In putting their health and the health of their newborns first, too many mothers are likely loading up on debt just to get by. And those choices can follow them for the rest of their lives.

By Bryce Covert of The Nation –

When it comes to taking time off for a new baby, the best-laid plans often go awry. Sonya Underwood had worked at a hospital in Atlanta, Georgia, for eleven years before getting pregnant with her third son. As a single mother, she prepared to cover the income she would lose during her unpaid leave, hoarding paid time off and taking out disability insurance. And then real life intervened. Doctors told Underwood that she had an incompetent cervix and put her on bed rest three weeks ahead of schedule. Then her son arrived at twenty-six weeks. The twelve weeks of leave she is guaranteed by the Family and Medical Leave Act soon ran out, as did the insurance, even though her son remained in the NICU. “I didn’t have any money left,” Underwood said. So she went back to work and visited him at the hospital every day.

But once her son came home, Underwood’s situation quickly became untenable. Daycare centers wouldn’t take a medically fragile baby. Her human resources department informed her that her only choice was more unpaid leave. “It didn’t help out my situation because I still had rent due, my car note due, utilities, everything else,” she said. After she exhausted that leave, she was let go from her job, lost her car and couldn’t qualify for unemployment insurance because of her role as her son’s caretaker. The only places left to turn were Temporary Assistance to Needy Families and a loan she already knew would be difficult to pay back. “I’m a victim of FMLA because it didn’t help my family,” she concluded.

Many new mothers in this country are like Underwood: working women who give birth without guaranteed time to recuperate and care for their babies. Those who take unpaid leave often resort to drastic measures, such as going deep into debt, to make ends meet. Only three federal laws have ever been passed that offer protections for workers with new children. The best known is the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), which requires that employers of a certain size allow new parents up to twelve weeks of unpaid leave. No federal law requires employers to provide paid leave to new parents, and eighteen states offer nothing beyond the FMLA. Unsurprisingly, the Census Bureau has found that over 40 percent of new mothers take unpaid leave.

But many workers aren’t even guaranteed that. Less than half of the country’s private-sector workers are covered by FMLA, which may explain why over a quarter of all workers—in situations similar to Underwood’s—either quit or are let go of their jobs when they need to take leave.

More on The Nation

In a way, the controversies surrounding Ashley Judd’s puffy face has done immense good. Not only have our media exposed themselves as sexist scavengers that perpetuate fascist beauty standards in evaluating women’s worth in our society, but this so-called news update has allowed for an emergence of a much needed dialogue on a much undermined feminist issue. And who better than Ashley Judd herself to confront the pernicious impacts of yellow journalism that comprise mass media selling points today?

Judd raises several critical questions that inform such innocent curiosities of bystanders on puffy faces. Such insulated have we become within ourselves against attacks on our collective human intelligence that we have ended up evaluating each other based on how we measure up against a strict yardstick of beauty that generates advertising money. Such depraved are we today as never before in terms of recognizing our unique selves that we crave to adulate a physical form that requires validation from outside before it can appeal to our inner selves.

Through her powerful, evocative and emancipatory writing in true feministic traditions, Ashley Judd also reminds us of our vulnerabilities of constantly being judged while we accept the assaults silently. If it requires courage, conviction and a public platform for a celebrity of her stature to register a protest, how ridiculously difficult it must be for young children and teenagers today who are constantly subjected to reminders of their less than ideal body image?

Judd compels us to interrogate our shoddy privileges when we denigrate the less ideal bodies and how it becomes more pathetic as women are asked to “better watch out” in fear of the philandering husband. She forces us to reexamine traditional components of patriarchal setups that conveniently blame the men exclusively and she reminds how grim the situation really is today when most women are falling for the sexist spells. That, she was first criticized by women for her looks is no mere coincidence. In fact, like gullible and willful agents of patriarchy – a system mirrored after dominant male perspectives – women unquestioningly look upto and emulate the male priorities and adapt to them as their own. Especially in the entertainment industry, where the male producers amass the wealth, it is the female performers that feel emancipated through approved looks. Ashley Judd minces no words, makes her personal political, and reflects upon her career of approvals that has received significant jolts along the way whenever she has failed to satisfy the conditions fulfilling beauty criterion.

She writes, “this abnormal obsession with women’s faces and bodies has become so normal that we (I include myself at times—I absolutely fall for it still) have internalized patriarchy almost seamlessly. We are unable at times to identify ourselves as our own denigrating abusers, or as abusing other girls and women…..In fact, it’s about boys and men, too, who are equally objectified and ridiculed, according to heteronormative definitions of masculinity that deny the full and dynamic range of their personhood.”

Entire article can be found on The Daily Beast.

by Katie Matlack

Women are the more active gender on online social networks, and are the healthcare decisionmakers in most families, too. Taken together, these two facts help explain why women–moms in particular–often are responsible for using the web to bring powerful stories from the grassroots level to the world, effecting real change in healthcare.

To learn more about the topic I spoke with Deb Levine, a pioneer when it comes to using the web as a tool for social change related to health information access and technology. She founded the award-winning online sexual health Q&A site Go Ask Alice, and recently won an award from the White House for her team’s design of an app used to help prevent dating violence at colleges and universities. Levine, a mother of two, observed that being a mom “informs all of [her] work and writing” and is “an overarching influence” on her.

“Women who are mothers are writing about sensitive issues,” she continued. “[They] are the people who, in bringing health issues to the forefront, are pushing healthcare reform and access while also bringing attention to important issues like maternal mortality.”

Below, I’ll discuss six moms doing important work to improve healthcare and the tools available in health for the wellness of themselves and their families–and ultimately, of all of us.

Deb Levine – Trustworthy health information access for young adults

Levine built what’s known by many as the first major health Q&A site, Go Ask Alice; it was also named by Stanford University as the most accurate reproductive health info site on the Internet. The site’s success–it receives over 1.5 million hits per month–illustrates what Levine’s work showed us: that “topics considered to be shameful and embarrassing like sex are best discussed behind a screen–computer screen then, mobile phone and PDA today.” Today Levine directs a nonprofit, Internet Sexuality Information Services, and is organizing next month’s conference, Sex::Tech, on new media, youth, and sexual health.

Elita Kalma – Spreading information about benefits of breastfeeding to women of color

With the birth of her first child, Kalma wisely started her helpful, delightful and assertive blog Blactating after discovering that few voices online advocating for breastfeeding were from women of color. She tells her own experience about breastfeeding, thus acting as a critical role model among women of color debating nursing. The Surgeon General reports that breastfeeding rates are about half as great among black at birth as compared to white children, with negative health repercussions since breastfeeding can counter child obesity as well as a range of other health issues, so here Kalma’s advocacy can act to spur online conversation, dispel misinformation, and raise awareness to help benefit readers and readers who are women of color in particular.

Jodi Jacobson – Advocacy for public health and reproductive and sexual health & justice

Visit RH Reality Check (RH stands for reproductive health) to get an idea of Jacobson’s impact. She’s the Editor-in-Chief there and writes regularly about news events that stand to impact reproductive health rights. For example, Jacobson was partially responsible for publicizing and drumming up outcry against the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s policy change in February that, were it not reversed, would have denied preventative health services to thousands of women. In addition to providing information directly to the masses on this site, Jacobsen frequently weighs in as an expert cited in mainstream publications including the Lancet and The Economist. She also founded and led the Center for Health and Gender Equity, an internationally-influential organization that produces cutting-edge research on international policies and programs.

Robin Strongin – Elimination of “gatekeepers” to drive disruptive change in the health sphere

The name of the blog Strongin created sums it up: Disruptive Women in Health Care. The blog’s been around since 2008 and serves as a platform for “provocative ideas, thoughts, and solutions in health.” Strongin realized that the health sphere needed input and direction from some outsiders in order to advance the pace of change. Today bloggers post on her site about underreported issues such as the surprising shortage of primary care physicians or the need for better incentives for mobile health in the U.S. Thus, the blog serves to amplify the voices of its contributors through its coverage in mainstream media outlets such as CBS.

Penelope Trunk – Creation of dialogue around miscarriage and working women’s health issues

Trunk writes a popular blog about “the intersection between work and life” and regularly posts Tweets shared on her site as well. When she inadvertently created an uproar by tweeting about her own miscarriage, however, her influence on society’s acceptance and understanding of health issues was made clear, too. Major outlets such as ABC, CNN and AOL covered the reactions to the tweet, serving to shed light on the misplaced shame that sometimes complicates understanding and support of health issues.

Mary Brune – Connecting moms to information about toxic environmental risks

Brune’s work highlights important information that impacts infant health as well as environmental health conditions that touch us all. Her site, MOMS–which stands for “Making Our Milk Safe”–was founded to bring mothers together to collaborate for a healthier and safer environment for their children. It publicizes risks and protection measures on toxics, and has been featured in a PBS special on toxic toys.

(Katie Matlack writes about health IT topics ranging from medical billing software reviews to social media for doctors and health advocates, to electronic health record adoption, as a blogger for Software Advice, an Austin-based startup.)

By Saswat Pattanayak

International Women’s Day is possibly the most progressive annual observation in human history. It is a celebration that is deeply rooted in women’s rights movement, as the foremost catalyst in diversifying Marxist applications, as the primary precursor to the greatest peoples’ revolution of 1917, and as the epic reminder of the most visible inequality in our world today.

More importantly, International Women’s Day (IWD) also marks the first organized anti-war movement in recorded history.

IWD started as the culmination of Russian women’s pacifist stance against the First World War. The very first peace movement led by (Russian) women in 1913 began to make impacts on this important day and spread to several European countries. Subsequently, the four-day women’s strike against the Czar’s militarism and demand for “Bread and Peace” resulted in abdication of the Czar, and the provisional government granting women the right to vote for the first time. And this historic occasion, the last Sunday of February 1917 in Russia (March 8 on Gregorian Calendar) has since been celebrated as the International Women’s Day.

Owing to Soviet Union’s contributions to women’s movements and progressive workers movements world over, March 8 was observed first by several communist countries and subsequently by most of the world. Due to resistance towards the communist bloc, and also owing to disenfranchised women in the western society, March 8 has never really been adopted with enthusiasm in much of the capitalist world, but ignoring such a milestone has never been really possible.

Tremendous pressure on United Nations to recognize such a special day exclusively to celebrate working women of the world finally resulted in the day being thus designated, only in 1975. March 8 used to be observed as the national holiday of only the erstwhile Soviet Union. Today, IWD is an official holiday in Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, China (for women only), Cuba, Georgia, Guinea-Bissau, Eritrea, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Madagascar (for women only), Moldova, Mongolia, Montenegro, Nepal (for women only), Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uganda, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Vietnam and Zambia.

Predictably enough, most countries even today which enthusiastically observe IWD are either communist nations or formerly were members of the communist bloc. However in the western world, feminists have also joined voices with their comrades abroad to formulate IWD’s agendas. On International Women’s Day in 1970, the Berkeley Women’s Liberation Front circulated a pamphlet “Vietnamese Women: Three Portraits” to stand in solidarity with the communist women of Vietnam. The pamphlet asked “What does the Vietnamese war have to do with women’s liberation?” It is an important question considering many western white feminists were either being rejected as racists or irrelevant by women of color in the United States. In the true spirit of an International Women’s Day as envisaged by revolutionary feminists associated with Bolshevik Revolution, the Berkeley front replied:

“Everything! Women in the movement here are talking about the essential right of people to live full and meaningful lives, demanding an end to the way women, throughout history, have been objectified and dehumanized. How then can we not recognize these same claims that are being made not only by the oppressed in our own country, but by those who are oppressed by this country abroad?”

Ruth Rosen in “The World Split Open” mentions that although IWD used to be celebrated only in the communist countries, on International Women’s Day in 1969, about fifty women marched through Berkeley. On March 8, 1970, thirty other towns and cities of America celebrated the day. By the end of the seventies, nearly all schools and cities in the United States commemorated it.

Philip Foner in “Women and the American Labor Movement” describes how the lesser known history of this communist celebration is, in fact, deeply rooted in the labor movement of the United States as well. This is possibly the biggest coincidence that could have cemented the friendship between working peoples of the USA and the USSR, had the western history textbooks and institutional censorships not prevented generations of people from realizing the common causes between women world over. If March 8, 1917 was the day when Russian women started their revolution to acquire right to vote, it was a historic coincidence that on March 8, 1908, women workers in the needle trades had led a massive demonstration in New York demanding democratic unionism. 15,000 women marched through New York City to demand for shorter hours, better pay and voting rights. Such was their impact that, only two years later, on March 8, 2010, German communist Clara Zetkin moved a resolution to honor these American working women and demanded that March 8 be dedicated to fighting for equal rights for all women in all countries.

Coalitions of Labor Union Women in America also found resonance on March 8. In 1975, more than a hundred women unionists from over 55 international AFL-CIO unions, the UAW, and the Teamsters’ Union urged CLUW chapters to participate in observances on March 8, aimed at combating unemployment and to deal with “faltering economy”. Inspired by socialist experiments abroad, women unionists demanded “jobs for all” on this day.

International Women’s Day is losing its relevance due to the anticommunist culture that refuses to acknowledge the role, class conscious women have historically played. On the contrary, with the gradual demise of labor movements in this country, and with growing capitalistic takeover in much of the remaining socialist societies, women are increasingly being silenced via mass media coverages and their demands for unique rights remain at the mercy of handfuls of powerful legislators.

This is a day that is not only historically relevant to understand how March 8 could have very well united women from America and Soviet Union in common cause, but it is also a magnificent reminder of what lies ahead :: the pressing need to recognize unique civil and human rights of women. It is not just a day to celebrate women, but more importantly, a day to recognize tremendous struggles and resistance registered thus far by women’s movements worldwide.

A group of moms have brought city’s attention to the manner in which Facebook confirms to the otherwise sexist norms in our society when it comes to breastfeeding rights.

Although the protests took place at Facebook office lobby at 335, Madison Avenue, Facebook officials did not feel it necessary to address the gathering, or more importantly, the issue. Emma Kwasnica, the woman who launched this global movement against Facebook believes that the employees of this powerful corporation are “running rougue” and deleting images owing to their personal sensitivity. However the reality is, by turning indifferent to her protests, Facebook has been consistently adhering to the patriarchal standards. And there lies the greater crisis.

The online moral czars have flexibilities otherwise deemed illegal. For instance, in public, a women in New York has the right to breastfeed her baby in any public or private place where she has a right to be. This includes stores, day care centers, doctors’ offices, restaurants, parks, movie theaters and many other places. No one can tell her to leave any of these places because she is breastfeeding, and no one can tell her to breastfeed in a bathroom, a basement or a private room. Likewise, at work, the employer cannot discriminate against a woman for choosing to breastfeed her baby or for pumping milk at work.

Facebook and other social media which self-regulate for the most part, need to be not just politically correct, but more importantly, socially responsible by following women’s rights laws. Or stricter regulations need to be in place for private corporations, irrespective of whether they claim to be freedom loving virtual/social media networks.

Following news reporting by Cassandra Garrison for Metro details the protest, and its impact –

An international movement landed in NYC this morning as a small group of women carried their young children inside the building that houses Facebook’s NYC office, demanding that the social networking giant leave their breastfeeding photos alone.
The “nurse-in” was planned after Vancouver mom Emma Kwasnica launched an online campaign, calling on Facebook to stop deleting images of mothers nursing their children. Kwasnica said Facebook removed her photos numerous times, despite the company’s claim that it does not delete images unless they show an exposed breast that is not being used for feeding.
The group of moms who attended the NYC “nurse-in” insist that even though the photos are acceptable by Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, they are continually removed. They met in the lobby of 335 Madison Avenue, the building where Facebook operates on two floors. The small contingent was first asked to leave but later returned to the lobby where security allowed them to stay. The moms nursed their children and chanted lines like, “Facebook, Facebook, don’t be mean — breastfeeding is not obscene.”
“People view breasts as this sexual thing,” said Wendy Ledesma, an Astoria mom who has a 17-month-old son. “We need to get over that as a society and realize that breastfeeding is normal, natural, beautiful and important.”
No one from Facebook came downstairs to address the moms, but a spokesperson blamed the deleted photos on human error. Each photo that gets flagged as offensive is reviewed by an employee who then decides whether the photo will be deleted and the user’s account frozen.

Women’s Media Center’s exclusive:

The author, professor emerita of Penn State University, describes the culture that produced the recent scandal—and suggests a path to a needed focus on the victims of such abuse.

This book and its empathetic engagement will be a treasure to anyone working with victims of sexual abuse. And if we want to truly understand the failure in the Penn State scandal, we will look closely to its victims.

I was once summoned to my dean’s office to justify comments I made in a radio interview upon publication of my book Prostitution of Sexuality (1995). I had said that one in ten women in the United States is raped, and that figure—which has since doubled—was an undercount because only 10 percent of rapes are reported. The interview angered a Penn State alumni, who demanded that the university president take action against me. In all seriousness, the president forwarded the complaint to my dean, who expected me to explain myself. My answer didn’t satisfy apparently so I was called in once again. This time I told the administration that the call was likely coming from a sexual predator, and I walked out of the dean’s office.
Penn State caters to an alumni whose donations are a major source of income, and whose presence is a major segment of the crowd that fills the 100,000-plus capacity football stadium every home game. In such an atmosphere, coach Joe Paterno, as the lead draw for alumni contributions, was beyond question. So, for a time, was Rene Portland, the Penn State women’s basketball coach whose explicit “No Lesbians” team policy and attendant sexual harassment wreaked havoc on many young women’s lives and college careers. When Penn State, under pressure from feminist and lesbian/gay rights groups, mandated sexual harassment training for all coaches in the 1990s, Paterno and Portland, with the arrogance of the untouchable, showed up for only the last 15 minutes of the program.

More:

At Women’s Rights NY, we have awarded our Annual “Women of the Year” recognition to the following four exemplary feminists –

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the 24th and current President of Liberia won a decisive victory in the reelection of 2011. She has the distinction of being the first and currently the only elected female head of state in Africa.

She received the African Gender Award in 2011, and was the co-recipient of Nobel Peace Prize in 2011 for her “non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work.”

Ellen Sirleaf has in the past represented Organization of African Unity (OAU), the Pan-African anticolonial agency that supported, trained and provided weapons and military bases to colonized nations fighting for independence. It was thanks to OAU that South Africa during Apartheid was expelled from World Health Organization.

When Sirleaf was elected in 2005, she had promised to rule just one term, but she decided to contest again last year and continues to rule Liberia as its most illustrious of presidents. As the president, she has had enormous success in fronts of national debt relief. She has criticized international military interventions in Libya, and has led historical investigations into national civil conflicts in Liberia with an intent to identify the people associated with former warring factions.

However, not everything is rosy with Sirleaf’s growth and progress. She has been viewed as pro-western in many instances. Her opponents claim that the Nobel Prize was awarded to her a couple of months before the election so as to ensure her re-election. Her first foreign visit was meant to restore friendship with Côte d’Ivoire, a traditionally pro-capitalist member of the former OAU. Under pressure, she also agreed to withdraw her stance regarding Libya and joined the chorus in calling for Gaddafi’s head.

Notwithstanding controversies, being an African woman leader, she has been acknowledged by Newsweek magazine as one of the top ten best leaders of the world. Time magazine paid her tribute as one of the top ten female leaders.

Lidia Gueiler Tejada

Lidia Gueiler Tejada

Lidia Gueiler Tejada died on May 9, 2011. She was Bolivia’s first female president and only the second female president in the entire western hemisphere (if at all Argentina’s Isabel Pero’s widow-card is accounted for).

Unlike any other female political leader in the Americas, Lidia Gueiler was fiercely revolutionary in her politics. She joined the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (MNR) in 1948, the most important political party in the 20th Century Bolivia.

Lidia Gueiler’s contributions to feminist causes in Latin America are unparalleled. Three years after she joined the Revolutionary Left Movement, she became the most formidable social rights activist in Latin America when she led 26 women on an eight-day hunger strike to win the release of their sons and husbands, who were being held as communist political prisoners.

After the MNR was toppled from power in 1964, Gueiler spent many years in exile. She was elected president of the lower legislature in Bolivia upon her return. After a series of military interventions and nationwide labor strikes, Gueiler was appointed president of Bolivia by the Bolivian congress in 1979.

A lifetime campaigner of women’s rights and progressive causes, she publicly supported the socialist leader Evo Morales in 2005 election.

Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy turned 50 in 2011. But more than this incidental turn of event for her, there was a more conscious decision taken by the Booker Prize winning progressive writer. She declared herself to be “a Maoist sympathizer”. In an interview to The Guardian, she endorsed any means possible to bring about revolutionary changes.

Guerrillas use violence directed against the state forces and at times innocent civilians sustain injuries and deaths. When Roy was asked to clarify if she condemned such violence, she was forthright: “I don’t condemn it any more. If you’re an adivasi [tribal Indian] living in a forest village and 800 CRP [Central Reserve Police] come and surround your village and start burning it, what are you supposed to do? Are you supposed to go on hunger strike? Can the hungry go on a hunger strike? Non-violence is a piece of theatre. You need an audience. What can you do when you have no audience? People have the right to resist annihilation.”

Betty Ford

Betty Ford

Betty Ford died on July 8, 2011. She was more than a First Lady. Through her contributions to women’s rights movements, she set precedents as a First Lady unafraid of taking on politically sensitive issues.

Betty Ford raised awareness about breast cancer following her mastectomy in 1974. She also drew from her personal experiences to politicize issues when she raised awareness of addiction following her battle with alcoholism.

As a pioneering feminist of her time, she actively supported Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), equal pay, and women’s right to abortion. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter appointed Betty Ford to the National Commission on the Observance of International Women’s Year. She opened the National Women’s Conference in Houston, Texas where she helped create the National Plan of Action.

When in 1978, the deadline for ratification of the ERA was extended from 1979 to 1982 it resulted in a march of a hundred thousand people on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. Several leading feminists including Bella Abzug, Elizabeth Chittick, Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem joined Betty Ford in registering protest.

(The List: Edited by Saswat Pattanayak)

The 2011 Nobel Peace Prize has been presented to three activists and political leaders on Saturday for “their nonviolent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights” as peacemakers.

New York Times reports that President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia, 73; her compatriot Leymah Gbowee, 39, a social worker and a peace activist; and Tawakkol Karman, a Yemeni journalist and a political activist who, at 32 (in the picture above), is the youngest Peace Prize laureate and the first Arab woman to receive the award.

Wall Street has been occupied by those representing the 99%. But what about the top 1%? How do they fare? They might be throwing cakes at the hungry masses down below, but how do they share their pies? They might be unleashing atrocities upon the huge majority of people through criminal manipulations, but how fairly do they treat each other?

A look at their annual salaries points to crucial factors of inequality and biases within the top 1% themselves. The masculine, patriarchal and sexist nature of corporate greed duly relegates its women accomplices to the inferior salary brackets. No matter if the women are in the same ranks of CEOs or Presidents, they are just paid way less. In fact, the highest paid woman Safra A. Catz (President, Oracle Corp.) earns less than any of the first 12 highest paid men! And the second highest paid woman Wellington J. Denahan-Norris (COO, Annaly Capital Management) earns less than any of the top 25 highest paid male executives.

The cumulative total earning for the first 9 months of last year was $381,105,205 for the highest paid male executives, while the cumulative total earning for the highest paid female executives for the said period was $118,233,692.

When such disparities in pay across genders have been normalized within the top echelon, it is no wonder the financial bosses of the Wall Street do not think twice about the increasing class society afflicting America today.

Here, then, is the breakdown (first 9-month period, 2010) -

Top 5 Men

Philippe P. Dauman
President and Chief Executive Officer
Viacom, Inc. (VIAB)
2010 Total Compensation: $84,469,515

Mark V. Hurd
President
Oracle Corp. (ORCL)
2010 Total Compensation: $78,362,540

Lawrence J. Ellison
Chief Executive Officer
Oracle Corp. (ORCL)
2010 Total Compensation: $77,556,015

Ray R. Irani
Executive Chairman
Occidental Petroleum Corp. (OXY)
2010 Total Compensation: $76,107,010

Thomas E. Dooley
Chief Operating Officer
Viacom, Inc. (VIAB)
2010 Total Compensation: $64,610,125

Top 5 Women

1. Safra A. Catz
President and Chief Financial Officer
Oracle Corp. (ORCL)
2010 Total Compensation: $42,095,887

2. Wellington J. Denahan-Norris
Vice Chairman, Chief Investment Officer and Chief Operating Officer
Annaly Capital Management, Inc. (NLY)
2010 Total Compensation: $23,634,800

3. Carol Meyrowitz
Chief Executive Officer
TJX Companies, Inc. (TJX)
2010 Total Compensation: $19,252,740

4. Susan M. Ivey
Former Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer
Reynolds American, Inc. (RAI)
2010 Total Compensation: $16,823,900

5. Marina Armstrong
Senior Vice President and General Manager
Gymboree Corp. (GYMB)
2010 Total Compensation: $16,426,365

Sources: Equilar & CNN Money.

Occupy Wall Street and Slut Walk NYC

I’m a feminist because I believe in equality based on gender.
I’m a feminist because I believe that no one has the right to touch you without your consent.
I’m a feminist because I believe that all women should have free and unfettered access to reproductive health care and abortion services.
I’m a feminist because I believe women deserve equal pay for equal work.
I’m a feminist because I believe that women should be able to wear what they want to wear without fear of being assaulted or harassed in the street.
I’m a feminist because I believe that when a woman is sexually harassed or sexually assaulted, we should be asking what the perpetrator was doing or wearing so we can catch him, not what the woman was doing or wearing, so we can blame her for inviting it.
I’m a sex-positive feminist because I believe that sex and sexuality is not the problem, lack of consent is the problem. Clothing is not consent. Consent is consent. The only person responsible for a rape, or for sexual harassment, is the rapist or the sexual harasser.

I’m a feminist because I have faith that once we individually and collectively harness our feminine energy sufficient to offset the pure masculine ethos of the unregulated corporate person, with its unlimited billionaire underwritten speech—we will get back to a relatively lush, safe and sane America where we all share in the beauty of the commons and we all share the costs of maintaining our general welfare.

My name is Jack Tuckner; I’m the co-founder of Tuckner Sipser, a women’s rights/employee rights law firm in NYC, and I want to talk about two significant and related protest gatherings that occurred simultaneously in NYC on October 1, One was SlutWalk NYC, and the other was Occupy Wall Street, but they’re both really protesting the same pathologies afflicting our body politic.

The “Slut Walk” started in Toronto when a cop told a group of female university students to “not dress like sluts in order to avoid being victimized.” This victim-blaming mentality catalyzed a long overdue movement, as sexual violence and sexual harassment are still widespread in our culture and have been for far too long.

In our Rape culture, the rapist/harasser/assaulter fails to control his own impulse to molest, violate, humiliate, harass and/or abuse a female subordinate, for example, or a woman walking down the street, or date who is raped, because he feels little to no empathy, respect or equality between himself and his target object; like Wall Street’s Ayn Randian view of living in perfect selfishness, the rapist is a sociopath, he seeks only his own gratification, and sees his victim as an object, as other, as less than, so her pain, fear, shame, or death is of no consequence to him.

Now take Wall Street culture, part and parcel of Rape culture, only on the Street, the faceless rape “victim” is the poor, the weak, the young, the old, the sick, the middle class; the female, almost all us, really—99% of us, in fact.

In Rape culture, the male cannot or will not reign in his sexual and/or gender- conflicted impulses, so he acts them out on each woman who comes within his destructive path, and in the Wall Street (rape) culture, the boys continue to rape, pillage and plunder Main Street while its enablers victim-blame teachers, cops, fire fighters, factory workers, students, Medicare recipients, immigrants, the EPA; seniors and the unemployed whose benefits are running out–these are the victims that Wall Street blames–the greedy, needy $40,000 per year worker trying to pay her bills, never mind the 2 billion dollar per year hedge fund manager who pays way less percentage of his “earnings” into the common coffer than the rest of us poor folk.

Rape culture and Wall Street culture are symptoms of Male Privilege run amok. No Yin, All Yang. All brain and balls; no heart and no soul.

As women’s rights advocates, we support Occupy Wall Street, as well as drastic changes to our criminal crony corporate culture. Women should not have to face deep cuts to the Women, Infant and Children nutrition program to cut down on low infant birth weights, so that another American company can join the other 18,000 companies incorporated in the same building in the Cayman islands to avoid paying federal taxes to help our country pay its bills. Is that patriotic?

And kids shouldn’t be kicked out of Head Start programs, and young people shouldn’t have to give up their Pell Grants and therefore college, so that the million dollar an hour hedge fund manager who wrecked the economy on purpose can continue to pay a 15% marginal tax rate on his “capital gains” cause he skims other people’s money for a living. And we can’t let these hoods in Congress get away with vilifying, scamming, investigating and destroying Planned Parenthood, the nation’s leading sexual and reproductive health care provider, just because they take care of our American girls and women. Shame on those bastards.

Social, economic and gender injustice affects and poisons everything. Look at this bleak landscape we’re living in—and the reason is simple—the billionaires and giant transnational corporations increasingly own and control our commons, and they own the elected leaders through the use of 37,000 highly paid lobbyists in Washington, yet they steadfastly refuse to join us in the fight to keep the jobs in America, to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure by investing in this country they profess to love. Wall Streeters and the politicians they own are stingy, greedy, selfish, small-minded and mean-spirited, and they’re dumb too, as they apparently aspire to living filthy rich in a poor country.

As corporations are now “persons” under the Supreme Court’s grotesque 2010 ruling, yet we still can’t get the Equal Rights Amendment for women passed into law, let’s never forget that first and foremost, we must vigilantly strive to raise the status of women while lowering the status of corporations, if economic, social and gender justice is our goal.