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News from
the Women's Resource Center 

Next Women's Empowerment Workshop on Feb. 9 will help you find a clear path to success

Clearing the Path to Freedom: Release What Stops You from Realizing Your Dreams will be the next Women's Resource Center's Empowerment Workshop scheduled for 6 to 8 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 9, at the Durango Public Library.

Certified Professional Coach Victoria FittsMilgrim (and WRC board member) will help you find your way to the path of creative expression – whether personal or professional. We’ll show you how to stay connected to your Vision, to know what really matters, to manage your time and energy, and to banish the inner and outer critics that would stop you from realizing your dreams. Get the support you’ve been looking for – and turn 2012 into your best year yet!

Cost is $10 for WRC members, $15 for all others.
All proceeds benefit the Women's Resource Center. Call 247-1242 or e-mail members@wrcdurango.org to reserve a spot.

WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH
and the Women's Resource Center's 25th Anniversary Celebration!

Women's Education
IS Women's Empowerment

• Miss Representation documentary and panel discussion at Fort Lewis February 27
• Members Reunion Party at Eno on March 1
• Author, media critic Susan J. Douglas to be keynote speaker on March 22
• 25th Anniversary Celebration & Awards Luncheon at DoubleTree March 23
  
• See a complete schedule here . . .
  

The highest form of female power
is how you dress?

"In school books, the Dick and Jane syndrome reinforced our emerging attitudes. The arithmetic books posed appropriate conundrums: 'Ann has three pies . . . Dan has three rockets. . . .' We read the nuances between the lines: Ann keeps her eye on the oven; Dan sets his sights on the moon."

—"Down with Sexist Upbringing"
by American Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Susan J. Douglas

You probably wouldn't find an old Dick and Jane reader anywhere near a public school classroom today. But turn on the television or pick up a popular magazine, and you'd think that a woman’s only value lies in her youth, beauty, and sexuality, not in her intellect or her capacity to lead.

Unveiling the sexist messages behind present-day media's portrayal of women will be the focus of several educational events that will be offered during Women's History Month in March. This year's national theme, "Women's Education IS Women's Empowerment," will celebrate the pioneers and advocates who fought for women's equal access to education.

And thanks to the sponsorship of Alpine Bank in Durango, the Women's Resource Center, in collaboration with the Fort Lewis College Gender and Women's Studies Program, the American Association of University Women, and the Girls Scouts of Colorado, will take that theme one step further with several events that will educate and inspire men and women in our community to speak out against sexism and challenge the media's degrading portrayals of females that curb – even destroy – a young woman’s educational aspirations.

Highlighting Women’s History Month activities will be a lecture and public discussion featuring Susan J. Douglas, nationally renowned media critic and author of The Mommy Myth, Where the Girls Are, and most recently, Enlightened Sexism, a critique of modern-day media and its “seductive” message that women have achieved equality, when in reality they have not.

Douglas’ presentation will be at 6 p.m. on Thursday, March 22, in the Fort Lewis College Ballroom. Admission is free to FLC students, faculty, staff and Women’s Resource Center members, $5 all others at the door.

Douglas presents with wit and humor example after example of the media’s skewed representation of women that would have us believe that women’s liberation is a “fait accompli,” when in reality, women still make, on average, 23 percent less than their male counterparts. Television shows, magazines, and film engage their audiences with “enlightened sexism” when they depict scantily clad or bare-breasted women as “empowered,” because the women now have “chosen to be sex objects and men were supposedly nothing more than their helpless, ogling, crotch-driven slaves  . . . The wheedling, seductive message to young women is that being decorative is the highest form of power – when, of course, if it were, Dick Cheney would have gone to work every day in a sequined tutu.”

The presentation will be followed by dessert and discussion groups to give audience members an opportunity to identify action steps that we can take as a community to raise awareness about the messages that popular media send about women, how those messages affect women in their personal and professional lives, and how we can empower young women to pursue their educations, establish careers or successful businesses.

For more information, contact the Women’s Resource Center at 247-1242.