Thanks to my great friend and an activist who has always put her convictions into action, Rita Dickinson for this guest post. She wrote this moving personal essay after attending a WomenGirlsLadies intergenerational panel.

After attending the Feldt-Barbanell Women of the World Lecture at Arizona State University recently, I have questioned if I can honestly call myself a feminist.  I always thought of myself as one, but do I deserve to wear the badge?  The remarkable women on the panel had defining moments that justified them considering themselves feminists.  I don’t have one “aha” moment.  My sense of feminism is more organic.

My childhood was glorious.  I am a Boomer, but June Cleaver was only a fantasy character on television.  Conversely, I didn’t have militant women in my life either.  Women surrounding me were strong, independent, and smart.  Although our family is small, I had eight significant female relatives within reach:  my mother, my grandmothers, my great-grandmother, my aunt, two great aunts and a great-great aunt.

Most of the significant influences in my childhood were subtle, yet extremely fond memories.  I remember attending graduate classes with my mother, taking colored pencils and newsprint (we weren’t allowed to have coloring books – they would stifle creativity).  We spent a great deal of time outdoors; we went to the beach, and we camped every summer.  None of this is remarkable, except that my mother had survived polio when pregnant with my older brother, resulting in paralysis from the waist-down. 

One of my earliest memories is of serving cookies at Red Cross blood drives while my mother volunteered.  And I remember when I was about nine years old, a man at church said something about my mother being a paraplegic.  I assured him that she was a Christian.  I guess I had never heard the word.

I never felt my family was different from others until a few years ago

Guest post by regular contributor Lee Reid Taylor.

Barack Obama and the world woke up Friday morning to the unexpected news that the president had received the Nobel Peace Prize.  Women’s responses to the announcement ran the gamut: from accolades, to shock and even disbelief.  Some question whether the award is premature, while others believe it is a call for Obama to act on his political oratory of peace.   

Obama is the third sitting president, following Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, to receive the honor. The first recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize was a woman, Bertha von Suttner, in 1901. Female recipients of the Peace Prize include: Jane Addams, Ayn San Suu Kii, Betty Williams, and Wangari Maathai (just to name a few).  Of the ninety-six Nobel Peace Prizes awarded, only nineteen were given to women.  The fact that Obama is now a recipient leads some to ask, “Why him, and why now?”

Women have different interpretations of why this award was given and what impact it will have on the president’s policies.

Last week there was a huge discussion about women and happiness that I thought missed the mark in two ways. First it misinterpred the data in so as to reinforce the preferred myth that equality makes women unhappy, and second it assumes happiness is  about seeking it for it own sake. So here's my take on the matter. What makes you happy? Inquiring minds (mine at least) want to know.

Please tell me below or/and on Truthout.

When my son David was a gangly 14-year-old with a class assignment to research his ancestral roots, we drove 360 flat miles from Odessa, Texas, to Dallas to visit my grandmother. After she’d hugged and pinched us to determine if we’d been eating properly, David pulled out his scribbled questions. “Bubba,” he asked, “What did you do for fun when you were a teenager?”

“Fun?” She looked perplexed.

I’m sure Grandmother found ways to have fun in her youth, as most kids do. But fun is culturally defined. And growing up in Russia during World War I, with far fewer choices than today’s teens

I went to a physical therapist about the neck pain I’d been experiencing. So a few days ago, I was distracting myself by watching Dylan Ratigan’s “Morning Meeting” on MSNBC while I practiced the boring exercise regimen Melissa, my therapist, prescribed. Ten reps three times for each exercise holding light hand weights as I hang over the bed.

The segment led with a rhetorical question about whether this could be the breakthrough time for women. La la. Heard that one before.

Dylan reported the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit was going on out in California. That’s a yawn—I went to the Fortune Summit five years ago. And that was supposed to be the time for women. Though I didn’t remember it making a media splash like this before.

Oh, I see. Mika Brzezinski was there—well of course MSNBC would want to highlight that. And Joe

This post is generously shared by its author,former New York Times reporter (she was their first female sports reporter) Robin Herman, originally published Sept. 12 on her blog girlinthelockerroom. Robin was also in the first class of women at Princeton University.

Forty years ago this September, on the first weekend after Labor Day, a group of just over 170 young women set foot on the Princeton campus as bona fide members of the University’s 3,400-strong student body. Their steps onto the ivied campus and into the old stone classrooms constituted an historic milestone for the more than 200-year-old Princeton, but it was also recognized as a symbolic act for a nation that was grappling with issues of equity in civil rights and women’s rights. For until that fall of 1969, young women, no matter their intelligence and potential, were still excluded from some of the greatest centers of learning in the United States -- Princeton, Yale and Dartmouth -- while several others of the Ivy League colleges maintained a technical distance from women by admitting them only through "sister schools".

Although Yale University also went coed that same fall, it was Princeton that attracted television cameras, hi

I am delighted to welcome a very powered young woman, Lee Taylor, as a regular guest poster.  Lee is a writer and feminist activist who is a senior at SUNY Purchase College majoring in History and minoring in Women's Studies. She is currently working on her senior thesis about Helen Rogers Reid, her great-grandmother, and former President of the New York Herald Tribune. After she graduates she plans on teaching high school. I'm especially thrilled that her first post here is a profile of my friend, the remarkable Helen Zia.

    Helen Zia was born into a Chinese American family in New Jersey in 1952.  Although the fifties was a time Lee Taylor and Helen Ziaof great conformity, the seeds of revolution were sown the day that Zia was born.   Zia was brought into an immigrant family which observed traditional Confucian beliefs, including the Three Obediences: a daughter must obey her father, a wife must obey her husband, and a widow must obey her son; the trajectory of Zia's life proves that she was truly a radical visionary and community organizer who broke seemingly insurmountable social and cultural barriers.

    Helen Zia graduated from Princeton University in the first class that accepted women.  She was also breaking racial boundaries as one of the few female, Asian American members of the prestigious university.  Zia attended Princeton on a full

• For the first time ever, two of the three nightly major network newscasts will be anchored by women. ABC Nightly News has announced that Diane Sawyer, who has anchored "Good Morning America" for years, will take over for the retiring Charles Gibson. Said Women's Media Center president Carol Jenkins of the news:

The Women’s Media Center considers the appointment of Diane Sawyer as anchor of ABC’s World News a watershed moment in the presence of women in media...Sawyer joins Katie Couric at CBS News in delivering crucially important information to our country.—and determining what that is. Sawyer’s expertise and professionalism are without question. We look forward to her debut in January, and to the changes in the perception of women’s capabilities her reign will bring...Here at WMC we always say that women are 51% of the population—and that we should not be afraid to ask for 51% of the jobs in media. At this point women hold only 3% of the “clout” positions in media. Anchoring a network evening news program certainly adds to the power quotient. We’re on our way.

• Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley didn't wait to be asked to run, as many women have been prone to do in the past and get left in the dust as a result--she was today the first to throw her hat in the ring for the senate seat left open by the death of Sen. Ted Kennedy last week. You go, girl!
• And third, I picked up a copy of "Mental_Floss" magazine at the grocery store today. When I thumbed through it to read the cover article, "The Five Gutsiest World Leaders", I found that two of the five they selected are women: German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Chile's president Michelle Bachelet. And my personal fave Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, president of Liberia, is listed among the five more you should know. Though women aren't the majority of these picks, the fact that there are so few women heads of state and yet three of them made this top ten list delivers the message once again that this is an amazing moment for women because what the world needs today is represented in the qualities women bring to leadership. (And do check out Mental_Floss-it's quite a fun zine and website.)

To commemorate Women's Equality Day, which is the anniversary of the Nineteenth Alice Paul, author of the Equal Rights Amendment which has yet to pass, toasting the passage of the Women's Suffrage AmendmentAmendment, August 26

This is an amazing story of vision, courage, and perserverance. It is also a tale that demonstrates the complexity of achieving a political goal only to lose much of its purpose. The suffragist leaders were split between those who felt that getting the right to vote was the end goal, and others, like Alice Paul, who believed getting the vote was necessary but only the beginning of a much larger agenda. Paul went on to write the Equal Rights Amendment in 1923. It has not passed--yet: this year it was reintroduced again, amidst debates about renaming it the Women's Equality Amendment or the Constitutional Equality Amendment.

I'm with the Alice Paul wing of the women's movement. I believe a movement has to move. We always need to be advancing an affirmative policy agenda. But for today, let's celebrate how far we've come and remember Paul's inspiring words:

So live as not to be scarred with the shame of

A cowardly and trivial past

So live that dying she can say:

All my life and all my strength

Was given to the finest cause in the world

The liberation of womankind.

http://www.GloriaFeldt.com/powered-women-blog

There are so many great websites for and about powered women and the issues important to us. I decided to start this regular feature as a way to honor them, but more importantly to share them with my readers, tweeps, and Facebook friends and fans. I hope you'll find some new website resources and interesting blogs here. And please let me know if you have websites to suggest.

Women for Parity isn't a new discovery for me though; it's been on my blogroll for a long time. Its founders include Bella's former NY office chief Martha Baker, filmmaker/activist Lilly Rivlin, web design expert Beva Eastman, and Carole Losee founder of the Elizabeth Seeger school.

They posted some good news recently that I want to share with you. Their Women for Parity Blog looked at the percentage of women in various political leadership roles. While the news overall isn't so great--17% of Congress for example--there's a big bright spot in state level chief justices:

In the course of tracking down information about Georgia’s Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears, I came across a list of the names of all the chief justices in all the states and territories. As I glanced down the list, I was astonished to find so many women’s first names in a setting that I would have expected to be an all-white male club. When I checked further and counted them out, I found to my delight that 18 of the 50 states had female chief justices--36%--and while women have not yet achieved complete parity, we are on our way in an unlikely place.

(Recently, NYS’s Chief Justice Judith Kaye has retired under NYS’s mandatory retirement rule of 70 years. Gov. Paterson has chosen her replacement, Jonathan Lippman, --not yet confirmed--after a brief struggle with the state’s nominating commission, arguing that the all-male list he was given to choose from which did not contain any women or minority names was not representative of the legal talent of the state!)

One reason for the achievement of so many women to high judicial office has been that more and more women have chosen to attend law school after their college graduation. The figures are quite astonishing, indicating that today 40% to 52% of law school classes are female.

There's lots of good news for women these days, in my humble opinion. This is a Moment unlike any we have ever seen. More on that in future posts. Today, check out Women for Parity, and let me know what other sites you'd like to see recognized as Website of the Week.

http://www.GloriaFeldt.com/powered-women-blog