Last Sunday afternoon, Holton-Arms staged our third annual Open Door
Film Society event. This year, we
featured MAKERS and more specifically the new MAKERS film commemorating the 20th
anniversary of the Beijing World Conference on Women entitled Once and For All. If you’re not familiar with MAKERS, here’s your opportunity. Part of AOL, describing itself as “a women's leadership platform that
encompasses broadcast documentaries, web and mobile-first video content, and
live events,” it’s a website that contains “the largest video collection of women’s
stories.” It has collected over 3,000
videos and chronicled more than 300 women’s stories. That
description alone should attract our attention.
The fact that Sammi Leibovitz, Holton class of 2006, as Vice-President
and Creative Director at AOL, oversees MAKERS, guarantees we at Holton-Arms should be
interested in this organization. Sammi,
a 2010 graduate of the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication at Syracuse
University, joined us on Sunday to tell us a little about MAKERS and present the
pre-release showing of the film.
I’ve known about MAKERS for a while and have kept meaning to
explore it. Sammi inspired me to dive
in. What a treasure trove it is! I began with the Read tab, a collection of
news pieces, not all from MAKERS. The
articles close to the top included one from xx about Bradley Cooper supporting
equal pay for his female co-stars.
Another heartwarming story featured a firefighters who banded together
to support a fellow firefighter in her fight against breast cancer. Still another original piece offered advice
for helping a friend in an abusive relationship. If this variety hasn’t piqued your interest,
perhaps an article entitled “6 ways women have broken the ice in professional
hockey” or Vanity Fair’s recounting
by Jane Fonda of Katherine Hepburn improbably mentoring a young Michael Jackson
will. Katherine Hepburn and Michael
Jackson? Really? My favorite, however,
was a MAKERS list of quotes by famous men about feminism. My two favorite quotations: "My advice
to the women's clubs of America is to raise more hell and fewer dahlias," from
the painter, James McNeill Whistler;
and from Teddy Roosevelt:
Conservative friends tell me that woman’s duty is the home. Certainly. So is man's. The duty of a woman to the home isn’t any more than the man’s. If any married man doesn’t know that the woman pulls a little more than her share in the home he needs education. If the average man has more leisure to think of public matters than the average woman has, then it’s a frightful reflection on him. If the average man tells you the average woman hasn’t the time to think of these questions, tell him to go home and do his duty. The average woman needs fifteen minutes to vote, and I want to point out to the alarmist that she will have left 364 days, 23 hours and 45 minutes.
A man well ahead of his time.
Then I headed to the Watch section where are located the hundreds of
videos of women pioneers, activists, and leaders. I could spend days just watching these pithy,
thought-provoking clips. The women
represent a huge range. There are household
names like Hillary Rodham Clinton, Condoleeza Rice and Madeleine Albright;
Carol Burnett, Glenn Close, Misty Copeland, Katie Couric, Ellen DeGeneres, Lena
Dunham, Ruth Bader Ginsberg & Sandra Day O’Connor, Nancy Pelosi, Michelle
Rhee, Phyllis Schlafly, Martina Navratilova, Mia Hamm, Alice Waters, Dr. Ruth
Westheimer, and Oprah, to name a few.
Then there are others who would be familiar to some but not others such
as Shirley Tilghman, former President of Princeton, Ruth Simmons, President of
Brown, Sheryl WuDunn, a journalist, Rachel Simmons, author of Odd Girl Out, Danica Patrick, the NASCAR
driver, Catharine MacKinnon, a feminist legal scholar, Wendy Kopp, founder of
Teach for America, Carol Gilligan, pioneering psychologist studying girls
development, Susan Cain, author of Quiet,
Sara Blakely, founder of Spanx, and Marin Alsop, the first female conductor of
a major American orchestra, the Balitimore Symphony. And then there are numerous women I’ve never
heard of, mostly activists and artists.
I started with Kelly
Clark, an Olympic snowboarder. I only
recognized her name because my son worked for her brother this summer. The beginning of her story is about
triumphing in a male world,” a pack of guys,” and winning a gold medal at the 2002
Olympics. However, she didn’t train well
enough for her second Olympics, and she finished a disappointing fourth. In the aftermath of defeat, she redoubled her
efforts and won a bronze the next time around.
She says that the bronze means much more to her than the gold “because I
know what it cost me.” Her advice, “Bend
your knees and go faster.”
Marissa Mayer
, the first female engineer at google who is now the CEO of Yahoo! shares her
experience as a Stanford and silicon valley female computer scientist. Mayer, who didn’t even know how to turn on
the computer she bought at the Stanford bookstore as a freshman in 1993,
probably succeeded because she seems to be, to use her words, “gender oblivious.“
She loved the problem solving in
computer science, the fact that there is “no formula, no recipe, no
memorization,” each problem offers a fresh start. She urges girls and women to ignore the fact
that boys have played video games and coded from a young age. She believes that “If you can push through
that feeling of being scared, that feeling of taking a risk, really amazing
things can happen.”
I heard Kirsten
Gillibrand, Senator from New York, speak several years ago and was very
impressed, so I wanted to watch her clip.
As it turns out, Hillary Clinton’s 1995 speech in Beijing, the one
featured in the film we saw on Sunday, proved a turning point in Gillibrand’s
life. She was working as a securities
lawyer for a big New York law firm, but listening to Clinton made her think: “I’m
not accomplishing anything here; I’m not making a difference; I’m not helping
people.” Clinton “inspired [her] to try
to focus [her] career more on public service.”
Her first attempts to enter public life failed, but refusing to give up,
she appealed to Andrew Cuomo, then HUD Secretary, for advice and he hired
her. Her experience in Washington
convinced her to run for Congress and she moved back to Upstate New York where
she had grown up. Despite warnings that
her opponent, the incumbent, was a “bit of a bully,” she persisted and as a
Democrat won a seat in a heavily Republican district in 2006. When Hillary Clinton became Secretary of
State, the Governor of New York appointed Gillebrand to take her place. She later won a special election with 63% of
the vote. Her advice: “You can do anything you set your mind to as
long as you work hard and stay focused.”
And from her grandmother, never give up; you should “keep fighting; . .
. sometimes, even if you’re not successful you do great good by just fighting
for what you believe in and trying to make a difference.”
Given that she graduated from Holton, I had to watch Julia Louis-Dreyfus. She has much to say about working on “Saturday Night Live” (which she hated), “Seinfeld,” and the power of comedy bring about change. She sounds most like a Holton girl in her praise of Kari Lizer, the Executive Producer and creator of the “The New Adventures of Old Christine.” Louis-Dreyfus observes, “We were both highly organized, shows got done in the most organized fashion you can’t even imagine; scripts were ready well in advance; people got home in time to get dinner on the table; there was a great amount of calm and organization on the set and I definitely attribute that to a woman running the whole kit and caboodle.” On the topic of women in Hollywood and her own career, she says, “I am certainly aware that women need to be better represented in Hollywood. But I’ve never let it get in my way; I’ve gone for the jobs what I’ve wanted and I’ve stuck to my guns.” Sounds like our motto, Find a Way or Make One” to me!
All these women epitomize what Joanna Barsh, Director
Emeritus at McKinsey & Company, who spoke at the first MAKERS national
conference in 2014 calls “triumphant outliers.”
They have achieved that status by pushing themselves, persisting even
after defeat, and believing that if you just keep trying – moving past fear or
discrimination, you can succeed. In the meantime, "bend your knees and go faster."MAKERS
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