What I Told My Daughter: Lessons from Leaders on Raising the Next Generation of Empowered Women - Softcover

Tassler, Nina

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1476734682 ISBN 13: 9781476734682

Verlag: Simon & Schuster, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

Empower yourself and the latest generation of girls with this collection of inspiring reflections from notable, highly accomplished women in politics, academia, athletics, the arts, and business, including Madeleine Albright, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and more.

In What I Told My Daughter, a powerful, diverse group of women reflect on the best advice and counsel they have given their daughters either by example, throughout their lives, or in character-building, teachable moments between parent and child.

A college president teachers her daughter, by example, the importance of being a leader who connects with everyone—from the ground up, literally—in an organization.

One of the country’s only female police chiefs teaches her daughter the meaning of courage, how to respond to danger but more importantly how not to let fear stop her from experiencing all that life has to offer.

A bestselling writer, who has deliberated for years on empowering girls, wonders if we’re unintentionally leading them to believe they can never make mistakes, when “resiliency is more important than perfection.”

In a time when childhood seems at once more fraught and more precious than ever, What I Told My Daughter is a book anyone who wishes to connect with a young girl cannot afford to miss.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Nina Tassler was the chairman of CBS Entertainment and has nurtured some of the most popular shows in television, including The Big Bang Theory, How I Met Your Mother, ER, and the critically acclaimed The Good Wife. She also helped shepherd the global phenomena CSI and NCIS to the screen. Tassler serves on the board for the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation and is a member of the Board of Trustees for Boston University. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two children.

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What I Told My Daughter Preface
I was forty when my daughter was born. After nine months, sixty pounds, and enough water retained to fill the Los Angeles reservoir I gave birth via emergency C-section to a ball of fire. This was not entirely surprising given the journey my husband, Jerry Levine, and I took to meet her.

I had gone through a festive assortment of fertility treatments ranging from the requisite menu of drugs and procedures to an experimental medical procedure that occurred entirely by accident; Dr. Richard Paulson flooded my uterus with my husband’s sperm when one of my fertilized eggs decided to make a run for it while going through egg implantation. This was the second time I had gone through an in vitro experiment (I would remind myself periodically that I was still a lab rat). Lots of needles, lots of doctor appointments, all while climbing the high peak of Mt. Anxiety—and then seven to ten days later I got the thrill of taking a pregnancy test. Talk about torture. The wait for the results, the fantasy that I am, in the very moment I am about to take the call from the doctor, in fact, pregnant. How could he possibly give me bad news? Not going to happen, no way. I wasn’t quite sure how to process the information the nurse was giving me over the phone—she reported numbers and levels and hormones.

“Am I pregnant?” I asked.

Politely, the nurse replied, “Probably not at these levels.”

“What level do I need to hit, just give me a number, and I’ll hit it, I’m very goal oriented,” I said in my intense, type-A network executive voice. What a ridiculous thing to say—borderline crazy, I realize as soon as the words leave my mouth. The disappointment made my skin feel thick.

The following week Dr. Paulson, the kind, patient Lord of Fertility Manor, called me at home to see how I was feeling, physically and emotionally. I remember getting out of bed to answer the phone. He told me to take a break from the shots. Take a breather. Don’t think about conception, return to sex without an agenda. Just relax. Okay. I hung up the phone and started to cry.

Two months later I was pregnant. Regular old sex. I think there were some survivors from the sperm invasion waiting for the perfect egg. They found her. Or rather she grabbed one by the scruff of his collar and commanded, “You!” as if she were Diana, the huntress of Roman mythology.

Our daughter was setting the stage for her arrival into the world from, literally, Day One. She dictated the terms of her insemination, and she was going to orchestrate every detail, from the pounds I gained during pregnancy to the trauma she and I went through after an induced labor resulting in a horrific emergency cesarean delivery.

A decade and a half later, I am just beginning to understand the significance of my daughter’s creation and birth. We named her Alice Luisa after both of her great-grandmothers. Each of those women were heroes in their own right—the eldest children in both of their families, immigrants who came to the United States with little but grew up to be formidable women. We chose the name not just because Jewish tradition says naming your child for a deceased loved one allows their memory to be kept alive, but because Jerry and I hoped all the traits we admired in our grandmothers would be passed down to our daughter. It was a thoughtful and significant decision.

From the day she was born, I was committed to raising Alice as a feminist, just as I was by my mother. To me, that means understanding that women are in every respect the equals of men and should never in any circumstance be considered otherwise. I made a point of instilling these principles in my son, Matthew, when he was little. One morning on our drive to school he declared, “You know, Mom, boys are better than girls.” I pulled the car over, turned off the engine, and made sure he saw the look on my face. “No, Matthew,” I told him, “boys and girls are different but they are equal.” This is an exchange that my son remembers to this day.

That deep-in-the-bones understanding of equality comes with the acknowledgment that we live in a patriarchal society that imposes gender distinctions in so many ways—from the toys we play with as toddlers to the careers we pursue to the roles we carve out in our own family structures. As women, we have a responsibility to combat such prejudice with our words and deeds, sometimes with our feet, and with fists clenched in solidarity. We don’t need to demand equality so much as we need to live and breathe it in everything we do. It is an extra burden, one that women have shouldered since time immemorial.

At the core of what makes us women, the objectification of female sexuality has a profound influence on our psyches from our earliest days. In today’s hyperactive media landscape, we are buffeted by an endless stream of messages to be prettier, thinner, sexier, lustier, happier, smarter but not too threatening. Ask any mother—you never feel the outrage about our cultural obsession with false ideals of beauty until you’ve seen it through the questioning eyes of your baby girl.

As my daughter reached her preteen years, I began a quest to hone my personal definition of feminism and learn how other women defined their strength. I read all the books and research I could find, but nothing quite answered the questions I had about the unique intimacy that exists between a mother and daughter. I wanted to know how other women communicated with their daughters, how they instilled in them the values and principles that matter most. I wanted to hear the humor, sense the subtext, and savor the lyrical language used in telling each story—women who are all so different from one another, and different from their mothers.

I realized that if I was searching for advice and inspiration on ways to teach girls to feel empowered, other moms probably were too. My instincts told me to reach out to women who are in leadership roles in a variety of disciplines, from Oscar- and Emmy-winning actresses to pioneering doctors and scientists to spiritual leaders, activists, politicians, academicians, writers, directors, business executives, and those who do heroic work with nonprofit and philanthropic organizations. I was overwhelmed by how quickly so many embraced the “What I Told My Daughter” concept.

On the journey of assembling this book, I came to understand that raising a daughter with feminist ideals is as much of a parental responsibility as it is to ensure that she eats a well-balanced diet and gets plenty of sleep. I remember the days when Alice was in preschool, and I would pack her backpack in the morning with snacks, water, hand wipes, and other items to get her through the day. I believe as mothers we need to pack our daughters’ backpacks with the supplies necessary to be a strong, determined proponent of gender equality. We can’t assume that she’ll absorb these principles automatically, no matter how many wonderful role models she has in her life. We have to work at teaching those lessons.

My point of view on what it means to be an empowered woman came directly from my mother, Norma. She sang to me lullabies of freedom, celebrating our right to full equality with men within the broader context of the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s. She instilled in me the fundamental belief that I was destined for some variation on greatness—and it was those ideals that gave me the underlying confidence and determination to pursue a career that has taken me to the top echelon of the entertainment business. My mother gave me the gift of never doubting that I would achieve my goals.
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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Simon & Schuster
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1476734682
• ISBN 13: 9781476734682
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Van Ditmar Boeken, VDB Sales; sales@vanditmar.nl; ; Hondiuslaan 44; Utrecht; 3528 AB; Niederlande