Women Leaders, Relying on Their Peers’ Power and Their Own

nationalgeographic.com - This story appears in the January 2017 issue of National Geographic magazine. For 3 Questions this month, we interviewed two leaders who have blazed trails on matters of gender. Writer and activist Gloria Steinem, 82, has been one of the world’s leading feminists since the 1960s. In her memoir, My Life on the Road, the Ms. magazine co-founder describes a life of nearly constant travel, from her itinerant childhood to her ongoing global advocacy. Sheryl Sandberg, 47, is a champion for women’s leadership and the author of Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. After years of government service, she leaned in to the tech boom, first with Google and now as chief operating officer for Facebook.

Steinem and Sandberg answered our questions in separate interviews, which have been edited for length and clarity.

What was a defining moment in your life, related to gender?

Gloria Steinem: It’s difficult to think of a defining moment because gender, in my generation, was just so assumed. I never remember wanting to be a boy, except perhaps to put my feet over the movie seat in front of me in the theater. And I never remember feeling limited as a girl, because I was not going to school very much. It came as a shock and surprise when I got to be a teenager and gender became very limiting and very important. There were always whispers and rumors about girls who got pregnant and had to get married. If someone was raped, it was her fault. In my teenage years I became aware of being careful.

How the Biggest Book Club on Goodreads Is Making a Real-World Impact

Actress and UN Women Goodwill Ambassador Emma Watson has spent much of the last year learning as much as she can about feminism and women's causes, and she wants to share the learning journey. Goodreads covers their largest group: the books Watson and her book club friends worldwide are reading, and how the club is inspiring movements and clubs to organize around the globe. goodreads.com - When Emma Watson starts a book club, readers pay attention. On January 6, the British actress and UN Women Goodwill Ambassador announced her intention to start a feminist book club. It took less than 24 hours for Watson to turn her intention into reality. By January 7, Our Shared Shelf was up and running—and less than a month later, it became the largest group on Goodreads with 100,000 members (and counting).

"As part of my work with UN Women, I have started reading as many books and essays about equality as I can get my hands on," Watson wrote on Our Shared Shelf's group page. "There is so much amazing stuff out there! Funny, inspiring, sad, thought-provoking, empowering!" Her plan is to select one book a month to read and discuss with her fellow book club members. Her first pick was My Life on the Road, journalist and feminist activist Gloria Steinem's 2015 memoir. This month, the club is reading The Color Purple by novelist and feminist activist Alice Walker.

But Our Shared Shelf is more than just a place to find reading recommendations.

Read the rest here.

Why We Need to Keep Talking About Feminism

Please enjoy an excerpt from Huffington Post, where Sheila Moeschen; senior editor for I AM THAT GIRL; writes on feminism, conversations, and how a book can make us nervous—or serve as an opening for a conversation that is still vital and ongoing.  

huffingtonpost.com - I had just been to one of the nearby bookstores where I had bought Gloria Steinem's recent memoir My Life On the Road and was looking forward to pausing over some coffee to dig in and read for a while. Now I felt supremely self-conscious about breaking it out in front of this person. Would he try to engage me in a debate on feminism? Would he take it as an invitation to assume I was a Hillary supporter and pontificate on the laundry list of reasons why Hillary was bad for the country and even worse for women? Would he get angry?

In the zillion years I spent as an undergrad and graduate student studying literature, a book has never made me nervous. But here I was weirdly worried. I felt very much what it means to be an educated white woman during a time in our country's history where the focus on women—on our bodies, our access to health care, our politics and our relationship with feminism—is like a powder keg rigged up to a hair trigger. Women are in a perpetual state of vigilance it seems, on guard against physical and verbal assault, crouched in a defensive pose in anticipation of backlash. No wonder women are confused and cagey about feminism. It's risky and messy. It's a lot of work. Isn't there an app for this?

Read the rest here, and follow Sheila Moeschen on Twitter.