Learn how each has used their women’s studies training professionally and in their personal lives.  We will provide ample time for questions and answers.

Panelists

Allison Attenello, Training Director, New York Peace Institute

Elizabeth Curtis, Learning and Development Specialist, Google

Ingrid Dahl, Director of Next Gen, Bay Area Video Collective

Read their Full Bios here

Details

Pre-registration is required, space is limited.

No fees for current NWSA members.  Not a current member? Join here.

Date:  May 17, 2012

Time:  4PM – 5:15 EST Time

Click here to pre-register.  Registrations will be accepted on a first come, first served basis for current members until we reach the attendance cap.

Space is limited; if you pre-register and your membership is current and there is still space, we will send you a confirmation email with the log in AND dial in information. If your membership is not current, you will not receive a confirmation email.

To participate you must have access to a computer with internet access as well as a phone. You will be provided with a dial in number to hear the panelists.

If you have any questions, please email Patti.provance@nwsa.org

Warmly,

Patti Provance

Deputy Director

The Secular Student Alliance at SJSU is holding it’s first public speaker event on May 12 @ 2:30pm at the SJSU Student Union in the Umunhum room. This event is free for all and all are welcome, so please spread the word. We hope to see you there.

-David Norman

Event Description:

Straight Journalist Ted Cox went undercover in Christian gay-to-straight therapy programs where he discovered a twisted underworld of electroshock therapy, exorcisms and “healing touch” weekend retreats. Ted Cox has been featured by a variety of media outlets including Fox News, NPR, and the Huffington Post.He will share his experiences with SJSU in an exciting live event supported by the National Secular Student Alliance.

Facebook Public Event Link:

https://www.facebook.com/events/304264672981310/

Secular Student Alliance at SJSU Facebook group:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/sjsu.secularstudents/?bookmark_t=group

8:30am – 7:00pm in Student Union

March 17th, 2012, the first ever South Bay Women’s Conference, “Herstory: Uniting to Sustain the Community” was held.  It was amazing.  First there was a speaker, followed by three workshop sessions, a panelist discussion, a resource fair, and live music.  During the workshop sessions participants chose which workshop they wanted to attend.   I went to the workshop “Sexing the Sentence” first.  As soon as I read the description it became my mission to make sure I had a seat in this workshop.  I had never been to a talk, lecture, workshop, class or anything else where the primary topic was grammar and sexuality, and I was excited.  Sexuality and grammar!  It did not disappoint.  There were two more workshop sessions.  For session two I went to a presentation on youths and abusive relationships.  My little brother and little sister are both only a few years away from the age range most likely to get caught up in an abusive relationship, and when they get there I want to be ready to support them in any way I can.  I also want to be ready for any other awkward dialogues, which is why I was especially happy to see Planned Parenthood at the resource fair.  Did you know chocolate flavored condoms actually smell like chocolate?  I did not.  There were also many other tables, including a rep from Knowledge Alliance, Emily Chan.  She was so supportive and excited about Library Studies.  I had no idea how many different jobs a librarian could have.  She even offered to give me a behind the scenes tour of the library!  I can’t wait!  During the resource fair we had a live band, April Chase.  They were so cool.  I love their music, and as people they were very nice.

Her exhibit, “Recollections: Art and the Archive of an Iranian American Journey”, was on display in MLK Library in March.  The opening reception and artist talk were fascinating.  This stunning collection reflects on journeys and experiences within the Iranian American Community.  Perception and media portrayal are examined through vague photographs taken from wanted posters while the unique influence of Iranian cultural heritage and American culture on domestic life is reflected in the real photographs combined with glass, mirrors and beautiful prints.   The photographs of families and their homes made me nostalgic.  Both the American culture and the Iranian culture combine in these photographs.  Beautiful traditional Iranian patterns next to what would have been popular American fashions.  It was like going through photo albums with my grandmother, who moved to America from Japan a little over fifty years ago.

A TRUE STORY EVERYONE SHOULD KNOW!

This is the story of our Mothers and Grandmothers who lived only 90 years ago.

Remember, it was not until 1920 that women were granted the right to go to the polls and vote.

The women were innocent and defenseless, but they were jailed nonetheless for picketing the White House, carrying signs asking for the vote.

And by the end of the night, they were barely alive. Forty prison guards wielding clubs and their warden’s blessing went on a rampage against the 33 women wrongly convicted of ‘obstructing sidewalk traffic.’

(Lucy Burns) They beat Lucy Burns, chained her hands to the cell bars above her head and left her hanging for the night, bleeding and gasping for air.

(Dora Lewis) They hurled Dora Lewis into a dark cell, smashed her head against an iron bed and knocked her out cold. Her cell mate, Alice Cosu, thought Lewis was dead and suffered a heart attack. Additional affidavits describe the guards grabbing, dragging, beating, choking, slamming, pinching, twisting and kicking the women.

Thus unfolded the ‘Night of Terror’ on Nov. 15, 1917, when the warden at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia ordered his guards to teach a lesson to the suffragists imprisoned there because they dared to picket Woodrow Wilson’s White House for the right to vote. For weeks, the women’s only water came from an open pail. Their food–all of it colorless slop–was infested with worms.

(Alice Paul) When one of the leaders, Alice Paul, embarked on a hunger strike, they tied her to a chair, forced a tube down her throat and poured liquid into her until she vomited. She was tortured like this for weeks until word was smuggled out to the press.

Mrs Pauline Adams in the prison garb she wore while serving a 60 day sentence. Last week, I went to a sparsely attended screening of HBO’s movie ‘Iron Jawed Angels.’ It is a graphic depiction of the battle these women waged so that I could pull the curtain at the polling booth and have my say. I am ashamed to say I needed the reminder.

Miss Edith Ainge, of Jamestown , New York All these years later, voter registration is still my passion. But the actual act of voting had become less personal for me, more rote. Frankly, voting often felt more like an obligation than a privilege. Sometimes it was inconvenient.

(Berthe Arnold, CSU graduate) My friend Wendy, who is my age and studied women’s history, saw the HBO movie, too. When she stopped by my desk to talk about it, she looked angry. She was–with herself. ‘One thought kept coming back to me as I watched that movie,’ she said. ‘What would those women think of the way I use, or don’t use, my right to vote? All of us take it for granted now, not just younger women, but those of us who did seek to learn.’ The right to vote, she said, had become valuable to her ‘all over again.’

HBO released the movie on video and DVD . I wish all history, social studies and government teachers would include the movie in their curriculum I want it shown on Bunco/Bingo night, too, and anywhere else women gather. I realize this isn’t our usual idea of socializing, but we are not voting in the numbers that we should be, and I think a little shock therapy is in order.

Conferring over ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution at National Woman’s Party headquarters, Jackson Place , Washington , D.C. Left to right: Mrs. Lawrence Lewis, Mrs. Abby Scott Baker, Anita Pollitzer, Alice Paul, Florence Boeckel, Mabel Vernon (standing, right))

It is jarring to watch Woodrow Wilson and his cronies try to persuade a psychiatrist to declare Alice Paul insane so that she could be permanently institutionalized. And it is inspiring to watch the doctor refuse. Alice Paul was strong, he said, and brave. That didn’t make her crazy.

The doctor admonished the men: ‘Courage in women is often mistaken for insanity.’

Please, if you are so inclined, pass this on to all the women you know. We need to get out and vote and use this right that was fought so hard for by these very courageous women. Whether you vote democratic, republican or independent party – remember to vote.

Helena Hill Weed, Norwalk , Conn. Serving 3 day sentence in D.C. prison for carrying banner, ‘Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.’ So, refresh MY memory. Some women won’t vote this year because – Why, exactly?

We have carpool duties? We have to get to work? Our vote doesn’t matter? It’s raining? I’m so busy…I’ve got so much on my plate!

Read again what these women went through for you! We can’t let all their suffering be for nothing.

-Sue Cancilla-Conde

This guest post from social policy researcher and (doubly) working mother Julie Martinez Ortega brings some new perspective to the issues:

April 12, 2012

Hilary Rosen’s legitimate questioning of Ann Romney’s ability to comment on the dilemmas of women and mothers in the paid workforce has been cynically reframed into an alleged attack on stay at home moms. And in this edition of the political “mommy wars,” as in all previous chapters, the economic reality governing most mother’s lives is ignored/rendered invisible. All over the country usually smart and savvy women are now scrambling to defend Ann Romney’s “choice” to be a stay at home mom. Even my beloved Michelle Obama has gotten in on the action.

I wish they would all cut it out and speak the truth. To argue that moms in 2012 America have a choice as to whether to work for pay is simply a silly but dangerous joke. The defenses offered for Ann Romney’s lifestyle only serve to perpetuate the myth that moms in the U.S. actually have such a choice about providing for their children’s material needs (AKA working). Let’s call Ann’s lifestyle what it truly is: A Luxury. Hilary Rosen shouldn’t apologize for speaking the truth, even if it offends some people. The reality is that not having to earn money because another adult is willing to cover your expenses is a LUXURY, not a choice. Most mothers who work for pay do all the work that Ann Romney did to raise her family, and yet have to meet the demands of a paying job on top of that work. The decision to work for pay when you do not have another adult who is willing to or capable of covering your expenses is not a choice either; it is SURVIVAL.

In a few hours, the woman who empties my office trash and recycling bins will come by as she does every work day. She’ll do this while her own children are literally thousands of miles away, on another continent. Every penny she can scrape together is sent to her children back home. In many ways, she makes the ultimate sacrifice that any mother could for her children: She forgoes the cuddles, prayers, and laughter of her very own flesh and blood so that they can have the material things necessary to survive and hopefully thrive. She’s a mom in America–does she really have a choice to work or not? On the other end of the spectrum is where I sit, a professional mom with an exciting and fulfilling job, earning a nice income. But, having come from a working class family, I still carry student loan debt with a monthly bill close to $1,000. How many women have a husband who can support her and their children by himself, and then pay her student loan debts on top of that? Is my working for pay a choice?

Who really does have a choice? What about debt-free women with high-income earning spouses? Is it really a choice for them to not work, even temporarily while their kids are still too young for school? After seeing how many husbands don’t end up sticking around, would you advise them to give up their jobs and any seniority they’ve earned, and bet their children’s well being on their husbands sticking around for the long haul?

A little history lesson/statement of what should be the obvious: Around the world, and even here in the U.S., most moms have always worked for pay. And this is especially true for moms of color. My own grandmother, Julia Ortega, worked in the canneries and farm fields of Northern California to earn money for the family. And she did so while raising 10 children! At other times, she literally “took in washing” from other families to make money. I’ve never understood how she and the older kids managed that when they already have 12 people’s washing to do. And, of course, African American women’s labor was literally stolen from them under the guise that not only their labor but their very bodies were owned by their masters. Labor history is replete with stories of European women working under horrific conditions in U.S. textile factories, oftentimes to pay off the debts they incurred to make the passage to the U.S. Only a tiny sector of women and moms ever had the luxury of not working for pay throughout U.S. history. And you can bet your bottom dollar that those American women in the canneries of California, the fields of the Midwest, the tobacco farms of the South, and the sweatshops of New York and Boston would have seen the opportunity to spend the day caring for their own children as a luxury. They and their modern day counterparts had no choice to make about whether to work for pay, a la Ann Romney.

And it’s time to stop the kvetching about how hard it is to be a mom and that therefore moms who don’t work for pay are excused from paid work. The disingenuous outrage about Ms. Rosen’s supposed de-valuing of the work done by stay at home moms actually devalues the double-shift work done by moms who work for pay on top of raising their families. We still do everything the non-pay-earning moms do, just in 40 fewer hours a week. For those of us in the upper income echelons, perhaps our living rooms aren’t as tidy, and our closets are a jumbled mess, but we still feed our children breakfast, outfit them in clean clothing, help with their homework, organize the play dates, plan the family vacations, find the missing shoes, change the sheets after a midnight “accident,” write the letters to grandma, put something on the table for dinner, and make sure that the bathtub doesn’t have mold growing in it. In other words, it’s pure poppycock for Ann Romney or Michelle Obama to assert that ALL moms work hard and then leave it at that, as if that’s the end of the story. Of course all moms work hard, it’s just that some of us work hard at two jobs, not just one.

I say all this as somebody who was raised by a stay at home mom who is about to celebrate 50 years of marriage to my father. My mom would be the first one to say how incredibly lucky she is that my dad provided the money to support her and their four kids while we were young, and then for decades after that. After all, what was the alternative for a Mexican American woman with an 8th grade education? Before marrying my father at the ripe age of 21, she worked at the Patio Foods factory in San Antonio, Texas, on an assembly line. She stood for 8 hours a day slopping spoonfuls of beans & rice onto the TV dinner trays they produced. She also claims that the plant manager used to be the warden of a prison. At least that’s how she and the workers explained how mean the boss was to them. Was it a choice for her to stay home with us four kids? Spend the day with her children using her own discretion about how to organize her time, or spend 8 hours on her feet on the assembly line under the watchful eye of the former prison warden? That’s a choice?

And what about the dads? Why are men supposed to figure out how to simultaneously work and parent their children but women are only expected to do just one of these jobs at a time? As someone who is very fortunate to have a husband who truly shares in the parenting and home care duties, it seems really insensitive to assert that a male parent should have to do all the juggling required of parents in our crazy society that stubbornly clings to outdated conventions (like three months of no school when parents have to magically patch together safe and affordable care for their school-aged children during the workday, or random days off from school that don’t coincide with work vacations) but female parents shouldn’t. When we start providing subsidies to all parents, male or female, so that they don’t have to work but their families’ financial needs will be taken care of, then perhaps we can say that Ann Romney had a “choice” to stay home with her kids. Until then, let’s just call it what it is: a Luxury.

Julie Martinez Ortega, JD., Ph.D. is the Vice President of Policy & Advocacy for PowerPAC.org and the President of PAC+. She is also a Principal with New Majority Solutions, a strategic research firm offering guidance on the new majority electorate, and a Principal and Partner with Project New America Latino, a national survey research group that specializes in helping clients gain a deeper understanding of the nation’s growing Latino population.

Dr. Martinez Ortega has worked on social policy issues of importance to minority populations for over two decades, applying her unique combination of quantitative research skills and legal analytics to her work.  See her blog here

The information on the summer teaching assistant internship has been posted to the Spartan career on line site.

College students can read about the Summer Math Acceleration Program (MAP) for incoming 7th grade students athttp://alearn.org/?programs/map-math-acceleration-program.html

They can apply for a summer intern position by completing the application located at http://alearn.org/?get-involved/summer-jobs.html

2)  During the summer, ALearn will bring ~1000 students grades 6-9 to tour San Jose State.   We will start preparing by meeting with MESA (Christina Ramos) who were very helpful last summer in organizing the tours, presentations.   Let me know if you have suggestions on graduate students and professors that can talk about the exciting programs underway at SJSU and be engaging with middle school audiences.

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______________________________ Manuel Salazar Assistant Director, ASPIRE Program San José State University