Welcome to the Women Change Worlds Blog!

"A world that's good for women is good for everyone."

Welcome to Women Change Worlds, the new Director’s Desk blog of the Wellesley Centers for Women. At WCW, also known as the Centers, we do research, theory, and action that promotes justice and wellbeing for women and girls, their families and communities – and we’ve been doing it since 1974. This year, 2012, marks our official entry into the blogosphere, where our goal is to speak up and shape conversations – national and global, regional and local – that impact our core constituencies and the multiple contexts in which their lives unfold.

Here at WCW, our motto is “A world that’s good for women is good for everyone.” But what exactly does “a world that’s good for women” look like? The truth of the matter is, there are worlds within worlds, and a world that’s good for women acknowledges women’s similarities as well as women’s differences. This includes obvious and widely acknowledged differences – such as race, ethnicity, nationality, culture, religion, education level, income, social class, sexual orientation, gender expression, (dis)ability status, and age – but also less visible or less widely-acknowledged differences such as health status (physical or mental), experience with violence, rural/urban location, political attitudes, and even worldview. This “worlds with an s” approach acknowledges that not all women have the same perspectives or the same needs, yet, at the same time, all women deserve a life of decency, dignity, education, equity, power, health, and wealth.

As I state in my Director’s Message on the WCW website, today’s world has been shaped over multiple generations by feminist and womanist critical theory and social activism, yet many women and girls still do not enjoy full equality, freedom of expression, or even the provision of basic needs and rights. What gives?? What remains to be done?? What do we need to do to steer the world in the direction of that world that is not only “good for women” but is also “good for everyone”? These are the kinds of questions that this blog will tackle.

Since I took the helm of WCW in July, the popular media has debated such provocative issues as whether women really can or can’t have it all, whether there is or isn’t such a thing as "legitimate rape,” whether a nearly all-male panel of Congressional representatives is actually qualified to make decisions of national scope about birth control, what to do when a woman who testifies in favor of contraception is characterized with a misogynistic epithet in the national media, whether men are “in decline,” whether women are becoming the richer sex, whether father-daughter dances and mother-son ballgames are or aren’t discriminatory, and whether opportunity really is the route to overcoming oppression for women and girls worldwide. Just before I got here, we were having national and global conversations about issues such as whether the Arab Spring actually benefitted women, whether Title IX is still relevant, and even whether there are enough women writing op-eds. Now, as we hurtle towards a presidential election, we are talking about – although not loudly enough, in my opinion – whether and how women voters and women’s issues matter in this presidential election year. While I was chomping at the bit to blog on all these topics as I settled into my new position, my point is simply that the stream of women’s issues that matter – or issues that matter to women – is swift-moving and never-ending. Any moment can be the right moment to jump in.

In the worlds of scholarship and scientific research, not to mention the worlds of theory and program development, knowledge production can crawl at a snail’s pace. And rightly so, given the necessarily deliberate and systematic nature of such work: turning over every stone, ruling out every alternative explanation, testing every theory, and piloting then evaluating every program. Yet, with age and expertise comes authority and responsibility. Our researchers, scholars, theorists, and practitioners have invested years, careers, and at times even lifetimes into this work on behalf of women and girls, their families and communities. With nearly four decades of expertise at our collective disposal, those of us at WCW have a lot to say about the issues of the day. Women Change Worlds is our new platform.

While blog posts can never replace peer-reviewed journals and books, the immediacy of blogging plays in indispensible role in public discourse. From my perspective, blogging serves as a platform for bringing diverse constituencies into conversation and as a staging ground for organizing action. Blogging also serves as a needed bridge between the academic and the everyday. Blogging helps break through the walls that have kept the ivory tower isolated from everybody else and the silos that have kept thinkers of different disciplines from talking with each other. Blogging facilitates what I like to call “the politics of invitation” – a “build it and they will come” route to “another world is possible” – inviting us to engage towards change differently than the more adversarial “politics of struggle.” Thus, it is in this spirit that I hope you will join the conversation at Women Change Worlds, so that together we can make that world that is good for women, girls, and for everyone.

Layli Maparyan, Ph.D., is the Executive Director of the Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College.