Sherry Chandler » 2008 » May » 12
Founder and President of Emily’s List, Ellen R. Malcolm says Quitters Never Win:
When I was growing up in the 1960s, I wanted to play basketball. In those days, the rules said girls could dribble only three steps and then had to pass the ball. To make sure we didn’t overexert ourselves, we weren’t allowed to cross the half-court line. It’s a wonder our fans (our mothers) could stay awake when a typical game’s final score was 14-10.
It’s remarkable that my generation of women entered the workforce and began to compete in business, politics and the hurly-burly of life outside the home. How did we ever learn to locate, much less channel, our competitive instincts in a world that made us play half-court and assumed that we would be content staying home to iron the shirts? It’s a tremendous tribute to women of my generation that we sucked it up and learned to compete in the toughest environments.
Which brings us to Hillary Clinton running for president. This brilliant woman believes that she can compete for the most powerful office in the world. She believes that she can do a better job than any of the men running to lead our country through these challenging times. And millions of Americans, women and men, believe that she is correct.
Yet over and over again the media and her opponents have claimed that she is defeated — it’s over, she can’t win, she’s a loser. And over and over again — in New Hampshire, on Super Tuesday, in Texas and Ohio, in Pennsylvania last month, and in Indiana this week — female voters poured out of their homes to cast their ballots for her. They know that women can compete, and they want to make sure that women, especially this woman, can win.
Link from Jeralyn.
This post was written by sherry
Because I spent Mother’s Day afternoon with my own mother, I’m a bit late getting to this Save The Children report on best and worst places to be a mother:
Westport, Conn. (May 6, 2008) — Save the Children, a U.S.-based independent global humanitarian organization, today released its ninth annual Mothers’ Index that ranks the best — and worst — places to be a mother and a child. The Mother’s Index, highlighted in the organization’s State of the World’s Mothers 2008 report, compares the well-being of mothers and children in 146 countries, more than in any previous year.
Nordic countries sweep the top rankings of the best places to be a mother, while countries in sub-Saharan Africa dominate the bottom tier. Sweden tops the list, while Niger ranks last among countries surveyed. The United States places 27th this year, one slot down from last year’s ranking.
Read this whole report, which I found compliments of FrenchDoc posting at Corrente, and view the multimedia presentation. It will break your heart.
As for me, I have one question. If the people who want to do away with abortion rights, the ones whose travelling exhibits show screaming fetuses to college students, the ones who think a drip of sperm on a man’s leg is a pre-born baby, if those people really think every fetus is sacred, why is the United States 27th on this list? And trending down?
Why, if every fetus is sacred, does the Bush administration cut off funding U.N. women’s health initiatives just to keep women from getting abortions? Why is this sort of thing tolerable:
…in Niger, a typical woman has less than three years of education and the life expectancy of a girl born today is only 45. Only 4 percent of Nigerian women use modern contraception, and 1 child in 4 never sees a fifth birthday. At this rate, every mother is likely to suffer the loss of a child during her lifetime.
Look at that. One child in 4, 25% of children, die before age 5. Life expectancy for women is 45.
This post was written by sherry
