Women’s eNews is a website dedicated to journalism on issues germane to women–as long as the women are of the reliably feminist-left persuasion. So when the site announced that it had come up with its annual list of 21 Leaders for the 21st Century 2005 (“an awe-inspiring, reader-nominated list of fantastic, fabulous and farsighted leaders making news by changing women’s lives”), we figured that the list would contain the usual suspects: Hillary Clinton, Eve Ensler, Barbara Boxer, and the like. But the list is now out, and it contains…the names of 21 females we’d never heard of!
Here are some samples:
“Estefania ‘Stephanie’ Alves–who, at 18, is the youngest of our leaders–is co-founder of Radio LOG in Boston, a station that selects its music based on lyrics, including only those songs that convey positive messages about women….
“Sharon Sopher, an award-winning documentary filmmaker and television journalist, is the winner of our Ida B. Wells Award for Bravery in Journalism. Sopher turned the camera on herself after she found out she had AIDS, creating a documentary and a larger multi-media project to raise awareness of the spread of the epidemic among women in the United States….
“Charon Asetoyer, a Comanche, has established a Native American women’s health center on a South Dakota reservation….
“Dr. Miriam Nelson is promoting strong women, literally, through her bestselling ‘Strong Women’ book series and her innovative research highlighting the key connection between exercise and nutrition and women’s health….”
At this point, I was having problems staying awake. The biggest name on the list belonged to Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan environmentalist who won the Nobel Peace Prize last year for her decades-long project that reseeds war-devastated forests–but isn’t it a bit demeaning to line Maathai up next to a recent high-school grad who founded an ideological radio station a couple of months ago?
If this tatty list is really the best our sisters of the rad-fem left can come up, it says something sad–about them.