Savvy Women

This week I’m looking at young American women, the choices they make about how they are going to live their lives, and the role older female mentors can play in helping youngsters make good decisions. I’ve included two CNN videos that work very nicely together. The first one describes a number of societal problems facing young women today, and the second one, which profiles a wonderful woman named Consuelo Castillo Kickbusch, shows how role models can help girls overcome many of the difficulties that they face.

Just a little to set up the first video: Mike Galanos, of CNN, is shown discussing the problem of teen pregnancy at Robeson High School in Chicago with two experts–Dr. Brenda Wade, a clinical psychologist, and Lauren Lake, attorney and co-founder of Women in Entertainment Empowerment Network. The video provides no justification for why CNN chose to focus on this particular school. Anyway, as you’ll see when you watch the video, the numbers of pregnant girls at RHS is indeed high. What I most like about the video is that the experts actually focus their discussion on the larger issue–why so many young women are making so many bad choices, decisions that are likely to limit their abilities to reach their full potential as human beings.

For me, the most telling comment came right toward the end of clip when Ms. Lake asked the following question (I’m paraphrasing): Why don’t we celebrate more people for being intelligent? She then goes on to say that we worship those with sex appeal but show limited appreciation for those who use their brains.

Now, on to video two, which presents a possible solution to the problems we’ve been discussing.

The thing that makes Ms. Kickbusch’s message so persuasive is that it comes out of her ethos, her credibility, as a speaker. She understands her audience and can speak to them with great power because she was among them at one point in her life.

Being an educator and thus someone who has thought long and hard about the larger implications of my work, I can assure you that there is nothing more important to a nation’s security than making sure its young women are well educated and empowered.

While getting ready to begin this week’s blog, I thought back to the video I’d included in the previous week’s entry and what I’d written about it.

That clip, if you haven’t seen it, shows a woman’s transformation.

This change begins when she sits down in front of a camera and the makeup artists begin. They apply foundation and rouge and mascara and the lead from colored pencils and who knows what else. They reshape her hair and use computer magic to enlarge her eyes and lips and thin her neck and then soften the outline of her coiffure. In the end, she is beautiful. But it’s a certain type of beauty that rests on the surface of her skin.

It’s pretty clear after watching the change that takes place that she’s not the sort of “real” woman featured in this week’s video. As a matter of fact, this week’s clip serves as a nice counterpoint to last week’s.

This week’s film documents the recent opening of an exhibition of photographs taken by Connecticut-based photographer, Carla Ten Eyck. The theme of the exhibit was female beauty. Ten Eyck asked “real women” to participate by allowing themselves to be photographed. To help the subjects prepare for their individual photo shoots, she got them to think about and then respond, in writing, to the following question: “How do you feel most beautiful?”

The photos serve as the answers to that question.

I don’t want to spoil the video by telling you a lot more than what I just have. Three of the women who were photographed for the exhibition talk about what the experience was like for them. Ten Eyck also discusses her role. All the women are more than capable of speaking for themselves.

I do want to make one comment about something Susannah says. At one point in the video she mentions that she feels empowered when she is “out of her element” and that that is like being “comfortable” because one is discomforted. It’s an interesting idea and something I can really relate to.