By: Paula Goldman
What defines your generation of women? A few years ago, Paula Goldman emailed this question to women aged twenty to forty around the world. At the time, she was fresh out of graduate school and not entirely sure how to launch her career, but she knew she wanted to make a difference in the world, and she was deeply inspired by the amazing and diverse accomplishments of women she knew across the globe. She felt this book could showcase the power and talent of these women to a wider audience.
Imagining Ourselves: Global Voices from a New Generation of Women
Published by: New World Library., March, 2006 (Purchase)
By: Paula Goldman
239 pages, paperback
US$26.95
ISBN: 1-57731-524-3
She wrote a short call for submissions, asking women to submit artwork and writings responding to the above question, and with the help of a few organizations working internationally, she sent it out. Thousands of responses later, the result is this book, comprising entries by more than one hundred women from fifty-seven countries and virtually every populated region of the globe.
The works in these pages are inspiring, challenging, enlightening, funny, and sometimes shocking. The contributors emphasize that the world they inhabit is different from the world of their mothers and grandmothers. Many have lived in more than one country, many are biracial or multiracial, and most have had access to more education than any women in their families before them. They come from myriad geographic, ethnic, spiritual, economic, and educational backgrounds. They celebrate their differences, but they also find strength in their commonalities.
Meet Lada Karitskaya, a Russian woman who turns down the opportunity to become a mail-order bride; Israeli singer, Achinoam Nini (aka Noa), whose life changed dramatically when she became a mother; slam poet Aya DeLeón of the United States, who fantasizes about what it would be like if women ran the hip-hop industry; and Toyin Sokefun of Nigeria, who uses photography to explore the boundaries between society's ideals of beauty and women's self-images.
These brave women boldly address the challenges they and their cultures face, expressing themselves freely through art and writing, wielding their power to create positive political and social change. Imagining Ourselves has a power and reach far greater than Paula Goldman dreamed possible when she first conceived of it. This book builds bridges, demonstrating not only the potential of each individual life but also the awesome power of today's generation of women as a whole.
About the author:
Paula Goldman's professional life has been driven by the quest to work with groups in conflict and to increase opportunities for underserved populations. In postwar Bosnia she worked on reconciliation and reconstruction projects, in India she worked with educational groups to create professional paths for rural high school graduates, and she worked with human rights organizations in Kenya and Guatemala. She has also helped develop programming with WorldLink Television and led a film project to promote community-building efforts between Jewish and Muslim groups in San Francisco.
Hafsat Abiola, associate editor of this book, is the founder and director of the Kudirat Initiative for Democracy (KIND), A human rights and democracy activist from Nigeria, she earned a bachelor's degree from Harvard University and has received many honors. Hafsat is a Fetzer Fellow and serves on the boards of Youth Employment Summit, Educate Girls Globally, Women's Learning Partnership, Hewlett-Packard's World e-Inclusion Project, and the Global Security Institute. She lives in Lagos, Nigeria.
Isabel Allende was born in Lima, Peru, in 1942 and raised in Chile, Bolivia, Europe, and the Middle East. She worked as a journalist in Chile until the 1973 military coup. Upon the rise of the Pinochet dictatorship she was exiled to Venezuela, where she wrote the bestselling novel The House of the Spirits. Since then she has authored fifteen other books, which have been translated into twenty-seven languages. Isabel was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2004, and she resides in San Rafael, California.
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March 14, 2006 Paula was born in Singapore in 1975. She and her family lived in Jakarta, Indonesia, before moving to Southern California. She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1997 and went on to receive a master's degree in public affairs from Princeton University. She is currently working toward a PhD in social anthropology at Harvard University. When she isn't traveling for her projects, Paula divides her time between Boston and San Francisco.
