On a recent weeknight in midtown Manhattan, a trickle of professional women wearing sheath dresses and smart blouses swept into a delicately lit penthouse. The space they entered was filled with women quietly working and chatting, seated on an array of curved pastel furniture, designed to fit the precise ergonomic specifications of the average woman. The womens computers bore stickers reading Im With Her, Hermione 2020, and Cornell. The colour-coded bookshelves behind them included works such as 50 Ways to Comfort a Woman in Labor, Suffragette: My Own Story, and Cunt: A Declaration of Independence.

It was a typical Wednesday night at The Wing, an exclusive club that describes itself as a network of work and community spaces designed for women of all definitions. For between $185 and $250 per month, US Wing members or Winglets, as the company sometimes calls them can use the space to work, eat, socialise, breastfeed, shower, network, exercise, nap, reapply their makeup, meditate or all of the above. In other words, The Wing is a one-stop shop for the performance of contemporary mainstream feminism, a meticulously curated space where women can blow-dry their hair or stage a small coup, depending on the day.

Audrey Gelman, the companys co-founder and CEO, often tells The Wings origin story roughly as follows: she was working as a press secretary, and later as a political consultant, dashing from city to city and from meetings to parties. This lifestyle forced her to change her outfits in Starbucks and Amtrak bathrooms, places she found semi-degrading. She dreamed of having a more dignified place to go, where women like her talented, outgoing, highly ambitious could find like-minded souls, get changed and charge their phones in peace. Thus the idea for The Wing was born.

The company now has eight locations three in New York City, and one each in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston and Washington DC, with five more scheduled to open imminently. Its first international outpost, on Great Portland Street in London, opens next week. Second locations in London, San Francisco and LA are in the works; there will be 20 Wings by 2020. Over the past two years, The Wing has raised $117.5m in funding, attracting a formidable and diverse array of investors, whose ranks include Serena Williams, President Obamas friend and former senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, and members of the US womens soccer team.

Since the moment it opened its doors three years ago, The Wing has attracted the kind of buzz, funding and controversy usually reserved for projects involving Gwyneth Paltrow or Lena Dunham. (Not totally coincidentally, Dunham is a close friend of Gelmans and a Wing founding member. Gelman had a cameo on Girls, and was famously the basis for the character of Marnie.) The attention The Wing generates is, in large part, because it was founded upon a paradox: its brand is steeped in the feminist language of emancipation, empowerment and equality, while its business is based on one of societys most elitist institutions: the private members club. The result is that the company has become a kind of proxy for national debates over issues of gender, race, inclusivity, intersectionality and the limits and possibilities of neoliberal democratic politics. And yet, the number of people who actually belong to The Wing is still pretty small it aims to have about 15,000 members by the end of the year, slightly less than the monthly circulation figures for The Cricketer magazine, and 16 times less than the total youth membership of the RSPB.

Because The Wing is in part a co-working space, many of its members hail from professions in which office space is a rare commodity the creative class of writers, editors, freelancers, artists and influencers who make up the media. Handily, these are precisely the same kind of people who like to tweet, Instagram and write about the world as it looks from The Wing. This has ensured that even its minutest details, from the coffee to the furniture to the lunch offerings to the customised scented candles in the gift shop, have been deemed worthy of an article of their own. It also means that The Wing has been the subject of seemingly endless criticism accused of being too rich, too white, too cis-gendered, too feminist, not feminist enough, too liberal and not liberal enough. One former employee described it as a super-toxic place, while a British member told me that upon walking into The Wing in New York, she felt that she had found her holy grail.

That Wednesday evening in Manhattan, Wing members sat with their guests, sipping ros and snacking on seasoned popcorn as they waited for the evenings event to begin. It was nominally a talk by the writer Caitlin Moscatello, whose new book tells the stories of first-time female candidates running for office, but it was more like a political strategy meeting for women who were thinking of running themselves. Sitting in the audience felt like being entrusted with trade secrets. Moscatello sat between Kimberly Peeler-Allen, co-founder of Higher Heights, an organisation that works to elect black women, and Catalina Cruz, the newly elected assemblywoman for New Yorks 39th district.

After the three speakers finished their discussion, a woman in the audience raised her hand and introduced herself to the group. She was planning a run for local office, but had yet to announce. Please dont repeat this! the woman told the crowd. Cone of silence! exclaimed Peeler-Allen. As Cruz went on to describe the personal and financial strains of campaigning, the woman who had announced her run looked increasingly stricken. Youre scaring me! she said. Youll be fine, girl, said Cruz. Just get yourself ready.

It was just the kind of exchange that The Wing has been designed to generate. One of its press representatives described it to me as an accelerator for the coming revolution, a place where women are preparing to leap year into a more egalitarian future. In the US, it has become an almost compulsory campaign stop for women, trans and non-binary political candidates. Three of the women running for president have visited in the past year, and a Wing spokesperson told me that the other two front-runner Elizabeth Warren and Senator Amy Klobuchar are actively discussing doing so. The companys corporate ranks are stacked with former Democratic political operatives who worked on Hillary Clintons presidential campaigns or in the Obama administration.

To belong to The Wing is to join this in-crowd, a kind of utopian shadow government. Theres a secret smile that you share with the other women in the elevator, said Jess Lee, a partner at the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Sequoia, which led the The Wings latest $75m funding round. And it was true I found myself giving a look of ambiguous fellowship to the women I encountered in The Wing, and felt a slight twinge of embarrassment at the check-in desk as they swiped their membership cards and glided away, while I announced myself as a journalist, there to report on the workings of their private club. At Moscatellos event, I laughed and clapped along with the women in the audience as they shared strategies for their political triumph. In the elevator on the way out, an older woman turned to me and two young women and gave us the secret smile. So, are you all going to run? she asked.

The Wing opened its doors on 10 October 2016, four weeks before the presidential election. One of the very first events it held was an invitation-only very adult sleepover featuring face masks, monogrammed pyjamas and pillow fights. The next one was a public phone bank and debate watch party in partnership with Clintons presidential campaign, which invited women to spend three hours calling members of the public and urging them to vote the first woman into the Oval Office. Gelman and her co-founder Lauren Kassan hoped that their company would flourish alongside a Clinton administration, buoyed by the arrival of feminisms golden age.

On election night, about 175 women gathered in the Wings Flatiron location to watch the results come in. Like just about everyone else in New York, they expected it would be a celebratory event, a coronation. But as the evening drew on, and it became increasingly clear that Clinton was not going to win, the mood shifted. Oh my goodness, you could feel it getting colder, says Nol Duan, a Wing founding member. At one point, Gelman, wearing a backwards baseball cap and a pink Madam President T-shirt, sat down and held Duans hand.

The Wing was heavily aligned with Clinton, yet among the Democratic partys young, progressive voters, Clintons strain of establishment politics was swiftly disavowed. In no time at all, the former secretary of state had become both a feminist martyr and a political liability, a flawed candidate whose defeat everyone felt they should have seen coming.

Almost everyone I spoke to about the company said it would be a different place if Clinton had won. Instead of being just a beautiful space for women to revel beneath a shattered glass ceiling, it became, for its members, a place to take shelter. It was a really sobering moment, Kassan told me. I think there was already the demand and excitement, and I think that we realised just how important it was now.

A few days later, The Wing briefly opened its doors to all women who felt they needed a place to regroup. Gelman and Kassan gave the organisers of the Womens March on Washington access to the space, and in January, they hired buses to take 100 Wing members to Washington to participate. The Wing began to emphasise civic and political programming, ramped up hiring and continued planning to expand. In interviews, Gelman has articulated the mission in overtly political terms: Being a girl is no longer politically neutral. Your identity, whether you like it or not, is now political, she told Elle in 2017.

Clintons loss marked the unravelling of the already tenuous coalition of American feminists. The 2017 Womens March was the largest single-day protest in US history, but it quickly became known more for its controversy and in-fighting than for its transformative politics. The Wing was born into a world in which women were banding together in new and enlivening ways, but often doing so in competing camps. To many, Clintons Sandbergian, Lean In brand of corporate feminism had been fully discredited and a more radical approach was needed, while others felt that the emergency of President Trump in the White House meant that this was a time for progressives to unite, rather than pursue potentially divisive new policies.

The Wing has found itself trying to please all sides, in the process finding itself attacked from all sides, often within its own walls. It is an easy target, and the fact that it is owned and operated by women makes it all the more so. Where its programming and brand have conflicted with the aims of progressive politics, its members have called the company out. Yet anyone who criticises The Wing may expect to be swiftly criticised in turn, on one side for poking holes in an otherwise admirable project, and on the other for paying it any attention at all. All parties involved might expect their exchange to be followed by a polite reminder of the specific actions that The Wing has taken to respond to the initial criticism, and perhaps an invitation to continue their discussion in a panel event. To begin to reckon with The Wings project is to risk entering an ouroboros of doom, as the writer and illustrator Shelby Lorman put it. It feels like such a perfect metaphor, she said, for the many tangled and charged disagreements over what it means to be a modern woman, feminist and political subject.

Before any woman sets foot in The Wing, she will, in all likelihood, already know what it looks like. Every corner of every branch seems to have been designed specifically for Instagram, which is to say that the furniture and art and food and plants and people feel as if they have been carefully chosen to telegraph that they are coveted, consumable goods. The company posts mock-ups of every new space months before it is built, so that women between the ages of 26 to 35 living in major metropolitan areas and possessing roughly $2,000 of annual disposable income can begin to imagine themselves wandering around there. (The companys omnipresence on social media is another reminder that its power derives from not letting everyone in and letting everyone know about it.)

Every outpost contains careful local touches, and each projects an air of strained yet somewhat soothing whimsy. In the Soho premises in New York, I walked up a set of stairs that read Its not a reach when we climb together, before settling in to enjoy a fork the patriarchy grain bowl on a blue pastel desk. In its Washington DC outpost, located above a spa in Georgetown, one of the toniest corners of the city, there is a conference room named K Street, after the citys main lobbying thoroughfare, and a phone booth named after Anita Hill, legal eagle. The Wing London, a five-storey penthouse in Fitzrovia, will offer a tearoom, terrace, fitness room and floral patterned tile floors, as well as a portrait gallery featuring the likenesses of Diane Abbott, Mary Beard and Amal Clooney, among others. It is the first members club in London that has signed on to the mayors living-wage pact, and proceeds from its cafe and its programming will benefit local charities. There will be trellises, black-and-white tiles and chandeliers. I was very inspired by the British countryside, Laetitia Gorra, the companys director of interiors, told me.

Walking through one of the Wings premises can sometimes feel like exploring what would happen if Oliver Bonas were to design a luxury corporate office: lots of pastel and very few sharp edges. The walls, cushions and seating offer an array of muted pink, mustard and rose-gold hues, a colour scheme chosen in part for its calming effect. The air conditioning is usually set at 22C (72F), to accommodate womens slightly lower skin temperatures. Chiara de Rege, who helped design the first few locations, said that the goal was to make them feminine, but not girly girl or precious. Hilary Koyfman, who collaborated with De Rege on the early design, has described the overall aesthetic as kind of like Mad Men without the men.

There is certainly something beautiful and powerful, even alchemic, about being in a women-only space. For some women, it is a place to find support, friendship and inspiration, where they do not have to apologise for anything or worry about their things being stolen or their drinks being spiked. Two locations currently offer childcare services, while every location features a private nursing room for new mothers. Each Wing also offers a luxurious beauty room with a wide array of hair and makeup products. These beauty rooms, staff told me, are a key part of the companys storytelling. They are designed to make life easier, as Gelman once said, for the kind of woman for whom part of being successful is not only making sure that you know everything thats going on in the news and that youve responded to every single email in your inbox, and that nothing is on fire in your house, but also looking good because it is whats expected of you and can make you feel more confident.

Yet, for its critics, this point of articulation is where the alchemy dissolves: instead of being a place that seeks to lift all women up, it becomes a place where one must constantly consider how well one is performing both feminism and femininity. And with any performance, this can be exhausting, and always carries the risk of failure. Spending time at The Wing, I was reminded of the kind of ideal woman that the writer Jia Tolentino described in a recent essay: she has expensive hair and expensive skin, she is successful and svelte. Todays ideal woman is of a type that coexists easily with feminism in its current market-friendly and mainstream form, she writes. This sort of feminism has organised itself around being as visible and appealing to as many people as possible; it has greatly over-valorised womens individual success.

Some of the tensions within this brand of feminism can be glimpsed, not too surprisingly, at The Wings in-house shops, where it sells T-shirts, bags and hats with slogans like casual business woman and annihilate the patriarchy on them. There are workout clothes and $17.50 keychains. When I visited the Soho location in early August, the shop was selling a range of colourful award ribbons, printed with lines such as Wow, youre not sexist, Best ally, and Youre my Wingman of the year. As Jezebel has reported, some of the merchandise resembles that of other feminist artists. The ribbons, for example, seem to be emulating the work of Shelby Lorman, whose book Awards for Good Boys satirises the low standards to which men are held. Lorman first spotted The Wings version of the ribbons on Instagram. I thought it was amazing and hilarious, because they are awards for men, for sale for $6, but theyre stripped of humour, so its literal, she told me. I truly dont think that anything could be funnier because if they did borrow my work, they have totally missed the point. And they are monetising the missed point, which is kind of genius. Its so sinister and so evil that I kind of love it.

Ever since it first opened its doors, The Wing has struggled to define who exactly it is for. Its representatives, describing its membership policy, use the words exclusive and inclusive in the same breath. No one gets rejected, they told me. Applicants are merely placed on the waiting list 35,000 people have applied so far when their preferred space is at capacity. Yet, in a 2018 presentation to the New York City Commission on Human Rights, The Wings attorneys stated that it is highly selective and that only around 40% of applicants are admitted. Aspiring members must explain how they have promoted or supported The Wings mission of advancing women, and also describe the dinner party of their dreams.

The commission was investigating the company for discriminating on the basis of gender. (New York law requires it to investigate any complaint it receives. The investigation closed in March 2019.) At first, the club refused to allow men into its spaces, even as guests. A former employee told me that one of the first things they were taught was how to keep men out: Block them with your body, push them to the elevator, push the elevator button. But outward appearance does not always correlate with gender identity; the employee witnessed instances where individuals who presented themselves to the check-in desk at The Wing were misgendered by staff. In August 2018, a serially litigious 53-year-old man sued The Wing for up to $12m for rejecting his application, claiming that he had been denied entry because of his gender. After the lawsuit was filed, and as a result of conversations with its trans and nonbinary staff and members, The Wing adopted a formal membership policy that would evaluate applicants based on their commitment to The Wings mission, regardless of their perceived gender or gender identity. In a letter to members announcing the new policy, Kassan and Gelman wrote that they would be working to actively incorporate the perspective of trans and non-binary members into our offerings. The language of guest emails was changed from shes landed to theyve landed. The policy also meant that men could enter the space as guests and apply for membership, if they really wanted to.

The companys success is partly due to the fact that, over the past five years, the identity-based members club has emerged as a powerful trend. In the US, The Wing already has too many competitors and imitators to list, which have names such as The Lola (Atlanta), The Broad (Richmond), The Assembly (San Francisco), The Riveter (Seattle) and The Hivery (Mill Valley). In London, womens clubs such as The AllBright and The Trouble Club already occupy part of The Wings target audience. In November, Ethels Club, the first private social and wellness club designed with people of colour in mind, will open its doors in Brooklyn. The Wing was created for a certain type of woman, which, from my point of view, is not for me, Ethels Club founder, Najla Austin, told me. Im looking for my people. Its not unlike religion. If you write down the similarities of Catholicism and a social club, theyre not that different.

Akilah Cadet, who runs a diversity and inclusion consulting firm in Oakland, had a similar first impression of The Wing, and decided that it probably was not for her. But then Yari Blanco, at the time The Wings senior manager of culture and diversity, reached out to her about her work, and Cadet decided to join the club. Being a member, she rightly predicted, would bring in business. Honestly, my objective was like, get this money, so thats what I did, she told me. She said her application to the San Francisco location was fast-tracked, and soon she found herself at an event thrown specifically for black women. At one point, a white woman stood up on the couch and announced that they would be giving away T-shirts reading phenomenally black. Cadet raised her concerns about the event to Blanco and her team, criticising what she perceived to be a lack of serious thought about the way the event was organised. Two days later, she found herself on a panel at The Wing sponsored by Secret deodorant, where she got a new client.

The company has made similar missteps along the way, and has almost always made concerted efforts to correct them wherever they arise. Nol Duan, the founding member from New York, who is Chinese American, told me that when The Wing held an event for Asian women, they posted an Instagram story intended to celebrate the clubs women from Asia. Duan did not attend, but some of her friends did. They were like: were not women from Asia, were American, she said. What I really love about Wing members is that they are willing to speak out, including against the company, Duan added, noting that the company had changed in response to criticism. I can see from personal experience that it has come a long way since they first launched, she said.

Cadet took it upon herself to point out instances where The Wing could be more attentive to diversity and difference. Eventually, she was doing so much work for The Wing that she said they offered her a complimentary membership, and she frequently used the space to hold meetings in San Francisco. Like many of its critics, Cadet tries to view the company with generosity.

Lately, however, maintaining this nuanced view has come to require a more intricate set of mental gymnastics. At the end of May, a racial confrontation occurred at the West Hollywood branch. According to reporting by the online magazine Zora, Wing member Asha Grant, the director of The Free Black Womens Library Los Angeles, and her guest were harassed in the parking lot by an unaccompanied white woman guest who began yelling at them after Grant took what she felt was her parking space. The harassment and racist threats continued inside, where the white woman gave the middle finger to Grant, her guest, and another black club member, Stephanie Kimou. In an attempt to ease the situation, staff offered Kimou, Grant and her guest a free meal, but the white woman was not asked to leave the premises.

News of the incident spread quickly. In mid-August, Kimou and Grant posted on Instagram announcing that they were cancelling their memberships. After the initial allure of their perfectly designed co-working spaces, beauty rooms stocked full of Glossier and Goop, the lattes and their commitment to diversity, the facade started to crack and what was underneath all that pink felt oppressive and debilitating, Kimou wrote in her post.

Other black members began quitting The Wing. They didnt think it was going to get to this level, Cadet told me. On 5 September, Gelman and Kassan sent an email to all Wing members that finally acknowledged what had occurred: Our handling of it left everyone feeling disappointed, and the black member felt especially unprotected and let down, they wrote. In the following weeks, they would hold gatherings in every city with the goal of improving community understanding and mutual trust, which the executive team would attend. Eleven days later, members received another email from Kassan and Gelman in which they apologised for the ways weve fallen short, and made commitments to pay more attention to racial inclusion, including reworking the clubs code of conduct and changing member orientation to address issues of race and racial empathy. Two days after that, on 18 September, Gelman appeared on the cover of Inc. magazine in a long-sleeve black knit dress, her hands resting on her pregnant torso. She became the first visibly pregnant CEO to grace the cover of a business magazine.

On 6 September, the day after the first email from Gelman and Kassan went out, I visited the companys new headquarters in the East Village in New York. Zara Rahim, senior director of strategic communications, gave me a tour around the four-storey office, which is located in what was once a hospital for German immigrants and later expanded to include a dedicated womens wing. In the basement, the only place in the building where I spotted several men, the tech team was hard at work. Upstairs, we popped our heads into a mint-green conference room, where a planning meeting for the London launch was underway.

Rahim and I settled into a couch in Kassans office, where Kassan greeted us wearing a yellow plaid jacquard blazer and a logo necklace bearing The Wings hero W, which looks something like the Wonder Woman logo, but softer, rounder, cuter. While Gelman, as CEO, is the public face of the company, Kassan, as COO, tends to handle operations behind the scenes. Before this venture, Kassan was the first employee at the fitness chain SLT, which specialises in high-intensity reformer pilates (motto: better sore than sorry), and then moved on to Classpass, a fitness class app. She rarely gives interviews, but by the time we spoke, Gelman was busy preparing to go on maternity leave and Kassan was taking over some of her duties.

Kassan was excited for the London launch, which she told me had been years in the making. She would be bringing her whole family over to celebrate the opening. I asked her about the recent email to members and about the common criticisms of the company. Diversity had been a part of who we are and what weve cared about since the beginning, she explained. That shows up through our programming and through our products. When things happen, we want to be transparent and clear about that because there are things that happen outside in the world that we cant control. And we want to create a space to be able to have these honest and hard conversations.

Kassan had less time for the criticism that membership is too expensive. I think the price point is just she lowered her voice to a whisper bullshit. The Wing is, indeed, more affordable than the vast majority of its competitors. As women, we undervalue what were providing and serving, Kassan said. We get criticised about that, and we feel proud of what were doing. In London, membership will cost 170 per month for access to a single location, and 240 for access to all locations. Approximately 7% of Wing members are awarded scholarships, which last for two years and cover the full cost of membership, and the company is planning tiered membership rates to expand access in the future.

The more time I spent speaking to the companys critics and supporters, the clearer it became that the controversy it generates has far more to do with what it claims to be rather than what it actually is. Last month, for instance, it debuted a members-only job marketplace that allows members to post listings and hire one another. From a business perspective, this is a savvy move giving ambitious women yet another reason to want to join, while connecting bosses who are members with a pool of promising candidates. But this is a very narrow vision of feminism. Of course, many talented people will gain new opportunities through this service but, equally obviously, its exclusivity threatens to exacerbate the same kinds of inequality that The Wing claims to want to combat.

Feminism, for me, is fundamentally about collective struggle, not individuals, says Sarah Banet-Weiser, a scholar of communication and gender studies at the London School of Economics. The Wings strain of feminism, she argued, is something else: Theyre empowering women to be better economic subjects within capitalism, empowering women to network, to get a raise, to address the pay gap. Those are real things, but they are really tied to capitalist logic. As a former employee put it, The Wings feminism is less about making the world more equitable as it is about making sure women are given equal opportunities to make money: Its like, you only make $1m? Well, this man makes $2m! You could make $2m if only it werent for misogyny. (One recent post from The Wings Instagram feed read: Mood: CE0,000,000.)

Progressives often talk about The Wing in the same way they talk about the Democratic party: its not great but maybe things will get better, maybe the politicians will figure it out, maybe the world The Wings founders imagined they would serve will one day emerge. One vocal supporter of The Wing is, somewhat surprisingly, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Gelman hosted a fundraiser for Ocasio-Cortez at her home in Brooklyn last summer and, a few months later, the politician told Glamour: The Wing isnt just a functional space, its a real symbol of whats happening in our country. She called the company one of the most potent forces that weve seen emerge in politics this year.

Many of the people I spoke to for this piece were disappointed in The Wing for a variety of reasons, but hesitant to publicly criticise it. They had made good friends there, and saw all the work that staff were putting in to make it a better place. They had low expectations for corporate behaviour, and saw The Wing doing a better job than most companies when it comes to addressing its failures. They understood the paradox of a company whose profitability rests upon both expanding its tent and guarding the entrances. I really wonder what the plan is to grow while staying true to their values, one San Francisco-based member told me. Maybe they have something up their sleeve, they have a ton of really smart women working for that company, but I dont see it. Cadet also felt burned out by her experience. I want this to go well. I want this to be a good thing, she said. I dont know, maybe Ive done all that I can do. (And when you write that, say that I was gazing off into the distance, she joked.)

The opening of the London branch comes as The Wing seems to be reckoning with its first few years. Last week, The Wing unveiled a mural advertisement on a street corner in Shoreditch in east London. In a bright coral hue, it introduces The Wing as the first place in London to solve the dual epidemic of mansplaining and manspreading. After it went up, Rahim texted me a photo of a handful of men and women pausing in front of it, presumably wondering what a thing called The Wing could be and what it might become.

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The Wing: how an exclusive women's club sparked a thousand arguments - The Guardian

Ashley McBryde will be presented with a special honor at this year's CMT Artists of the Year ceremony:McBryde will be receiving the Breakout Artist of the Year Award for 2019.

The country music newcomer has had a whirlwind couple of years: She released her debut album,Girl Going Nowhere,in 2018, to widespread critical acclaim, and received a Grammy nomination for Best Country Album in 2019. She's also nominated for New Artist of the Year at the upcoming 2019 CMA Awards, and was named New Female Artist of the Year at the 2019 ACM Awards.At the 2019 CMT Music Awards in June, McBryde received the Breakthrough Video of the Year honor, for the music video for "Girl Goin' Nowhere."

The "A Little Dive Bar in Dahlonega" singer has already begun preparing her sophomore album. She recently released the lead single, "One Night Standards," from the project. McBryde hasn't reveled much about the unnamed album; however, the singer says it will be out in 2020, according to Nash Country Daily.Early next year, she'll be hitting the road with Luke Combs, on his What You See Is What You Get Tour.

The 2019 CMT Artists of the Year ceremony will also honorDan + Shay, Kane Brown, Thomas Rhett, Luke Combs and Carrie Underwoodas this year's artists of the year. Additionally,Reba McEntire will be honored with the prestigious honor of Artist of a Lifetime.

The 2019 CMT Artists of the Year will be celebrating its 10th anniversary on Oct. 16. The ceremony, set to take place in Nashville at the Schermerhorn Symphony Center, will air live on CMT at 8PM ET.

29 Songs from Women You Need to Hear Today:

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Ashley McBryde to Receive Special CMT Artist of the Year Award - Taste of Country

The first time I listened to the Call Her Daddy podcast, I was utterly appalled by both the profanity and absurdity of the ideas that the show was overtly promoting. And yet, every Wednesday, I find myself eagerly refreshing the app anticipating the source of weekly entertainment.

The blunt and provocative nature of vloggers Alexandra Cooper and Sofia Franklyn has given the Barstool podcast a five-star rating with more than 65,000 reviews. Although the audience includes both male and female listeners, the podcast is supposed to be revolutionary for women because it delves into the nitty gritty details of the modern dating scene from a heterosexual female perspective.

Through sharing their own personal experiences with men, Cooper and Franklyn provide all the necessary tips and tricks on how to master the daddy game a game of manipulation and winning the power dynamic. While it seems like an inspiring and empowering way to include women in the conversation of casual sex, Cooper and Franklyn seem to do so through a dominantly male perspective.

Despite the entertaining and sometimes helpful advice, female listeners should refrain from using the podcast as a golden standard of rules in the dating game. The podcast exposes the manipulative tactics of men and explains to women how to play their game and ultimately win it.

One of their recent episodes, Milf Hunter, contained the most provocative dialogue yet. This episode featured a guest on the show whose identity remains a secret, but who goes by the moniker Milf Hunter. Cooper and Franklyn consistently make references to him as the ultimate player who vivaciously dates, has had more than a hundred sexual partners and has supposedly mastered the daddy game a term used to describe the stereotype of male players who attain emotional control of women and juggle several partners at a time.

In his guest appearance, he consistently referred to women as holes as he educated listeners about his successful strategy of lies and manipulation. Through recounting various sexual experiences, he revealed that he has yet to take a woman on a date and rarely even opens the door for them. He also gloated about the fact that although he has never been in love, he tells women he loves them so he can continue hooking up with them.

For a female listener, this behavior sounds degrading and for most people in general these assertions sound uncommon and irrational. Yet Cooper and Franklyn not only expressed full support of his general apathy and treatment towards his partners, but encouraged the same behavior from women. In fact, Cooper even expressed gratitude to Milf Hunter for teaching her how to manipulate men the way he does with women.

Girls, most men are like this so I hope your ears are perking up and I hope youre feeling like shit about yourself, Franklyn said.

This kind of advice wrongfully shoves all men into a negative category and simultaneously conditions women to normalize and accept this kind of treatment. Cooper and Franklyn routinely remind women that adopting this mindset will make them better off. Yet learning to treat the opposite sex in a worthless manner does not equate to female empowerment.

In support of these outlandish notions, Cooper and Franklyn put an emphasis on performance in the bedroom and encourage women to drop everything else that might be included in the realm of a normal relationship. They advise women to remove any expectations from men, and to brainwash themselves into believing that they are merely a hole.

The conversation about casual dating and open relationships isnt the problem with the podcast. But constantly re-enforcing that casual sex is all men want and women should cater their own desires and expectations to fit this rigid and extreme standard is worrisome.

You dont want him calling you babe, you want him calling you a whore, Franklyn said.

Furthermore, the idea that women need to downgrade their status to the level of a sex object is even more dangerous to the conversation of casual dating. Rather than empower women to pursue the relationships they desire, Call Her Daddy teaches self-deprecation and limits their options.

Cooper and Franklyn put an emphasis on keeping up exceptional performance in the bedroom, remaining low maintenance, refraining from conversations about the relationship status, abstaining from any expression of emotion and staying noncommittal to anyone.

If your behavior changes, especially if youre starting to act more needy, hes going to be terrified of you, Cooper said.

The podcast routinely stresses that any demonstration of emotion or attachment is a turn off and that any progression towards a relationship must derive from the males end. For some women, this dynamic works. But for the women who may desire something other than sex, this kind of advice can be toxic and minimizing.

Cooper and Franklyn overgeneralize the dating world and normalize an abnormal pattern of treatment to a varied audience of listeners and subscribers.

By teaching women to replicate the strategies of certain men and blatantly ignore their own feelings and others, they contribute to a never-ending cycle of this power game. According to Cooper and Franklyn, the game never ends, not even in marriage.

They still hate you and theyre still cheating on you, until they prove otherwise, Cooper said.

This mentality is not only harmful to women, but it places men in an unfair category as well. To assume that all men or even the majority of men solely share an interest in sex, is unfair and inaccurate. It morphs the expectations of both genders and creates an endless power dynamic game that results in a toxic cycle for both parties.

So while Cooper and Franklyn may have cracked the code of the so-called daddy game, women should take this advice with a grain of salt. Not all men solely want sex, and women who want more should not neglect their own desires. Women might benefit more from a game that they create and write their own rules to one that doesnt abide by the aloof standards that certain men of the 21st century have regimented into the modern dating culture.

Read more here:
Opinion | Call Her Daddy podcast entertains and degrades - University of Pittsburgh The Pitt News

A few weeks ago I wrote about Presbyterians. Today I want to talk about Methodists. Both of these groups possess good biblical church order and governance. Presbyterians are governed by elders (Greek, presbuteros). Methodists first developed out of a method - small house groups. This was an alternative place for converts to gather, to pray, to study the Bible, and to confess their sins. These home meetings were needed because the historical churches were resisting the revival. In fact, some Methodist pioneers (my ancestors) were tarred and feathered and driven out of town, simply for believing you could know you were saved. They were pioneers in the faith.

The Methodist denomination came about from the preaching of John Wesley and his genius for organizing small groups. Like most revivals, it was a movement before it was a denomination. Movements begin with individuals encountering God. They morph into movements as more people get on board, then organizations develop. Other revival movements had amazing leaders like Jonathan Edwards (Presbyterians) and William Seymour (Assemblies of God).

Personally, I have a love-hate relationship with denominationalism. I love the church, but I dislike what religion has done to Christianity. Sadly, many parts of the body of Christ (believers everywhere who are born again) have mostly been boxed into sectarian groups who rarely interact with each other, pray together, or witness together.

Denominations started off to protect the orthodoxy of the faith, to prevent heresy. Upholding faith in Christ Jesus or teaching historic doctrine is good, of course. It isn't that denominations are wrong, it's just that when you add an ism to it, that it becomes sectarian. "We are right! You are wrong!" Maybe so, but we still need to love one another in the Lord, right?

The fervor of a revival movement, the freshness of rediscovered biblical truth, the presence of the Holy Spirit: these things characterize a move of God in its beginning stages. In the movement stage, there is very little organization, just key men and women used by God to proclaim the message. Denominations started off with an aspect of neglected truth the church had forgotten. It could be justification by faith, the reliability of Scripture, experiencing the new birth, receiving the empowerment of the Holy Spirit, or our personal obligation to evangelism. Today, I'm watching charismatic renewal movements reveal genuine prophets and apostles. I'd love to see evangelists emerge again. Where is Billy Graham when you need him?

My late sister Carol and her husband Fred were wonderful Methodist pastors in Florida. We had many theological and practical discussions. I admired their work. I vividly recall being invited to come forward and pray in one of Fred's churches. It was a very old historic church in Jacksonville, Fla. As I stepped behind the ancient wooden pulpit - surprise! I was suddenly enveloped in the presence of the Holy Spirit. I knew instantly that members of the church had for generations prayed for whoever stood in that church pulpit, that they would be anointed by the Spirit to declare God's word. What a wonderful heritage!

Denominations today are institutions that hold assets and property and uphold fundamental doctrines. In some cases, they are still anointed by the Lord. We owe it to those pioneers of Christianity to be true to the Lord as they were, and if necessary, to claim new territory for God and His world.

If you want to learn more about Methodists, a new book will soon be out- Marks of a Movement: What the Church Today Can Learn from the Wesleyan Revival, by Winfield Bevins.

--RON WOOD IS A WRITER AND MINISTER. CONTACT HIM AT WOOD.STONE.RON@GMAIL.COM OR VISIT http://WWW.TOUCHEDBYGRACE.ORG. THE OPINIONS EXPRESSED ARE THOSE OF THE AUTHOR.

Religion on 09/18/2019

Print Headline: Methodist Movement Came From The Preaching Of John Wesley

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RELIGION: Methodist Movement Came From The Preaching Of John Wesley - NWAOnline

When Courtney Hill, a doctoral candidate in the University of Virginias School of Engineering, was invited last year to speak at her high school in eastern Arkansas on girls empowerment day, she eagerly agreed.

In the farming community where she grew up, not many of the students had met someone let alone a woman with an academic career in research, said Hill, who was the first woman in her family to go to college.

Now, Hill is one of two UVA scholars to win a Ford Foundation Fellowship. Hers will help her finish her dissertation on testing the effectiveness of water-purifying devices in Limpopo, South Africa.

Anthropologist Roberto Armengol also won a Ford Foundation Fellowship in the postdoctoral category, to research how Cuban workers in small urban businesses and sustainable farms are managing during a time of social transition.

The Ford Foundation Fellowship Programs, which also include the category of predoctoral work, seek to increase the diversity of the nations college and university faculties by increasing their ethnic and racial diversity, to maximize the educational benefits of diversity, and to increase the number of professors who can and will use diversity as a resource for enriching the education of all students, its website says. The national academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine administer the programs, which awarded fellowships to 130 outstanding scholars from across the country this year.

Hill and Armengol are among 19 UVA scholars who have secured one of the fellowships over the past 34 years. Last year, Isola Brown, a research scientist in the School of Medicine, was awarded a 2018 postdoctoral fellowship.

Armengol, who earned his Ph.D. in anthropology from UVA in 2013, was pleasantly surprised when he got the news about the fellowship. At first I thought it was a mistake, he said. Only 24 scholars received postdoctoral fellowships this year.

With the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, hell be contributing groundbreaking scholarship about how Cuba is changing right now.

Previously, he served as a College Fellow in the inaugural group that developed the cross-disciplinary courses for the College of Arts &Sciences new general curriculum, an appointment that concluded after the spring semester.

As a Ford Fellow, Armengol will return to Cuba in the spring, where he has been doing fieldwork on self-employed workers since the early 2000s. Now his focus is shifting toward worker-owned and organic farming cooperatives that have grown in number in recent years. As part of his research, he plans to work at a farm outside Havana. Since the economic crisis of the 1990s, Cuban farmers have almost by necessity, rather than choice, turned more and more to traditional and more sustainable principles of growing crops, he said.

This fall, hes wrapping up a book manuscript based on his dissertation, the everyday life of small business entrepreneurs and economic practices that draw on an ethic of cooperation that is unusual as compared to the mainstream market logic based mostly on self-interest, he said.

During the economic crisis, working-class people became so enterprising in creative ways, he said. Theres so much red tape, however, that a lot of practices are illegal.

Take bicycle vendors, for example. These individuals sell and fix bicycles, which are in high demand because not that many people can afford to own cars. The vendors help and support each other through reciprocal exchanges so their businesses can survive.

The small business phenomenon has been misread as capitalism breaking through socialism, but its really a socialism of their own, distinct from the socialism imposed by the state, he said.

More recently, fledgling business schools, workshops and entrepreneurial support networks are being established by both private and public actors. Armengol wants to look at what effect the conventionalization of economic activities that previously took place under the table is having on small business owners and operators. He suspects theyre learning more about being profit-motivated, but also might be continuing their ethics of cooperation and support, changing the conventions imposed in formal business education.

I think theres a larger message for rethinking how we understand working-class people all over the world, Armengol said.

His adviser, Latin American history professor Tico Braun, agrees.

Roberto Armengols research suggests that what may well be emerging in Cuba has elements of both socialism and capitalism, and in the combination, both are altered. Roberto has detected market-like relationships that are imbued with a sense for the moral, for the collective, Braun said.

If, in the early 21st century, we are coming to a consensus that with neo-liberalism we have gone too far toward the privatization of the market, Braun wrote in an email, Cuba may well point us toward a more balanced relationship between the private and the public. If so, as appears to be the case, this needs to be known and known everywhere. Robertos research is vitally significant as we think about the good society, or at least about better ones.

Hill is excited to join the nationwide community of Ford Fellows, she said, with whom shell continue to learn about inclusion in higher education.

This fellowship is an invaluable opportunity to connect with like-minded academics who are dedicated to using diversity as a resource for enriching the education of all students, Hill wrote in an email. The network provides professional, academic and even personal support for members of the community as we wrestle with what it means to create an inclusive environment at every level of higher education.

Hill said she knows what it feels like to be the only one in the room as a woman and someone from a working-class community, she said. She wants to continue to help students feel accepted and welcome no matter where youre from.

She knows how meaningful mentorship can be to students, Hill said, especially if theyre first-generation college students from a low socio-economic background or from an underrepresented group. She said its important to share information with students and peers about opportunities such as Fulbright scholarships or National Science Foundation grants, for example.

Hill currently holds an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and a Jefferson Fellowship from the Jefferson Scholars Foundation, given to graduate students who demonstrate outstanding achievement and the highest promise as scholars, teachers, public servants, and business leaders in the United States and beyond, as the website describes them.

Working with James Smith, Henry L. Kinnier Professor of Civil Engineering and the lead developer of the MadiDrop water purification tablet, Hill is focusing on low-cost ways to treat water in rural South Africa. She has worked in South Africa during several summers for two months at a time, mentoring students in the program from all over the U.S., as well as students from South Africa. She learns from them, too, she said.

Last spring, she served as a Mirzayan Science and Technology Fellow at the National Academy of Science through the InterAcademy Partnership, an organization that makes scientific recommendations to international bodies like theUN. Before graduate school, she taught high school English in South Korea as a Fulbright Scholar.

Last year, Hill was awarded UVAs first Global Water Initiative Graduate Prize for the most outstanding presentation.

Smith praised Hills ability to balance her research with other academic projects.

Her dissertation research is strong, but that is only a part of her professional activities, he wrote in an email.She mentors many undergraduates and less-senior graduate students.She participates in conferences and has been very active in promoting diversity in engineering. It is rare to find a Ph.D. student who can excel in their research while participating in so many other service activities.

On Grounds this year, Hill is working with students on developing another device for delivering the ionized silver that disinfects water.

I chose this topic, she said, because water is essential to life, and I believe that everyone should have access to a reliable, clean water source.

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Ford Foundation Fellowships Boost Two Rising UVA Scholars - University of Virginia

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Do you feel more or less in control of the world than you did five years ago?

This is a question I have been discussing with researchers, authors, executives, and others I encounter in my life as editor of MIT Sloan Management Review. You will not be surprised that the majority answer less, usually without hesitation and often quite adamantly.

I set the time span of five years for the question so it is not directly tied to the Trump presidency or Brexit, although its hard to imagine those developments are not central in many peoples answers.

The last five years have also seen the rise at least in our consciousness of several other phenomena that threaten our sense of agency.

Perhaps most obviously, the climate change conversation has taken a dramatic turn. We have reached a point where any rational, thinking human cannot help but be, well, terrified. Among all the things we may feel powerless against, the impact of an increasingly angry planet sits high on the list. Public discourse has evolved from if to when, and the question of when from centuries to decades to years.

Within this same half-decade, we have experienced a sharp turn in our feelings about intelligent technology. The cresting digital wave circa 2014 that we associated with freedom of expression, access to information, and promise of a hassle-free lifestyle has crashed into fears for our privacy, anxiety about replacement, and an absurd twist on the search for truth. We techno-optimists find this particularly distressing, as technology should be a source of great empowerment across our work and home lives and across economic boundaries.

As humans, we are all prone to bouts of exceptionalism. We get caught up in the moment and fool ourselves into believing we are experiencing something truly unprecedented. Later, with the benefit of perspective, we recognize that others have seen or experienced the same thing before.

I am certainly exceptionalism-prone, so I have challenged myself to look at history for context. Indeed, there is strong and near-term precedent for the type of angst we are experiencing. Consider how humankind reacted in the moment to the upheaval of the Nixon administration, for example, and to pretty much every major technological transformation of the industrial age.

But weve reached a new level of angst. Taken together, todays attacks on our sense of personal power across all walks of our lives and our economy amount to a crisis of agency.

I feel no pity for myself, nor do I have overwhelming sympathy for any other have in this world. I can only imagine how our feelings of discomfort pale in comparison to the stresses of simply trying to survive and put food on the table.

But shrugging our shoulders and accepting anxiety and impotence as the new normal is a sure road to disaster. We cannot let threats overwhelm or inhibit us, no matter how existential they may appear.

The answer, I think, is to do whats within your immediate power and do it right now. Do that thing you can do today that makes a positive contribution. Maybe thats making a financial contribution to a nonprofit organization or a political campaign. Maybe its taking the bus to work instead of driving, skipping meat for a meal, or staying off Facebook for the rest of the day.

Or maybe its seizing on the opening provided by the long overdue change in guidance from the Business Roundtable. Take five minutes and write the first paragraph in a memo outlining the change in strategy youve been contemplating. Your expanded set of stakeholders recognizes whats at stake.

While some of these actions may border on the trite, doing small things can make you feel more powerful. And you know what they say about a taste of power.

Paul Michelman is editor in chief of MIT Sloan Management Review. He tweets @pmichelman.

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Can We End the Crisis of Agency? - MIT Sloan

Kirkland, Wash.

Melinda Gates walks into the Pacific Northwest-themed conference room at Pivotal Ventures, the investment and incubation company she founded to jump-start progress for U.S. women in technology.

Having just finished a recording session, she moves seamlessly through the day at the companys headquarters on the shores of Lake Washington. As she slips onto a stool at the head of a sleek conference table and starts answering questions, its instantly apparent that Ms. Gates professionalism and poise are matched by her easygoing warmth.

Right now, shes talking energetically about one of her top U.S. policy recommendations: paid family medical leave for both fathers and mothers when a child is born. If the father takes time off, we know that over time he builds a deeper relationship with his child, Ms. Gates says. Her broader agenda? Incentivizing men to do more household work a burden now primarily borne by women. It would kick a door open that has been shut in this country, she says.

Author of a new bestseller on womens empowerment, Moment of Lift, her first book, Ms. Gates would later give a talk in London that was sold out within 48 hours. After that, she would jet to Paris to speak with finance ministers of leading industrial nations about digital financial inclusion for women: a plan to link mobile phones to digital bank accounts that she says will add $3.7 trillion to emerging economies by 2025 and create 95 million jobs, boosting opportunities for women.

Large numbers and superlatives tend to accompany Ms. Gates wherever she goes. She has been at the forefront of some of the most important technological advances of the past half-century, partnering with her husband, Bill, at Microsoft Corp. in the shared belief that writing software for personal computers would give individuals the computing power that institutions had, and democratizing computing would change the world.

With their Microsoft fortune, the couple in 2000 founded what is now the worlds largest philanthropic organization, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. As co-chair of the foundation, which has an endowment of $46 billion, she funds programs that support and drive major government initiatives around the globe.

A self-described perfectionist who wants to have all the answers, shes confident enough to joke about her failures and times she didnt have a clue, such as when a major HIV prevention program in India used foundation funds to build community centers for sex workers. Bill and I never thought in a million years we would be building community centers or renting tiny little spaces that were refuges for sex workers and their children, she laughs. (Still, it worked, helping to curb the AIDS epidemic in India and save millions of lives.)

Prashant Panjiar/Courtesy of The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Melinda and Bill Gates enjoy a moment with women of the village of Jamsaut in India in 2011.

But it wasnt always this way. For more than 20 years after marrying Americas wealthiest man in 1994, the naturally shy Ms. Gates shunned the spotlight and fiercely guarded her privacy. A 1995 Seattle Times article about her, headlined A Microsoft Mystery, raised the question: Equipped with youth, brains and wealth, her power to do good seems vast, but she has yet to make a significant move. What will she do with the tools in her hands?

Little did anyone know that behind the wall of privacy Ms. Gates was struggling uncertain not only of her voice but of who she was.

It was Feb. 28, 2001, and Ms. Gates and a few female confidants had gathered at friend Emmy Neilsons home in Seattles lakefront Laurelhurst neighborhood for the first official meeting of their spiritual group.

Suddenly, as if an omen, a large earthquake rocked the area a 6.8 magnitude temblor, felt as far away as Idaho, that would be named after the nearby Nisqually River delta. I thought that was a very good sign, says K. Killian Noe, a Yale Divinity School graduate and close friend of Ms. Gates who organized the group. Because the spiritual journey should involve inner earthquakes and inner landslides.

At the time, Ms. Gates, a Roman Catholic and mother of two young children, was wrestling not only with spiritual questions, but also with what to do with her life, and even more fundamentally, with her identity.

Her early trajectory had earned her accolades as a quick learner with a knack for science and math. Growing up in Dallas the daughter of an aerospace engineer and a stay-at-home mom, she thrived under the mentorship of liberal nuns at an all-girls Catholic high school, where she first learned computing and was valedictorian of her class. In five years, she earned a degree in computer science and an MBA at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. College for me was coding with the guys, she writes in Moment of Lift. After summer stints with IBM, she got a job offer in 1987 from the much newer and smaller firm Microsoft, where she was the only woman among the first class of MBAs hired.

She rose swiftly, and by 1996 was general manager of information products at the firm. Glass ceilings seemed a thing of the past. I had thought mistakenly as a young woman that we had broken through [gender barriers], she says. I was in computer science. I had a great career at Microsoft. Yes, I faced issues at Microsoft and slights here and there, but I didnt see the hidden biases, she says.

But her promising tech career came to an abrupt halt when she decided in 1996 to leave her job managing 1,700 employees at Microsoft. Instead, she stayed home to care for her first child, daughter Jenn, because, she thought, thats what women do. Overnight, Ms. Gates found herself isolated in the 66,000-square-foot mansion that her husband had started building before their marriage. Everything came crashing down.

A lot of things cascaded together that caused that crisis of self, Ms. Gates recalls. The shift from having been a working career woman, to all of a sudden I am living behind a gate, with people who have a certain image of my husband, and I am living in a big house ... when I grew up in a tiny little home. And then I am a young new mom, she says, her voice trailing off.

Jonas Bendiksen/Rockefeller Foundation/AP/File

Farmers gather in Malawi under a program funded by the Gates and Rockefeller foundations to help small farms across Africa.

On a scale of difficulty, the crisis of self felt like a 10, the numerically minded Ms. Gates says. It feels like [the] bottom is falling out of your life, like who am I?

Slowly, she began making friends outside work, and in 1999 started jogging with three other women on Monday mornings after they got their children to school. One of them was Ms. Noe. Right off the bat ... we went deep really quickly, Ms. Noe recalls of Ms. Gates. Ms. Noe realized the women all well-off materially could come together powerfully in a journey of faith and purpose.

In all, nine women joined the spiritual group that first met on the day of the 2001 earthquake. They encouraged one another to be vulnerable, to tap into their inner wisdom and pain. In that way, Ms. Noe says, they could discover how to best be an instrument of love in the world.

We worked a lot on that in this spiritual group that Melinda was part of and still is a part of, Ms. Noe says. What does it mean to go inward to the places of your own pain and brokenness and woundedness, and from there, go outward into the world?

Buoyed by her intimate friends and spiritual discovery, Ms. Gates would carry the question with her that year as she made her first trip to Asia for the Gates Foundation.

From dirt-floored huts in India to windswept fields in Africa, Ms. Gates launched into a series of trips over the next decade that would fundamentally shape her priorities for the foundation, her views on feminism, and her own voice. The goal of saving childrens lives in developing countries drove the early work of the foundation. But Ms. Gates quickly learned family planning was also an urgent priority, by listening directly to impoverished women.

None spoke more powerfully than Meena, a young woman Ms. Gates met in 2010 in Indias northern state of Uttar Pradesh, where infant mortality is high. Meena stood in the doorway of her mud hut, cradling her infant. The baby was born at a health center and was breastfeeding both goals of a foundation-sponsored health program. But when Ms. Gates asked if she wanted more children, Meena, despondent, said no. Hopeless about educating or even feeding her infant and her other son, Meena pleaded with Ms. Gates to take them both.

Courtesy of Gates Archive

Meena, a young mother from India who Melinda Gates met in 2010, influenced the philanthropists views on family planning.

It was a heart-wrenching encounter for the foundation executive who realized that, despite the programs successes, it had tragically failed to meet Meenas need for family planning. It was really a catalyst on her own journey, recalls Gary Darmstadt, former director of family health at the Gates Foundation, who was with Ms. Gates when she spoke with Meena. Here is a stunning example of how we kind of missed it.

Family planning using birth control to prevent or space out births is what women were asking her for, and in many cases, they literally were dying as a result of not having the access, says Dr. Darmstadt, associate dean for maternal and child health at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

Convinced family planning was vital for the overarching goals of health and poverty alleviation, Ms. Gates decided to take a major public stance. She announced at a 2012 London conference that the foundation would double its investment in family planning to $1 billion by 2020, leading a huge reinvestment by governments.

The truth spoken by ordinary women that Ms. Gates delivered to high-level government officials and international conferences was unusual. She would be sitting in a circle on a dirt floor in a hut one morning, and then in the afternoon would be talking to the president of the country, says Dr. Darmstadt. Being able to bring that voice from women from the field into the room at that level, that was definitely new.

For Ms. Gates personally, it was a turning point, as well. She overcame her shyness to take a bold public stance, braving criticism even from the Catholic Church. Having witnessed the frailty of newborns, she disagreed with the Vaticans opposition to contraceptives. My conscience at the end of the day says, I dont want babies and moms to die, she says.

The more she learned about the struggles of poor women in Africa and Asia including the discrimination and abuse they faced from husbands who, for example, beat their wives for using birth control the stronger her voice became.

It wasnt until I saw these other women and what they were up against that I could turn the question back on myself and say Wow, we have a long way to go in the United States and all over the world, she says.

After years of doubt, Ms. Gates emerged as an ardent feminist. I realized that many of the things that had been said earlier in the feminist movement were true that all these barriers existed.

Connecting with women overseas also helped Ms. Gates look deep inside and confront an earlier abusive, controlling relationship before she met Bill that she felt silenced her for many years. I really explored that with the help of a therapist ... who could support me to even go back through what had happened to me, she says haltingly.

Courtesy of Frederic Courbet/Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Melinda Gates visits a baby at a health care center in Dakar, Senegal.

Ultimately, that allowed her to speak up more forcefully within her marriage to Mr. Gates, whom, she notes, was pretty used to running things at Microsoft. It wasnt until I could face that [earlier] abuse that I could understand why in certain places in my marriage I hadnt used my voice as strongly as I would have liked.

In a dark room in a village southwest of Dakar, Senegal, Ms. Gates was listening to a woman sob. She was expressing regret over her past role restraining girls undergoing traditional genital cutting. Back in her hotel room later that night, Ms. Gates, too, couldnt stop crying.

It was 2012, and the further Ms. Gates delved into the struggles girls and women faced in the developing world from child marriage to forced prostitution the stronger her convictions grew about the overarching importance of womens equality.

If you want to lift up humanity, empower women, she writes in Moment of Lift. Year by year ... I see more clearly that the primary causes of poverty and illness are the cultural, financial, and legal restrictions that block what women can do and think they can do for themselves and their children. When women have power and use it, societies prosper. No other single change can do more to improve the state of the world than elevating women to equality with men, she writes.

Ms. Gates views male-dominated culture, religion, and law as the roots of much oppression of women. But instead of seeing such forces as immutable, she has sought out and promoted grassroots programs that have carefully ended practices that harm women and girls.

One such program is Tostan, which in the Wolof language in Senegal means breakthrough or, literally, when a chick cracks open its eggshell. Launched in Senegal in 1991, Tostan is a community-led empowerment project based on empathy and understanding between those providing aid and the people they serve. In the Tostan model, a small team of facilitators fluent in the local language moves into a village for three to five years. The team invites the villagers to discuss their ideals, while teaching them about health, reading, math, and human rights. The conversation often sheds light on the gap between villagers own ideals and practices that hurt women and girls.

Our whole approach is reinforcing the positive values of the community, says Tostan founder Molly Melching, who arrived in Senegal as an exchange student in 1974 and has devoted her life to humanitarian projects in Africa. Tostan, now active in eight African countries, has achieved striking results: More than 8,000 communities where the program is operating have decided to abandon child marriage and female genital cutting.

Ms. Gates credits Tostan with changing how she thinks about development work, showing the best answers to problems are already present in the locals drive for a better future. You have to go in and really listen, then design solutions with the local community, she says. You do not get cultural change unless there is openness and ... discussion.

Even religious practices can be changed from the inside, Ms. Gates says. Senior imams in Senegal told her there is this mistaken understanding that the Koran doesnt allow for family planning, but it does, she says. They said ... we can use our network so the imam all the way down at the local village level in Senegal is giving the right messages to women, she says. Thats a great change from within.

Ms. Melching and other development experts say theyre impressed by Ms. Gates thoughtful questions and ability to listen, as well as by her willingness to make anonymous, extended stays in the field that are rare for a wealthy philanthropist.

Its the head and the heart that come together in a very powerful and unique way, Dr. Darmstadt says of Ms. Gates. On one hand, Melinda is very data driven and evidence driven, but on the other hand she is very relational. ... She wants to sit down and hear these womens stories. She wants to really understand what life is like for them.

In 2014, Ms. Gates and her daughter Jenn spent three days living with a family in a village in Tanzania. It was the first time Ms. Gates stayed overnight with a family in the field. They slept in a former goat hut. Ms. Gates helped chop firewood and cooked over a fire. She walked half an hour to fetch water, carrying it in a bucket on her head. I learned more on that homestay than ... on any previous foundation trip, she writes. Seeing the mother, Anna, labor 17 hours a day, Ms. Gates says she gained a visceral appreciation for the massive burden of unpaid labor that weighs on womens futures.

Increasingly, such insights from abroad galvanized Ms. Gates to act on problems in the U.S. and even closer to home. At the foundation, she has moved to ensure women and girls are at the forefront of global development initiatives, a decision announced in Science magazine in 2014. It was, she writes, the strongest lever I ever pulled to direct the focus and emphasis of our foundation. For American women of her daughters generation, she sees hidden biases as a big challenge, particularly in the workplace. Through Pivotal Ventures, which she started in 2015, Ms. Gates is working to boost opportunities for women where they are badly lagging in technology and venture capital. If women are not in tech, women will not have power, Ms. Gates writes.

All such efforts are amplified by Ms. Gates heavyweight role in directing the worlds largest foundation. They use their size as leverage, says Brad Smith, president of Candid, a nonprofit that researches foundations work. Mr. Smith lauds the Gates Foundation for leading by example and collaborating with other foundations around the world. They have been refreshingly good about sharing what they have learned about the work, including failure ... saying what they have done wrong, and what they could do better.

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The Gates Foundation, which has given away $50 billion since its inception, has contributed to a significant decline in child deaths and poverty worldwide. Still, important targets remain. When asked what keeps her up at night, Ms. Gates doesnt hesitate: contraceptives. In 2012, the foundation spearheaded a global partnership that set the goal of giving 120 million more women and girls in the worlds poorest countries access to modern contraceptives by 2020. So far, the initiative has reached about 50 million women and girls. When you move forward for women and you start to provide contraceptives, there are things that chip away at that progress all the time, she says.

As with the foundations trials and errors, Ms. Gates is more forgiving of her own imperfections and willing to speak out a sign her activism on the world stage has just begun. Maybe my best self is when Im open enough to say more about my doubts or anxieties, admit my mistakes, confess when Im feeling down, she writes. Maybe my best self is not my polished self.

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Melinda Gates: What shes learned - The Christian Science Monitor

In an attempt to bring campus-wide awareness to sexual assault at Binghamton University, the Student Association (SA) will be implementing a sexual assault education campaign.

The campaign will work toward developing a dialogue regarding sexual assault by improving educational programs and creating a more accurate perception of abuse, according to SA President Emma Ross, a senior double-majoring in political science and psychology. The SA office is aiming to partner with other student groups to create collaborative programs and reach out to organizations in the Binghamton community, such as the Crime Victims Assistance Center, Inc. (CVAC).

CVAC, according to their website, welcomes victims into a safe environment to talk about their experiences while also providing counseling and support throughout the process. Haley Murphy, coordinator for the Enough is Enough program through CVAC, said the center is partnered with the University to make resources more readily available to students.

We partner with a lot of different student groups at BU as well as administrative departments on campus to make sure that students are informed about their community options to report as well as their on-campus options to report, Murphy said. We are open to every opportunity to become more accessible to students. It is really the mission of our program to serve everyone who is in Broome County, even if they dont live here full time. We just really want to spread the word for them and let them know that our services are always available and confidential.

Ross wrote in an email that she has a personal connection with the issue and stressed the importance of expanding the conversation around sexual assault while encouraging the empowerment of survivors with resources and safe spaces.

When I was dealing with my experience I felt alone and lost, and we dont ever want anyone else to feel like that, Ross wrote. Connecting survivors and their supporters is one of the most powerful things we can do. Attending [the Womens Student Unions] Take Back the Night event my freshman year was when I realized the power of conversation, and how badly I had needed an outlet for my story.

According to Ross, the campaign will strive to address a wide variety of voices and stories while also addressing how sexual assault may affect several different aspects of a victims life, such as mental health, body image, social relationships and education.

We want this to be intersectional and address how sexual assault differs for people of color, the [LGBTQ] community and people who have a disability, Ross wrote. We also want to address information surrounding sexual assault and validate the people who have gone through this horrible experience.

Melanie Cruz, a junior majoring in psychology, said it is important it is for all students to feel safe expressing their stories, no matter the circumstance.

Being a student with a disability, it isnt that I dont feel safe, I just dont feel accommodated, Cruz said. I feel like the University is struggling to kind of make it feel like everyone has a voice, which is why it is important for the SA to fight back on that and give students a voice where they feel comfortable and empowered.

Ross added there are many myths surrounding sexual assault that students need to be educated on in order to put an end to certain misconceptions.

One of the big things for me is dispelling myths around sexual assault, Ross wrote. Its not the scary man in the [alley. Eight out of 10] times, a college woman knows the perpetrator. It can be very difficult to look at someone you know, someone you may have trusted or someone you may love, and identify what they have done as sexual assault. Talking about these kinds of issues with peers is something that is missing on this campus, and we strive to fix that.

The campaign is expected to start announcing events sometime in mid-to-late October. Ross said the initial events will focus on informing students about intervening when they see something wrong and promoting awareness of sexual assault.

We are essentially trying to fill in the gap between [If you see something, say something] and everything that happens, if thats not enough to prevent it, Ross wrote. What my office is starting this year is not something we view as a one-time conversation, but rather we are hoping to lay the groundwork for intersectional programming on sexual assault for years to come.

As the program is in its beginning stages, the team is still looking to hire interns to help get it off the ground. The application can be found online and in the SA Newsletter from Sept. 9.

Read the rest here:
Student Association to implement new sexual assault education campaign - Binghamton University Pipe Dream

After months of advocacy by feminist activists and organizations working with college students, the California state legislature last week passed four billsSB 24, SB 464, AB 963 and AB 59that together will expand access to abortion care on college campuses, address disparities in maternal health care and increase civic engagement among young voters.

Feminist Majority Foundation, the Womens Foundation of California, ACLU California, ACCESS: Womens Health Justice, Act for Women and Girls, California Latinas for Reproductive Justice and NARAL: Pro-Choice California all played major roles in making these laws possibleand so did the student activists who mobilized to get them passed by their lawmakers.

SB 24 passed 55 to 19, with five absent voters. The College Student Right to Access Act, if signed by Governor Newsom, would require all on-campus student health centers at public universities and colleges to offer abortion medication to students by January 1, 2023. Currently, none of the student health care centers at Californias public colleges and universities provide medication abortion services. Students seeking this basic care must travel off campus to access itoften with serious logistical and financial barriers. For low-income students, especially, paying out-of-pocket at a clinic, securing reliable transportation and missing school and work to access timely care are huge obstacles.

Getting SB 24 to become a law has been my goal for the past year, said Feminist Majority Foundation Campus Organizer Emily Escobar. Working alongside student activists to organize, rally and speak out has shown me that real change begins with elevating marginalized voices and bringing them to the forefront of the movement. Student-led activism is the real driving force behind Senate Bill 24.

SB 464, The Dignity in Pregnancy and Childbirth Act, aims to reduce pregnancy-related preventable deaths, severe illnesses and associated health disparities by addressing implicit bias among perinatal health providers. It passed 40 to 0, with all members voting.

In the U.S., at least 700 people die from childbirth each year, and 50,000 more suffer from severe complications. Additionally, in California, women of color, particularly Black women, experience maternal mortality at rates three to four times higher than white women, and evidence points to implicit bias as the culprit.

SB 464 requires all health care providers involved in perinatal services at hospitals and alternative birth centers to undergo evidence-based implicit bias training through a program that tasks medical professionals with addressing personal, institutional, structural and cultural barriers to access health care; requires the California Department of Public Health to track and publish maternal mortality and morbidity rates, including information about the underlying causes and the racial or ethnic identities of patients; and adopts the U.S. standard death certificate format regarding pregnancy.

AB 963, the Student Civic and Voter Empowerment Act, which was written in consultation with FMF National Campus Organizer Carmen Liero-Lopez, passed 67 to seven with five absent voters. In an effort to empower a new generation of voters, it requires all 147 California public colleges and universities to designate one faculty member as a Civic and Voter Empowerment Coordinator who shall convene a committee of relevant administrators, faculty and students to develop a Civic and Voter Empowerment Action Plan for a campus-wide effort to increase civic learning and democratic participation; facilitate a minimum of four events each academic calendar year that includes a focus on civic engagement, voter turnout and community building; and require all relevant civic and election dates be included on the annual academic calendar and notify students through email and social media of these dates.

AB 59, also written with input from Liero-Lopez, passed 65 to 11 with three absent votersand if signed by Governor Newsom, AB 59 would prioritize the placement of vote centers and satellite elections offices on California university and college campuses, therefore increasing access among young people. Together, AB 963 and AB 59 would promote democratic participation and civic engagement of California students, a population of roughly 3 million people.

The passage of these bills is truly an important step towards an intersectional framework not just in activism but also in legislation, Escobar said. From promoting civic engagement to reproductive justice, they directly address the need for access for everyone in the communityespecially for people of color, women, and low-income individuals.

Originally posted here:
How Campus Activism Shaped California's Legislative Agenda - Ms. Magazine

Bankole Thompson Published 11:00 p.m. ET Sept. 18, 2019

In the midst of a federal corruption probe that has lead to multiple convictions, UAW leadership casts its nationwide strike against General Motors as a way of seeking economic justice for its members.

We stood up for General Motors when they needed us most. Now we are standing together in unity and solidarity for our members, their families and the communities where we work and live, said UAW Vice President Terry Dittes.

UAW Vice President Terry Dittes(Photo: Max Ortiz, The Detroit News, File)

That narrative would stand if you believed in the self-righteousness of a leadershipfacing scrutiny over its financial integrity and allegations that it used membership dues for personal gain.

It is difficult to accept the demonstration against GM as a righteous quest to secure the financial interests of its workers. It has already idled some plants and could prove costly for UAW members.

Dennis Johnson pickets outside the General Motors Plant in Arlington, Texas, Monday, Sept. 16, 2019. More than 49,000 members of the United Auto Workers walked off General Motors factory floors or set up picket lines as contract talks with the company deteriorated into a strike.(Photo: LM Otero, AP)

If UAW leadershipwas really that concerned about protecting benefits for its rank and file, there would have beenno indictments, noconvictions.

Standing in solidarity with the members of the UAW during their strike means condemning the lavishlifestyles of the greedy leadership.

The UAW has long castigated corporate America for exploiting workers and accused CEOs of extravagant living at the expense of those who make the products their companies sell. But the federal probe reveals that the unions own leadership livedthe same way as the corporate fat cats they call out during their bullhorn protests.

Exploitation of workers for little or no benefit anywhere should be condemned in the strongest terms. But when the actions of those who are demanding equity and fairness in the workplace are no different than the business elites they routinely accuse of being insensitive to the needs of workers, we need to call out their hypocrisy and contradictions.

What is remarkable is that the UAW leadership receivedlittle attention from Democratic powerbrokers in the state during the string of indictments and convictions thatplayed outin federal court. Hardly any prominent Democrat went on the record to denounce the corruption tales that readlike Shakespearean drama.

But those same powerbrokers were quick to endorse the strike. It makes political sense to do so, but failure to register public disapproval of unionleaders'poor financial stewardshipis not in the long-term interest of labor.

Labor has often gone off the rails, especially the UAW.

Harry Belafonte, the legendary entertainer and activist, who was a confidant of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., sought to drive home that point during a 2006 National Black Peoples Unity Convention I attended in Gary, Indiana.

Belafonte bemoaned the state of the working poor, and scolded labor for being complacent and how it has forgotten its mission to protect its members before conference attendees, who were returning to Gary after the first 1972 gathering designed to map out a national strategy for black political empowerment and increase black elected leadership.

Detroit is referred to as the home of organized labor because of the unique role that unions have played in this town and during the Civil Rights Movement.

But that does not inoculate the UAW from criticism when it reaches the point of being too big to fail, while its members wallow in economic misery. Their noble history should not deter us from demanding accountability of its leadership as corruption reports show their members are being taken advantage of.

With thousands of workers on strike this week, the UAW cannot preach populism on the streets while endorsing graft and patronage inside the corridors of power at UAW Solidarity House.

After all, the arrogance of power breeds corruption.

bankole@bankolethompson.com

Twitter: @BankoleDetNews

Catch Redline with Bankole Thompson, which is broadcast at 11:00 a.m. weekdays on Superstation 910AM.

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Bankole: Condemn hypocrisy in UAW ranks - The Detroit News