How Internet tools provide young women with a new means of empowerment

Thursday, September 5, 2013

Girls tweeting their way to power and social change
In this essay for the New York Times “Opinionator Blog,” Courtney E. Martin, talks about  ways young women are using social media tools to increase awareness of sexism, speaking out and working energetically to make a difference in the world.  In so doing, they are empowering themselves and others and, at the same time, fostering social justice organizing and activism on the ground.  Teenage and college young women, using online petitions and campaigns “have become modern day Davids taking on the Goliaths of our time — multinational corporations like Facebook and Lego, and media giants, like Seventeen magazine and Clear Channel, “ says Martin.  She writes: “Indeed, most everyone I spoke to talked about online petitions, and the social media that so often fuels them, as being about so much more than the official goal stated on the petition; it’s about what many online organizers refer to as the “ladder of engagement” — someone signs a petition, before long they’re creating their own, then running a full-fledged campaign.” Courtney Martin, author of several books and one of the former editors of Feministing, is a co-founder of the Solutions Journalism Network. Here’s a one-and-a-half-minute video about what “Solutions Journalism” is and how it differs from other kinds of journalism.

Letha Dawson Scanzoni is an independent scholar, writer, and editor, and is the author or coauthor of nine books. In 1978, she and Virginia Ramey Mollenkott wrote Is the Homosexual My Neighbor?, one of the earliest books urging evangelical Christians to rethink their views on homosexuality (updated edition, 1994, HarperOne). More recently, Letha coauthored (with social psychologist David G. Myers) What God Has Joined Together: The Christian Case for Gay Marriage (HarperOne, 2005 and 2006). Another of Letha’s most well-known books is All We’re Meant to Be: Biblical Feminism for Today, coauthored with Nancy A. Hardesty (Word Books, 1974; revised edition, Abingdon, 1986; updated and expanded edition, Eerdmans, 1992). Letha served as editor of Christian Feminism Today in both its former print edition (EEWC Update) and its website for 19 years until her retirement in December 2013.

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