A Generation of Powerful Women

By Jesse Hamlin
The San Francisco Chronicle

Tuesday 14 March 2006

Even to an optimist like Paula Goldman, the world looked very dark in the fall of 2001. The Sept. 11 attacks had just hit and the second Intifada was in full stride, forcing Goldman to give up a fellowship to go to the Middle East to write a book about peace-building efforts between Israelis and Palestinians.

Back home in the dot-com-deflated Bay Area, with a new master's degree in public policy from Princeton and no job prospects, she and a friend were mulling the terrible state of the world one morning when they realized how many young women they knew "who were doing impressive things with their lives," says Goldman, now 30. There was a woman in East Africa who started her own business, someone who began a nonprofit in Latin America. "It dawned on us that there was really something special about this generation of women, many of whom have enjoyed opportunities that were never possible for women even 30 years ago."

Out of that conversation came the idea for "Imagining Ourselves: Global Voices From a New Generation of Women," a newly published anthology and an ambitious online project featuring personal stories, paintings, photographs, essays and poems by hundreds of young women from more than 100 countries around the world - Korea, Iran, Sri Lanka, Peru, Britain, Mali, Macedonia. The women were asked to respond to one general question: "What defines your generation of women?"

A project of the International Museum of Women, a San Francisco nonprofit that puts on shows and a speakers series but doesn't collect objects or have an actual building, "Imagining Ourselves" went online March 8, International Women's Day. Since then, it has received some 200,000 hits, according to ecstatic museum officials.

Some of the submissions are reprints, among them an essay by Karenna Gore Schiff about American working mothers, and song lyrics by Malian singer Rokia Traore and the American Ani DiFranco. But the vast majority are original contributions.

They range from the expressionist figurative painting of Brazilian artist Stella Nanni to the Ruth Bernhardt-like abstracted female nude by Palestinian photographer Laura Boushnak. There are underwater images of pregnant women's "Beautiful Bellies" by US photographer Christine Luksza-Paravicini; pictures by Nigerian photographer Toyin Sokefun's examining society's vision of female beauty and how women see themselves; and a piece by Ukranian Olympic gold-medal skater Oksana Baiul about her search for her birth father.

An essay by Monique Tondoi Wanjala of Kenya about living with HIV is one of about 100 pieces on view during the month of March, organized around the theme of "Love" divided into the sub-themes "Self," "Relationships," Motherhood," "Health" and "Welcome." Next month the program shifts to "Money: Young Women in Today's Economy," followed in May by "Culture and Conflict: Uniting Women Across Boundaries," then the June theme of "The Future: Taking Action and Charting a Path for Young Women."

Wanjala's story inspired a response, posted on the same Web page, from a Kenyan writer named Lily Mabura, who's getting her doctorate at the University of Missouri at Columbia: "I love Monique's story," she wrote. "It's the story of many women in Kenya. Keeping positive and strong, despite one's HIV/AIDS status, is very important. Monique's story is testimony to that."

Goldman sought out these submissions with a volunteer team of international associates working with dozens of grassroots organizations. "We were overwhelmed," she says, by the volume and range of responses - about 3,000 from 105 countries.

When she began the project four years ago, the idea was to publish an anthology that would "capture the spirit of this generation and use it as a positive platform to inspire women into action in the face of all this negativity," says Goldman, who grew up in Southern California, got a degree in political economy at UC Berkeley and worked on reconstruction efforts in Bosnia and human rights projects in Kenya and Guatemala.

Hoping to reach as many participants as possible, the International Women's Museum opted to put the show online, hiring the San Francisco firm Zaudhaus to create the interactive gallery at www.imow.org, which gives viewers the option to read the material in English, Spanish, French or Arabic. The site also directs viewers to places where they can join efforts to stop the trafficking of girls and women, combat AIDS and provide health care in war-torn countries.

Goldman was moved by many of these stories. One of her favorites came from Nasra Abubakar, a Somali woman now working as a journalist in Nairobi.

"My generation of women is called the unmanageable ones because we are working mothers who are trying our best to be independent," Abubakar wrote. "I am different from my mother because she was a camel girl, meaning ... she took care of camels in the forest.... Those who care for camels also emerge as very good wrestlers. Because of her endurance and practice, my mother became an extraordinary wrestler herself. She was the best wrestler of her time; she actually had no equal, and men dreaded wrestling her.... My mother never went to school herself, but she wanted us to get the best education we could."

"I went to school and didn't have to take care of animals. My mother would never have dreamt of going to university, but I earned a diploma in armed conflict at the University of Nairobi."

Reading such stories has been inspiring to museum board chair Elizabeth Colton, a former political consultant who became involved with the organization in the early 1990s, when it was called the Women's Heritage Museum. She'd joined because she wanted her young daughter to learn about the contributions of women, "which weren't represented in traditional museums," Colton says, and because she wanted her to learn about the history of discrimination against women, which continues.

"Our mission is to value the lives of women around the world," says Colton, who describes the organization as a "museum without walls." Its recent effort to get some walls came to a halt when the museum dropped its plan to build a $120 million structure at Pier 26 in San Francisco. The museum, has raised about $10 million, but found the cost of renovating the structure, originally estimated at $6 million, would be 15 million, and decided "this was not the prudent way to invest our donors' money." The museum still plans to open a "physical presence" in San Francisco in the next few years, but more of a gallery than a large building.

The new online project, Colton says, can reach a far greater global audience than earlier museum shows like "Votes for Women: California Woman Suffrage, 1870-1911," now on view at the state museum in Sacramento.

"We felt it was important to give a platform to young women in their 20s and 30s, to raise their voices and inspire them to leadership," Colton says. "It's really their world."

Imagining Ourselves: Global Voices From a New Generation of Women can be found online at www.imow.org, through June 30th.