Stepping Out of Line: Lessons for Women Who Want It Their Way...in Life, in Love, and at Work - Softcover

Merlino, Nell

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0767924843 ISBN 13: 9780767924849

Verlag: Random House Inc, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

When activist Nell Merlino decides something needs to change, she throws everything she has into changing it. Whether it is raising the visibility of girls or helping women build their businesses, her many campaigns have helped women make dreams come true. Now she marshals her life lessons—and those of other gutsy women—to help women have ittheir way.

Stepping Out of Line is Merlino’s bold manifesto for women to stop waiting and get what they want, in the arenas of love or work or in the world at large. Offering practical nuggets like “Gain from complaining” and “The system is more malleable than you think,” she shows women how to imagine bigger lives, find support, and stay the course.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

NELL MERLINO created Take Our Daughters to Work Day for the Ms. Foundation for Women in 1993, and today, more than 71 million Americans have taken part. She is currently CEO of Count Me In for Women's Economic Independence, which helps women grow microbusinesses into million-dollar enterprises through its Make Mine a Million $ Business program. She lives in Manhattan.

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1: Stepping Out with Take Our Daughters to Work Day

A phone call woke me up the morning after the very first Take Our Daughters to Work Day in April 1993. It was Wyatt Andrews, an old-school, serious, senior correspondent for CBS Evening News, calling from one of those phones that was embedded in the backs of airplane seats before they had tiny TVs with forty-seven channels. He was on the "power plane," the shuttle between Washington, D.C., and New York, with all the businesspeople in power suits drinking power coffee and reading their morning newspapers.

Wyatt told me he was calling because while he was walking down the aisle of that plane, he had seen Take Our Daughters to Work Day stories and photos on the front page of everyone's papers: USA Today, the New York Times, The Washington Post, New York Daily News, the Wall Street Journal, and others. There were photos of girls in every conceivable profession, dressed in uniforms ranging from hard hats to chef's toques to surgical masks to dainty pearls. There were girls in goggles soldering circuit boards. Girls reading fetal heart monitor graphs. Girls flying flight simulators. Girls walking through the halls of Congress. Girls computing. Girls lunching. Girls meeting. Girls everywhere.

"You did it," he said over and over. "You did it! You did it!"

Weeks earlier, Wyatt had interviewed me in New York for a national story. He had asked me tough questions, like whether the need for Take Our Daughters to Work Day was an indictment of the women's movement, if it was an indication of the failure of people like Gloria Steinem and others to change the world for women. I had said no, it was absolutely not an indication of failure. In fact, it was a mark of our success so far and a recognition of just how long it takes to make lasting, systemic, social and economic change.

During this celebratory phone call, Wyatt also mentioned to me that he had become an overnight sensation at his two daughters' school, because of his story on Take Our Daughters to Work Day. He was not famous because he was a newscaster. He was famous because everyone at school wanted to find out more about Take Our Daughters to Work Day. They had seen his news story and lined up to ask him whether they were planning the day correctly for their daughters. Wyatt said he'd never had so much interest in a single story. Everyone wanted to talk about and be part of Take Our Daughters to Work Day.

"You did it," he kept saying on the phone that morning. "You did it!"


The Steps to Change

Much of what I know about making change I learned or confirmed in the process of making my vision of Take Our Daughters to Work Day come to life. The story of this event--which changed my life as well as the lives of millions of girls--highlights many of the themes we will explore in this chapter and later chapters:

* Start with the end in mind. Define what success looks like and feels like to you. Define the desired impact of your actions.
* Activate your imagination. Whatever you are struggling with in your life, envision the best outcomes you possibly can. You have to see it before you can devise a plan to get there. Imagine how other people feel or how they might approach the challenge.
* Expect and listen to resistance to your idea or plan. Other people's criticism and questions help you find out what people are afraid of, what they are protecting. When used constructively, resis_tance is valuable information.
* Inspire, activate, and mobilize who you know. Engage all the help you need. Drop any notion that you have to--or can do--anything significant alone.
* Expand your definition of success to include others. As you step out of line, you will likely find that other people will follow your lead.
* Write it all down. None of the inspiring messages and stories in this book replaces the need for a strong plan. Take it from a communications expert: a strategic outline and a few clearly written paragraphs can go a long way.


As you will see from the Take Our Daughters to Work Day story, creating change is not magic. It happens by putting one foot in front of the other and using every bit of creativity, information, and support you can gather. A written plan is also essential. It doesn't have to be fancy, but it needs to be your road map that reminds you of what you are doing and why. Like everything else you want to succeed at, making change requires commitment, focus, and discipline. And to begin with, it takes imagination.


The Story of Take Our Daughters to Work Day

One of the most frequent questions people ask me is how I came up with the idea for Take Our Daughters to Work Day. The short answer is that I used my imagination. The longer answer is that I wanted other girls to have the kind of experience that I had going to work with my parents.

The Take Our Daughters to Work Day story begins in 1992, when Carol Gilligan completed a study that documented a pattern of strong, vital girls devolving into ten_tative, unsure young women as they passed through adolescence. Gilligan found that most girls' confidence levels plummeted by the time they reached their teens. By high school, more than two-thirds of girls had lost their self-confidence and faced poor self-image and low expectations. This meant eating disorders in girls as young as age eleven; a doubling of the incidence of depression for late adolescent girls as compared to boys; at least one suicide attempt for over 20 percent of teenage girls; and over a million pregnancies for those between the ages of twelve and nineteen.

The Ms. Foundation for Women wanted to launch a big effort to do something about this. I'd caught the foundation's attention because of a campaign I had helped organize with the Gay Men's Health Crisis to publicize the tenth year of the AIDS epidemic. The Ms. Foundation decided to hire me to come up with a campaign to make adults aware of the tragic loss of self-esteem that girls experience in adolescence. I knew this required a big idea, a way for girls to be valued for their ideas, strength, and aspirations and not just their cuteness.

Around this time I attended a retirement dinner for my father. I sat there looking around at all of the people my father had worked with over the course of his public service career, and thought about how my meeting all these people and observing them at work had influenced my own choices in life. I had gone to the office and on the campaign trail with my father and often observed him working. I had also seen my mother raising five children and painting on canvas, theater scenery, and public murals. I had gone to my mother's art studio and observed her and the other five women painters with whom she rented the space. I knew what my parents did for a living and I learned from watching them that they loved their work.

During the retirement dinner, I started to see a video unreeling in my mind's eye of a crowded New York City subway filled with girls traveling with their parents or other adults to work. There were as many girls as adults on this train. What if for one day, everyone focused on the potential of young women? What would that look like? For a national campaign to get attention, I knew that girls had to appear someplace that people never imagined girls being. Girls would need to step out of school for one day and populate workplaces across the nation and around the world.

Immediately, I started to imagine physically how such a thing would occur, and what help we would need to make my vision a reality. And I began to write down a plan. Take Our Daughters to Work Day was born. I started with a vision of the way things could be, and then step by step I worked to bring that vision to life. You can do this, too.


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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Random House Inc
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0767924843
• ISBN 13: 9780767924849
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 222
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar