teenvogue.com - The Women's March on Washington truly became a national, and international, movement, with hundreds of thousands of people marching across the United States and around the world in support of women's rights. In downtown Los Angeles alone, 750,000 people marched and one of those was actress and activist Rowan Blanchard, who took to the podium after marching to address the crowd. And though she regularly educates and informs her millions of followers on social media, there’s something about addressing almost a million faces IRL that would probably spook anyone just a little bit — but not Rowan. Although she began her speech by addressing the initial despair she felt after Donald Trump’s election win, she then eloquently explained why she won’t let fear impede her work as an activist in these next four years. “I believe in art,” Rowan told the crowd after reading a passage on hope from a Rebecca Solnit text, “but more than that, I believe in the ineffable power of community.” She went on to note that the strength of marginalized communities is what teaches us that organizing works: “If women, if queer people, if people of color have survived this long in a world that refuses to represent them, that must amount to a force much greater than one man with nothing more to invest in but his ego.” Make no mistake: Her speech is definitely a must-watch.
Girl Crush: Rowan Blanchard and Cecile Richards
“Girl Meets World” star Rowan Blanchard and Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards discussed feminism, social media, and more last month; in PAPER Magazine's “Girl Crush” series. It was an ideal match--a quickly rising television star and young progressive voice and a longtime advocate for women's reproductive rights--and Blanchard mentioned Richards as one of her role models, while Richards praised the use of social media among today's young women as a way to get stories out and help mobilize people. “Whether it was their own sexual health stories, their own things that have concerned them, the issues they’ve dealt with as a woman,” she says in the interview. “It can be a really democratizing force.”
The entire discussion is fascinating. Click through to read the entire interview.
papermag.com - In our 'Girl Crush' series, women with mutual admiration for one another get together for conversations that offer illuminating looks into what it's like to be a woman right now.
Back in August, Rowan Blanchard posted an impressively thoughtful essay to Instagram about the importance of intersectionality in feminism, catapulting the 14-year-old Disney Channel star of Girl Meets World into becoming a rising voice of her generation. Her poise, eloquence, and commitment to promoting equality and understanding are traits also shared by Cecile Richards. The president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America was recently in the spotlight for the way she intelligently and gracefully testified before Congress during a House hearing that included accusations and bullying from GOP lawmakers attempting to cut federal funding from the organization. A few months after these events, Richards and Blanchard got together to discuss why it's more important than ever that young women receive information about reproductive health, and why despite this fraught political landscape, there's a lot of reason for hope.
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