist Nancy Folbre says that the words we use to describe the economy are more important than we might realize, and in this podcast on Economica, she suggests an alternative metaphor:

"The [new terminology] that I’ve suggested ... is the economy as a beating heart. There are mechanical replacements for hearts, so it’s not that they don’t have certain processes which can be a little bit reminiscent of the machine metaphor. But the heart is also much more organic. And key to the idea of a heart metaphor is circulation. That is you have to keep the resources moving around to keep the economy healthy. So you bring in ideas of health. You bring in ideas of circulating and keeping things moving ... the heart is also the location of care and responsibility, so you bring in that aspect as well. ...We need to look at the fact that what we want from an economy includes a lot of things that aren’t measured in GDP. We want an economy that also allows us to spend time with our children. And for children to have interaction with care and caregivers."

What do you think? What kind of metaphor would you suggest for the way the economy works, or should work?


Economic Jargon, Nancy Folbre [Economica: Women and the Global Economy]

CLIO TALKS BACK: Women as “Patrons” of the Arts

Book cover: portrait by Sir John Laverty. www.amazon.com

Alma de Bretteville Spreckels ("Big Alma")

Clio has just finished reading a biography of Alma de Bretteville Spreckels (1881-1968), a wealthy San Francisco widow and fervent Francophile who founded the magnificent museum of art and culture known as the California Palace of the Legion of Honor. This museum, which she built to honor American soldiers who had died in France in World War One, perches on a windswept hill high above the Pacific Ocean and is filled with artistic treasures such as sculptures by Rodin.

Alma’s longtime rivals, the de Young sisters, were likewise patrons of the arts. To honor their father, they founded the De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park, which has recently been rebuilt. Today these two distinguished museums partner in the fine arts museum network of the city of San Francisco.

“Big Alma” and the De Youngs are twentieth-century participants in a long chain of women of means who distinguished themselves as secular “patrons” of the arts. Not all of them founded entire museums, or built mansions or palaces to showcase their art, but most of them supported artists (mostly men), whether by acquiring their paintings, sculptures, and other artistic creations or securing their livelihoods by inviting the artists to live at their expense.

Centuries earlier, in the early Italian Renaissance, secular women patrons commissioned alterpieces, burial chapels, elegant furniture, and even tapestries and illuminated manuscripts. Yet for many centuries historians of art ignored these women patrons, even though many of the works they commissioned became famous. The best-known exception to this oversight was Isabella d’Este (1474-1539), called the “first lady of the Renaissance,” who presided over the court of Mantua with her husband Francesco Gonzaga and was painted by Titian.

In other city-states of Renaissance Italy, other aristocratic women also patronized the arts. Victoria Colonna, for example, commissioned Titian to produce a painting of Mary Magdalen. Queens and princesses in other realms also got into the act of commissioning works of art, while other women of wealth became collectors. They also commissioned architectural works, as had women religious who had long been patrons of architecture as well as the arts, primarily for Christian convents and churches.

In the mid-fifteenth century, one aspiring laywoman in Siena, the widow Caterina Piccolomini, commissioned and directed the construction of a palace, the Palazzo delle Papesse, which was conveniently paid for by her brother, Pope Pius II. According to A. Lawrence Jenkens, who has studied this case (see his article in Reiss & Wilkins), the records attest that Caterina seems to have controlled the whole project: “she bought the property, she employed Federighi and others to build her residence, and it was to her that the monies from the papal purse were disbursed.”

Sometimes these “women’s actions sustained the political and economic interests of their male relatives” (see Prologue to Reiss & Wilkins, p. 7), but in other cases (particularly as widows) they acted on their own interests and occasionally even against the expressed wishes of male kin, including their deceased husbands.

www.nwma.org Wikipedia

National Museum of Women in the Arts

Historians continue to dig out and publish the stories of these remarkable women, who lavished their resources on the promotion of the arts. Yet only rarely did they patronize or highlight the arts produced by their own sex. Such initiatives had to wait until the late twentieth century with the foundation by Wilhelmina Cole Holladay of the National Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., and the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum in New York. Would it then be appropriate to refer to Holladay and Sackler as “matrons” of the arts?

Since works of art are created by women as well as by men (and we now know that such has long been the case), and women are now bankrolling women’s art and fostering its display, surely we should no longer use the term “patronage” (derived from the Greek word for father, or pater) to describe women’s participation in promoting and underwriting the arts. What do you think?

Can you think of other examples of women patronizing the arts, especially women’s art, in other parts of the world? What suggestions do you have for women’s promotion of the arts of women today?

Further suggested reading:

Bernice Scharlach. Big Alma: San Francisco’s Alma Spreckels. San Francisco: Scottwall Associates, 1999.

Sheryl E. Reiss & David G. Wilkins. Beyond Isabella: Secular Women Patrons of Art in Renaissance Italy. Sixteenth Century Essays & Studies, Vol. LIV. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2001.

Cynthia Lawrence, ed. Women and Art in Early Modern Europe: Patrons, Collectors, and Connoisseurs. University Park: Pennsulvania State University Press, 1997.

Wilhelmina Cole Holladay. A Museum of Their Own: National Museum for Women in the Arts. New York: Abbeville Press Publishers, 2008.