Home and Family
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Seven Who Stake Our Claim to the Future
Hannah Rosenthal, Bernice Sandler, Elizabeth Saylor, Susan Weidman Schneider, Charlene Ventura, Sheila White Parrish, Marie Wilson Hannah Rosenthal, Activist With Clout "What will it take to end violence against all women and girls in Chicago and in fact the entire state of Illinois?" Hannah Rosenthal, executive director of the Chicago Foundation for Women, asks the question often. But it"s because she wants answers. "Violence against women and girls is from cradle to grave," says Rosenthal. "Think about it: it"s child abuse, bullying, date rape, sexual assault, domestic violence, human trafficking and elder abuse. It"s become a part of the fabric of society and part of the lives of too many women and girls." In 2006, the foundation launched a statewide anti-violence initiative in Illinois, thanks to a grant from the governor and the General Assembly, based on the question, "What Will It Take?" She plans to ask that question to more than 4 million people across the state during the year, hoping to find innovative ideas and get people thinking, especially those who aren"t the usual allies and activists on these issues. It"s an ambitious plan. But Rosenthal likes a challenge. One late night in 1984, after long months of lobbying the governor of Wisconsin, Rosenthal watched as the state"s legislature passed a law guaranteeing pay equity to women. "I remember staggering home and telling my husband, "I can now die, but make sure it says on my tombstone that she helped get rid of the wage gap,"" recalls Rosenthal, now 55, who at that time was head of the Wisconsin Women"s Council. In 2002, Rosenthal was named one of the top five most influential Jews in the country by the Forward newspaper because of her work heading the Jewish Council for Public Affairs; she was the first woman ever to hold that post. Rosenthal was appointed by Bill Clinton to head up the Midwest region of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in 1995, where she focused on girls" and women"s health and eradicating poverty. She moved from New York two years ago back to her Midwest home to head up one of the largest women"s funds in the country. In the past, more than 80 percent of the foundation"s money funded direct services to women rather than advocacy. Rosenthal has been instrumental in shifting the giving so that the two balance out. "We need to hold systems and all aspects of government accountable for making women"s lives better," says Rosenthal. "The foundation moved from being a community foundation to a successful activist foundation. "Nothing will change if we do not teach women how to advocate for themselves." --Irene Lew. Bernice Sandler, Title IX Godmother Bernice Sandler has devoted herself for the last 35 years to making sure that girls and women not only dream big career dreams, but have legal protection if they run into gender discrimination. Sandler, now a senior scholar at the Women"s Research and Education Institute in Washington, D.C., says she started life with conventional Depression-era expectations. "Like most girls, I expected to get married and didn"t really have vocational aspirations," says Sandler, who grew up in Flatbush, Brooklyn. "At some point I thought I might want to be a window dresser for the five- and ten-cent stores, even though I always knew I was going to college." She discovered a sudden interest in law after she was turned down for a professor"s position at the University of Maryland despite a strong resume. When she asked why, a male faculty member explained, "Let"s face it, you come on too strong for a woman." Sandler hit the books and found that there were no laws prohibiting sex discrimination in education. She noticed a little-known footnote prohibiting federal contractors from discriminating in employment. "I was alone in the house and I shrieked because I immediately made the connection that universities had contracts and couldn"t discriminate," she says. She filed charges of sex discrimination against the University of Maryland, the first of about 250 complaints. In so doing, Sanders also took the first step in the legal journey to establish Title IX, legislation passed in 1972 that prohibits federally funded educational institutions from sex discrimination. It was championed by Rep. Edith Green, a Democrat from Oregon, and Sandler became known as the Godmother of Title IX, a law that has changed every aspect of education for all U.S. women and girls. Since the passage of Title IX Sandler has worked on a variety of issues, including sexual harassment, the "chilly climate"--the subtle discrimination that affects female students and employees--and, most recently, student-to-student harassment. "In my naivete back then, I thought it would take about a year and then everything would be fixed," Sandler says. "At the end of that year, I admitted it would take a few more years. Of course, now I know it"s going to be generations." --Courtney E. Martin. Elizabeth Saylor, City Hall Fighter Manhattan-based civil rights attorney Elizabeth Saylor took on the largest City Hall in the nation to obtain food stamps and other benefits systematically and erroneously denied to battered immigrant women. "If you don"t feel safe and don"t have bodily integrity, you are beaten down as a woman and it"s hard to assert rights in any other area," says Saylor, 31, an associate at New York law firm Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady LLP. "Public assistance is often the only support available to them and, without it, many women and children would not be able to escape." After graduating from Harvard Law School and a judicial clerkship, Saylor went to Legal Aid Society in New York serving as a Skadden Fellow (supported by the global law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher Flom LLP). There she represented victims of domestic violence in public benefits, family and housing cases. She soon discovered that female immigrants were illegally being denied public aid because of a computer system failure to list their situation and identifying them as eligible for help. In December 2005, with the help of another law firm, Hughes Hubbard Reed LLP, Saylor brought a lawsuit in the Southern District of New York that challenged the city and state"s systematic denial of public benefits to eligible immigrants who were victims of violence. In addition, women who appealed the denial and won went back and reapplied only to be illegally denied again. "With the immigration rules, it"s almost impossible for an immigrant to get benefits and assistance without an advocate with them," Saylor says. In August, a Manhattan federal judge issued an 86-page preliminary injunction that ordered the city to overhaul its error-plagued computer systems and revise faulty training manuals so that battered immigrant women could receive food stamps and other public aid. The suit was also certified as a class action and now includes hundreds of immigrant victims of domestic violence who were wrongly denied benefits. The parties recently agreed to a settlement, which still needs to be approved by the court. Under the settlement, the city is now required to make benefits available to immigrant battered women seeking assistance. The city is also required to conduct extensive training, continue to fix its computer system, issue a new policy memorandum and submit to periodic monitoring. The battle is not over yet, however. The court will retain jurisdiction over the case and the plaintiffs can return to court if the city does not follow the terms of the agreement. --Irene Lew. Susan Weidman Schneider, Frank Feminist Susan Weidman Schneider, editor in chief and one of the founding mothers of the Jewish feminist magazine, Lilith, knows that mainstream media frequently proclaim feminism as dead. She"s read about young women caring little for the issues that their mothers once pow-wowed and protested over. Schneider, who is 62, isn"t worried. "One of my most cherished roles at Lilith has been working with young women," she says. "We"ve had well over 100 interns walk through our doors over the last 30 years. We have a genuine enthusiasm for welcoming their voices into the offices as well as into the pages of the magazine." Now celebrating its 30th anniversary, Lilith magazine prides itself on having a readership that transcends generations. Its tag line reads "independent, Jewish frankly feminist." Schneider revels in the wide variety of ideas and issues she gets to discuss--often over lunch around the library table at the Lilith offices--but also enjoys being able to home in on a topic, as she has in her three books: "Jewish and Female" (Simon and Schuster, 1985); "Intermarriage: The Challenge of Living With Differences Between Christians and Jews" (Free Press, 1989); and "Head and Heart: A Woman"s Guide to Financial Independence" (Trilogy Books, 1991). In addition to mentoring her staff, editing, writing her own articles--often about reproductive rights or women"s philanthropy--and raising money to keep the operation afloat, Schneider lectures across the country about the evolving complexity of Jewish women"s identity, including the pressure to do it all, the rise of interfaith families and the J.A.P. (Jewish American Princess) stereotype, among other issues. "The task before us when we founded the magazine in 1976 was more diagnostic: figuring out what was wrong, naming it, looking at the grand sweep of social, political and economic issues," she says. "Today there is a tighter focus, a more nuanced view of how to make change. We recognize that the vast differences in women"s lives prevent a one-size-fits-all solution to the problems we still face." --Courtney E. Martin. Charlene Ventura, Shelterer of the Battered Cincinnati, Ohio, is not thought of as a landing spot for recent immigrants. Yet Charlene Ventura has kept apace as the demographics of the river town changed with new arrivals. Cincinnati is knownPages: [1] 2