Should a Women's Policy Panel Focus on Women's Policy?

I was excited when I read the title of the below article. I thought, the more women in elected positions we've got working on women's issues, the better for women. Unfortunately, I was quickly disappointed to read that the group is Republican women working to promote the Republican agenda to try to earn more votes in the fall. It led me to think, are women's issues only part of the Democratic agenda? If the Republicans are seeking defense against attacks that the GOP is engaged in a "war on women" then why aren't they including "women's issues" (given quotes because in my opinion, these aren't just women's issues)-- such as healthcare, education, fair pay, childcare, etc. I could be missing something here. Would love to hear your thoughts!

House GOP launches women’s policy panel in new video

By Alicia M. Cohn - 05/22/12 12:40 PM ET

House Republican women, looking to combat the narrative that the party's policies are bad for women, this week launched a unified effort to promote female GOP voices in Congress.

House Republican women announced the Women’s Policy Committee on Monday “with the goal of raising the profile of GOP women in their roles as lawmakers, highlighting their diverse achievements and providing a unique, unified voice on a wide range of critically important issues,” according to a press release.

The committee also helps to fill a need for a Republican defense against attacks that the GOP is engaged in a “war on women" following a high-profile controversy over the White House's contraception mandate, which the GOP opposed as an attack on religious liberty and Democrats' framed as a women's health issue. The committee, which was launched with the full support of House leadership, could be effective by helping keep female Republicans at the forefront of Republican legislation.

The committee mission statement explains that the group “is organized for the purpose of influencing, advancing, leading, and communicating the Republican agenda in the House of Representatives. The Women’s Policy Committee is dedicated to the principles of job creation, less government, lower taxes, regulatory relief, personal responsibility, individual freedoms and a strong national defense.”  Rep. Mary Bono Mack (Calif.) will serve as committee chairwoman.

“As mothers, grandmothers, daughters, wives and sisters, women often see things in a different context,” she said in a statement. “As Republican women, we have some really unique ideas for moving our nation forward, and we’re excited about working together to find solutions.”

In a new video posted Tuesday, House Republicans “introduced” the 24 women serving in the House. The video’s script has the women declare through a combined effort: “We as Republican women are leading the charge to make America great again.”

“Republican women in Congress are making a real difference,” says Bono Mack in the video.
“While our backgrounds are different, one thing is not,” continues Rep. Kay Granger (Texas).
“We are all conservative reformers,” says Rep. Martha Roby (R-Ala.).
“We know what it’s like to run a budget, a business and a family,” explains Rep. Michele Bachmann (Minn.).

Republican men showed their support for the new committee through Twitter on Tuesday. House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) urged re-tweeting the new video as a digital “thank you message to our hardworking ‪#GOP‬ women."

10 Must Read Business Lessons from the Youngest Self-Made Female Billionaire

10 Lessons I Learned from Sara Blakely That You Won't Hear in Business School

Kathy Caprino

Forbes.com 

At last week’s inspiring National Association of Professional Women’s 2^nd annual networking conference, I had the opportunity to attend the keynote presentation of Sara Blakely, Founder of Spanx. In her one-hour talk, Sara highlighted her fascinating journey from launching a start-up with $5000 in savings to becoming the youngest self-made female billionaire in history. Anyone who’s heard Sara’s story knows it’s exhilarating and motivating, but to see her live brings a new dimension to her story. She’s fresh, exuberant, funny and completely passionate about helping women feel and look their best, and about reforming all of the misguided trends that have kept in women in painful and ill-fitting undergarments over the last 50 years.Sara delivers surprise after surprise in her tale of phenomenal entrepreneurial success. As I love to be “contrarian” in my work, I’m very taken with her non-conventional lessons that fly in the face of all the best business school advice we received from the business pundits and gurus.

Here are the top 10 lessons I learned from Sara’s journey from fax machine saleswoman to entrepreneurial superstar:

Move upMove down

1) Fail Big – Sara’s beloved father followed Wayne Dyer’s guidance in teaching his children the power of failing big. Each day, her father would ask – “So, what did you fail at today.” And if there were no failures, Dad would be disappointed. Focusing on failing big allowed Sara to understand that failure is not an outcome, but involves a lack of trying — not stretching yourself far enough out of your comfort zone and attempting to be more than you were the day before. Failing big was a good thing.

2) Visualize it – Sara is a big fan of “visualizing” your big goal, in specific, concrete ways. She saw herself clearly on the Oprah TV show 15 years before it happened. She simply knew it would happen. She’d see in her mind’s eye sitting on the couch with Oprah having an exciting conversation, and wondered, “What are we talking about?” The rest was just “filling in the blanks” to get there.

3) Don’t share your fragile idea with the world too soon. Sara kept her idea of making a fabulous new undergarment for women under wraps for an entire year while working on developing the prototype. Only after she was 100% committed to it and ready to launch, did she sit her friends down and explain her new direction. Sara explains that ideas are vulnerable, fragile things. Wait until you’re completely read to move forward before you share it with people. Meaning well, they’ll shoot it down, offering all the reasons why it won’t work. But when they do, you’ll be ready to deal with it.

4) Don’t take no for an answer. Sara reached out to slews of manufacturers and lawyers to help her patent her idea and create a successful prototype. In every conversation she had with potential manufacturers, she was asked three questions: 1) Who are you? 2) Who are you with? 3) and Who is backing you? When the answers to these three questions remained, “Sara Blakely,” no one wanted to take a chance on her, until one manufacturer called her back and said “OK.” Why? Because he had gone home and told his daughters about the idea, and they said, “It’s brilliant!”

5) Hire people you like and trust (even if they don’t know a great deal about what you need them to do). Sara hired a head of Product Development and a PR director who had been friends and supporters from the beginning. Neither knew anything about the functional areas they were hired to oversee, but Sara trusted they’d be fabulous at their new roles, and they were.

6) You don’t have to go in order. Sara’s passionate commitment to her new Spanx product was so fierce, she just tackled each task in the development and marketing journey as they came up, not necessarily in the best order for a smooth launch. She landed a Neiman Marcus deal involving placement of the product in seven stores, before figuring out how to mass produce “crotches” for the product. The Oprah show called to do a feature on her in a staff meeting in her “offices” before she had an office or a staff. She winged it, and it all went well.

7) You CAN figure it out – you have the ability. Sara knew absolutely nothing about women’s undergarments, patenting a new product, manufacturing, marketing, product development, website development, online commerce, and more. But that didn’t stop her. She researched what she needed to, hired out what she couldn’t do, and marched forward with undying commitment and energy. Don’t stop yourself from pursuing an idea because you don’t think you have what it takes.

8) You can build a billion dollar business starting with $5,000. Sara had only $5,000 in savings on that fateful day when she cut the feet off of her stockings in order to wear them under her white pants for a more flattering look (and thus, realized the world needed a new undergarment product that would be comfortable yet flattering to the female form). From that $5,000 she embarked on designing a prototype, securing a manufacturer, naming the product, legally protecting her product, and getting the word out to potential buyers. You don’t have to be rich to move forward with your fabulous new idea.

9) Don’t worry about the outer “stuff” until the time is right. Sara worked tirelessly from her apartment creating her product, avoiding investing in outside office space or other marketing and business tools until the product had taken off. She didn’t have a formal website until she made it on the Oprah show and needed one. Anything that wasn’t essential to building the product and getting the name out there simply wasn’t a priority.

10) Breaking the mold is a good thing. When Sara began to research undergarments for women and how they’d been made for the last 50 years, she was astonished. From the absurd sizing protocols (only one average waist measure was used on all the products, regardless of the size of the garment), to how products were tested (on manikins not real people), Sara saw that the undergarment industry needed a female perspective – insights from a real woman wearing these items to shape the product development direction so the products were useful, effective, and as comfortable as possible. She broke the mold, and developed a completely new approach to developing women’s undergarments.

Sara’s most important tip:
“Believe in your idea, trust your instincts, and don’t be afraid to fail. It took me two years from the time I had the idea for Spanx until the time I had a product in hand ready to sell into stores. I must have heard the word “no” a thousand times. If you believe in your idea 100%, don’t let anyone stop you! Not being afraid to fail is a key part of the success of Spanx.”
In the end, Sara Blakely’s story shows us what’s possible when we believe, when we’re resourceful beyond measure, and when our passion and commitment to something outside ourselves brings us to a calling.





What are you most afraid of failing at? Will you get in the cage with your fears and take a step toward your dream today?

Thought about Giving Birth?

Below is an interesting article on at-Home births. Since I've never been pregnant, I have not had to do any sort of investigation or contemplation about what I would want in my childbirth process.  After reading the below article, I thought it'd be helpful to share it for other women who may not be as informed.   

Mommy Wars: The Prequel
Ina May Gaskin and the Battle for at-Home Births
by Samantha Shapiro, May 23, 2012

One Monday morning last spring, Ina May Gaskin got into her golf cart and drove it down the dirt road away from her home on the Farm, a community of 175 residents on a former commune in rural Tennessee that her husband started in the 1970s. She pulled up to the community center, where she would be teaching a class on delivering breech babies. The class was part of a weeklong seminar Gaskin and her fellow midwives were offering to an eclectic group: nurse-midwifery students attending for college credit; a Boston-area family-practice doctor; midwives from around the country; and one, from Australia, who went by the one-word moniker Macca. They had traveled to this corner of southern Tennessee to learn from the founding mother of the natural-birth movement.

Gaskin began her presentation. She told the students that “at first, we brought breech pregnancies to the hospital, but we found after a while that we could deliver them here just fine. Footling breeches, which are thought to be the most difficult, in our experience, they often just slid right out.” Gaskin, who is 72, has the spry, almost Seussian presence of someone much younger. Her gray hair, trimmed since the days when she wore it in thigh-length braids, was loose and a bit wild, and she wore jeans, gardening shoes and a homemade jacket.

Gaskin, a longtime critic of American maternity care, is perhaps the most prominent figure in the crusade to expand access to, and to legalize, midwife-assisted homebirth. Although she practices without a medical license, she is invited to speak at major teaching hospitals and conferences around the world and has been awarded an honorary doctorate from Thames Valley University in England. She is the only midwife to have an obstetric procedure named for her. The Gaskin Maneuver is used for shoulder dystocia, when a baby’s head is born but her shoulders are stuck in the birth canal.

Gaskin cued up a video of a birth that took place in the 1980s. The couple, Judy and Brad, had traveled to the Farm from another state because their midwife couldn’t deliver their breech baby vaginally.

Most American doctors and midwives won’t. In 2001 the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) recommended C-sections as the best route of delivery for breech babies. Although ACOG modified that view in 2006, more than 90 percent of breech babies are now born by Caesarean, and the Farm is one of a dwindling number of places in the United States where practitioners still know how to perform vaginal breech delivery.

On the video, after five hours of pushing, Judy’s son emerged buttocks first, his tiny scrotum swollen from the pressure. Judy made increasingly urgent sounds — something between a Tuvian throat singer and a squawking chicken — as the buttocks inched out.

Gaskin paused the video. “The main danger with breech babies is that the head, the largest part of baby, is last to come out, so it may get stuck,” she told the students. “If the baby has been delivered to the umbilicus, you have five or six minutes before hypoxia sets in, but you don’t want to pull on the head if you can’t see the neck for fear of injuring the baby,” Gaskin said.

She restarted the video to show how that situation could unfold. Judy’s baby had been born up to his chest but his arms were caught alongside his head inside his mother’s body. On the DVD, a younger Gaskin, wearing a sleeveless dress, moved without a hint of nervousness. She rotated the baby’s torso vigorously to loosen it from Judy’s body; one arm emerged, but Gaskin was unable to reach in and grab a shoulder. The Tuvian throat sounds escalated.

Gaskin let the baby, half-born, hang out of his mother and dangle off the side of the bed. Using the weight of his body to traction his head into a better position, she pulled him out with a rush of bloody fluid. The boy looked a little limp, but after a vigorous rubdown and some gulps from an oxygen tank, he gave a cry. Minutes later Judy called out joyfully to another Farm midwife “Pamela, we have a baby!”

I first learned about Gaskin when I became pregnant last year. In my Brooklyn neighborhood, her books on birth are a standard part of the pregnancy canon, and I was given “Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth” and two copies of “Spiritual Midwifery” by three different friends. Now in its fourth edition, “Spiritual Midwifery” is a heady dispatch from the Farm’s midwifery practice around 1975. It tells of how Gaskin and other women discovered that birth could be a euphoric experience, a way of accessing a uniquely female power. In first-person anecdotes of births — “I began to rush and everything got psychedelic” is a typical description — the book shows vaginal, unmedicated birth to be an unparalleled opportunity for transcendence and communion. It has been translated into six languages and sold well over half a million copies.

Click here to read the remainder of the article.

Report: More women, minorities on Conn. boards

Interesting article about women's representation on boards and commissions in CT!
http://www.wtnh.com/dpp/news/hartford_cty/report-more-women-minorities-on-conn-boards

Updated: Tuesday, 22 May 2012, 5:54 PM EDT
Published : Tuesday, 22 May 2012, 5:54 PM EDT

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — A new report shows more women, blacks and Hispanics now sit on state boards and commissions, but the numbers still don't match the diversity of Connecticut's population.

While women hold a slim majority in the state, the report conducted by the Office of the Secretary of the State found there are still nearly 20 percent more men on state boards, commissions, committees and councils. Additionally, Hispanics are the fastest growing population group in Connecticut, but they represent less than four percent of the appointees.

The office did find, for the first time, the percentage of black appointees to these panels is at parity with the state's black population.

The report has been conducted every two years since 1993.

This year's report examined 175 boards. Of those, 24 had no females.

Join the Conversation on Women's Health

Upset with what's happening with women's health?  Join us for an open discussion on the war on women's health care!

On Saturday, June 16, CT NOW will join with NARAL Pro-Choice CT, Planned Parenthood and Connecticut's Women's Education and Legal Fund (CWEALF) for an open conversation on women's health care. 

The event is free, sponsored by the Connecticut Federation of Democratic Women and will be at the First Church of Christ, 190 Court Street, Middletown, CT from 9 am to 12 pm.

After the forum, you can attend the Fannie Dixon Welch Scholarship Luncheon at the First and Last Tavern on Main Street in Middletown.  There is a $30 fee to attend the luncheon.

RSVP is requested by June 7 to Liz Duarte, eduarte432@gmail.com.

A Little Soul Searching

It may just be the rain, or the clouds, that have come back to us after an amazing weekend, but I felt in need of a little pick me up! This article brought a smile to my face and reminded me to breath deeply, focus on others and keep the positive juices flowing!!


Soul-Thoughts for a Radiant Life
William Horden
Huffington Post

What are the moment-to-moment thoughts we are projecting every day?

From the soul's perspective, there is no more practical question than this, since the way we are thinking and feeling all the time forms our spiritual relationship with the world.

The more superficial sense of "I" that we experience as our private, individual, personality is formed by the thoughts, emotions and memories we habitually fall back into whenever we are not actively engaged with the outer world. This habit-mind is a kind of default stance that we are most familiar with, the stream of consciousness we "hear" when we silently "talk to ourselves." We are most familiar with this "me" because we have lived with it our whole life: It is, of course, the sum of all the body's experiences. The thoughts we think, the emotions we feel and the memories we relive by habit -- these are the components of our personal life-mood, the relatively constant way we have felt about our life since childhood that determines how we respond to what happens to us.

Our life-mood -- our personal demeanor, our lifelong disposition -- pours out of us into the invisible world of spiritual cause-and-effect that creates change in the visible world. In the long term, these ingrained attitudes create a stagnant relationship with the world around us: When our moment-to-moment thoughts remain the same, our personal power and success and luck remain the same. The consistent inner actions we are habitually producing radiate out into the spiritual environment, where they interact with those of others. It is in this realm that we can change our life for the better: When we change our moment-to-moment thoughts, we change our personal power and success and luck.

Soul-thoughts express the soul's intention to live in harmony with our spiritual environment: They are inner actions that we consciously take up to replace our habitual thoughts, emotions and memories. They are ancient thoughts that evoke new emotions and memories, thereby opening the door for a new moment-to-moment stream of consciousness to pour out of us into the realm of spiritual cause-and-effect.

Such soul-thoughts are timeless lessons of wisdom that have for ages been used to align the personality with the soul. They attune our personality to the laws of spiritual cause-and-effect, bringing it into harmony with the underlying harmony of the world. By concentrating on soul-thoughts instead of allowing our habit mind to run away with us, we change our relationship to the world -- by thinking soul-thoughts instead of habit-thoughts, we rise above the pettiness of self-centeredness that has been holding us back from experiencing our birthright of full personal power, success and luck.

Soul-thoughts, then, orient the personality to the compass points of the spiritual landscape. The practice of concentrating on each in turn evokes more sublime sensitivities and engenders more profound experiences -- it allows us, in other words, to respond to events in creative, spontaneous and beneficial ways rather than continuing to react in predictable and habitual ways. By shifting our attention away from the narrow view of the personality's self-interest, we paradoxically make the personality more successful. This occurs because soul-thoughts resonate with the underlying harmony of the spiritual laws of cause-and-effect, thereby unlocking the hidden doors leading to greater personal power, success and luck. In this sense, working with soul-thoughts enhances the way we interact with others and allows us to make new kinds of decisions -- not simply more effective ones, but startling and surprising decisions that carry us into a new and more exciting life.

Try replacing your self-defeating thoughts with the statements in italics below for extended periods of time -- thinking them in your heart, feeling them in your mind -- to both calm the negative habits of your personality and experience the presence of your soul closer to the surface of everyday awareness.

Five Soul-Thoughts for a Radiant Life
1. Assessing Present Thoughts:
As an immortal spirit, are these the thoughts, feelings and memories I choose to carry for eternity?

2. Attaining Inner Freedom:
What is most important is not how others are treating me -- what is most important is how I am treating others.

3. Expressing Inner Power:
I am a well of happiness, overflowing into the lives of others.

4. Attuning to Good Fortune:
I am part of a Living Whole that wants the best for me and all others at the same time.

5. Ennobling this Lifetime:
Because everything is sacred, so am I.

By orienting us within the realm of spiritual cause-and-effect, soul-thoughts transform our moment-to-moment inclination toward what we are about to experience. They allow us to lean into the coming moment with a more open-minded, open-hearted and dynamic personality. Instead of leaning into the coming moment with the kind of self-defeating thoughts, emotions and memories that lead us to keep trying the same failed strategies over and over, we find ourselves attuned to the whole and moving along with it conscientiously.

Ultimately, the primary lesson we learn from concentrating on soul-thoughts is this: What we are looking for is not something we wait to learn or understand or receive -- it is something that we ourselves produce in our hearts and send forth to shine on the furthest horizons of the spiritual universe.

US settles over mortgage insurance denied to women

Interesting article regarding women and mortgages.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20120430/us-mortgages-maternity/

April 30, 2012 06:35 PM EST | Associated Press

---

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department has settled a first-of-its-kind discrimination case against the nation's largest mortgage insurer for requiring women on maternity leave to return to work before the company would insure their mortgages.

The lawsuit filed last July against the Mortgage Guaranty Insurance Corp. alleged a violation of the Fair Housing Act and was the government's first involving discrimination against women in mortgage insurance.

The lawsuit arose from a complaint to the Housing and Urban Development Department by a Wexford, Pa., loan applicant.

Seventy people will be compensated from a $511,250 fund. The Justice Department's civil rights enforcement chief, Thomas Perez, says no lending company should force a parent to give up the right to take time off from work to obtain a mortgage loan.

A federal court approved the settlement.