Girls Who Swagger

Women swagger everywhere! On the website and in the book, we will explore what swagger looks like and how to get swagger at work, in sports, at church, in school, in relationships, and on the world stage.

Eve Ensler

I had the privilege of seeing Eve Ensler kick off her latest book tour for In The Body of the World on Friday, April 26 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her absolute honesty about her own suffering through abuse and cancer  and the experiences of the women of the Congo roared through the historic Lensic Theater in such a way that no one could leave there untouched, asleep, still pretending that there is not horrific violence against women and girls in the world. I was inspired to fight harder, more honestly, more radically for the rights of women through the work of The Girl’s Guide to Swagger.

Ensler was sexually abused and beaten as a child.  As a result, she learned to emotionally leave her body so that she wouldn’t feel the pain. While she was writing The Vagina Monologues, she heard stories from women about their sexual experiences. “I wish I could say that the stories that I heard were about pleasure and satisfaction and desire and orgasm, but 99 percent of those stories were about women being abused, incested, raped, being forced to leave their vaginas disconnected, never knowing their vaginas,” said Ensler.  “That was the beginning of whole consciousness radicalization for me…I had no idea of the epidemic proportions of violence on this planet. It is like a hidden story.”

Ensler also said that women are fractured and cut off from ourselves by the trauma that they have experienced; that we are asleep. But rather than staying in this “semi-sleep,” Ensler woke up and came out fighting. She broke the taboo regarding talking about vaginas with her play The Vagina Monologues.

After she had been performing the play for awhile by herself, Ensler became restless. She wanted to do something more.

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Post by Gina Pujols, for The Girl’s Guide to Swagger

Elizabeth Gilbert Speaking at the WRC Leadership Luncheon

I recently attended a women’s leadership luncheon hosted by The Women’s Resource Center in Philadelphia. The organization provides free or low-cost legal outreach, career advice and other various important programs to help benefit women and young girls in the area. If you live in the Philadelphia area, click here to learn more about the center and see if you would like to join them in their volunteer efforts. The luncheon featured awards and highlighted the accomplishments of many significant women who have worked to improve the great city of Philadelphia. It was heartwarming to see so many people working to benefit women’s livelihood in the city.

But the best part was hearing the great author, Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love and Commitment speak. She came to support the center’s mission and spoke about how women helping each other is one of our greatest talents and an invaluable resource. She also spoke about some of the trials and tribulations she experienced living in New York City in her younger years and also reminisced about some of her more solemn moments traveling around the world.

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If you are looking for some inspiration and a bit of advice on how to kick start your business and sharpen your message, you may want to talk to Lucinda Cross. She left her corporate job, which was working behind the scenes to make other people look good, in order to step out in front and start her own business.

In addition to advising entrepreneurs and speaking on panels, Lucinda has written two books. Corporate Mom Drop Outs contains the stories of women who left corporate jobs and made their own success working from home. Her second book The Road to Redemption: Overcoming Life’s Detours, Obstacles, and Challenges, advises us on how to grow and embrace the opportunities that life brings to us. It was published in 2012 and has been an Amazon best seller ever since.

What Lucinda loves to do is work with women to help hone their message. She helps them set a vision and be clear on it, along with identifying ways to make money with their business. She says “It is important to have a vision. Women can use their words as powerful vessels to heal. They can use the power of the tongue and pen to make a difference.” Read More…

Cole Parker, COO, teaching

If you haven’t heard, the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) was reinstated and signed into law on March 7^th, just in time for International Women’s Day.  To find out more about the significance of this law, please click here.

So in celebration, we’d like to introduce you to a wonderful organization called Divas In Defense Inc., The company teaches a self-defense system to women and girls across the nation in order to empower them. Divas in Defense is unique in its own right however, because two of its main officers who started the program are actually men! A pair of brothers named Christopher Britto, the President and CEO of the company and Cole Parker, the Vice President and COO, decided to create this inspiring organization three years ago after a female pastor asked Britto to set up some self-defense classes for women enlisted in her church. After discussing the idea with his brother, Britto decided to take the idea a little further.

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On the heels of One Billion Rising, celebrated on the 15th anniversary of V-Day, as one billion women and those who love them rose worldwide to bring awareness to the issues surrounding violence against women, I have been thinking about interpersonal violence in our own country. There appears to be a distinct disconnect between the message we want to send to girls and young women-that they can love and respect themselves and acknowledge that they have needs of their own that come first-and the message they are receiving-that they should look or behave a certain way in order to receive love and acceptance.

So why aren’t girls and women getting the message that they are fine just the way they are? Perhaps those of us trying to send this message are getting drowned out by the sheer volume of socially constructed messages bombarding girls and young women every day. Examples of objectification and violence are thrown in our faces constantly. While the recent charges of rape against high school football players in Steubenville, Ohio–young men who allegedly raped a 16-year-old fellow student last August while other students videotaped the unconscious girl–may seem extreme, we see other seemingly unimaginable stories day after day. Take the story of the “fantasy team draft” created by ninth-grade boys at the elite Landon School in Maryland in 2010, where the boys chose girls, rated them, and planned sexual conquests as part of a competition in which money would eventually be exchanged. Then, there was the violent murder of a University of Virginia lacrosse player by her abusive ex-boyfriend, a former Landon student.

It is no wonder that young women are so confused. If boys today are being sent to prestigious private schools like Landon only to be taught to objectify and debase young women by drafting them to teams with such names as “The Southside Slampigs,” and the punishment for planning sexual conquests is a slap on the wrist and a “boys will be boys” mentality, then the cycle will only continue. The former Landon student who murdered his ex-girlfriend had been seen previously choking her. He had also attacked a male teammate he thought had kissed her, and he became so out of control with a female police officer during a drunken rampage that he had to be tasered. But apparently everyone looked the other way, and through silence, the behavior continued to be condoned.

“In fully accepting your creative power, you honor and respect your soul and remind others to do the same.” ~Sonia Choquette

Creative drive, empowerment and advocacy is clearly emanated through the souls of many women. But in recent years, we’ve seen a decline in these attributes among today’s youth and The Girl’s Guide to Swagger is on a mission to make sure we don’t continue down this path. When those strengths are not drawn upon, women as a whole lose out. Fortunately, we all can nurture each other so that this doesn’t happen.  Ashley Marinaccio shows us how we can as she works to cultivate these important attributes through the girls and women involved in Girl Be Heard, a theater collective that uses acting to empower young women ages 12 through 21 to become brave, confident, socially conscious leaders while exploring their own lives.

Performers from Girl Be Heard

Girl Be Heard was founded four years ago by Marinaccio, who is the now Artistic Director. She is an activist and artist and her work has been seen in many venues across the country such as global TED conferences, The White House, United Nations, and on tour across the United States. She holds a M.A. in Performance Studies from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and a Bachelor’s of the Arts in theatre directing and sociology/anthropology with minors in women/gender and Middle Eastern from Pace University.Marinaccio’s enjoys utilizing theatre for peace building, healing, and empowerment and her vast background led her to be the most suitable person to begin this organization back at the Estrogenius Theatre Festival  in 2008, where she was asked to write a play for teenage girls performing at the festival. But instead, she changed things up a bit by having the girls write and act out the plays themselves.“It was apparent that I should not be writing this for them (the plays girls were performing). They needed to be empowered to write it themselves. So we had each of the girls get into discussions.

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Sheena Williams, President, SheWill, Inc.

When you are financially empowered, you are more able to control many aspects of your life. It’s an essential building block that many people unfortunately don’t seem to receive in their upbringing. This is reflected in the current state of America’s economy, as well as within the rest of the world.

Fortunately, there are brilliant people like Sheena Williams in the world who are working to change things. She is the founder of SheWill, Inc., an organization geared toward improving financial literacy in girls ages eight to 17 and families.

“I teach how to be responsible with money management. I also teach career empowerment and entrepreneurship,” said Williams.  “Basically what I do is try to prepare girls for life skills before they graduate high school and go off to college, so they’ll have fundamental financial and career skills before leaving their parents house.”

When Williams graduated from high school, all her dad ever told her was to be responsible with money. And as an 18- year- old living on her own, she didn’t know what that meant. “I made mistakes and I just don’t want the future generation to have to go through those obstacles that I did,” Williams said.

Williams has since earned an MBA in Public Administration and is the President of SheWill, Inc. During one of the company’s seminars or events, girls learn about savings, budgeting, and philanthropy. They are taught the difference between a credit card, debit card and checking account. Classes also learn what credit is, how to establish credit and different forms of credit such as store credit. They are able to review a credit card statement and learn about interest rates.

“We do simple interest for them and a little bit of compounding interest for savings but mostly interest rates for credit cards,” said Williams.

Sheena hosts classes and seminars throughout her hometown of Atlanta, Georgia and recently has been able to start working with school districts and organizations across the country. Read More…

Gretchen Cawthon

Throughout history and even today, women are told by men what they can and can’t do. Fortunately, the human spirit allows us the free will to decide for ourselves what we can do. We just have to tap into our inner confidence.

In 2005, when Gretchen Cawthon was told by a man that “women just don’t do web design,” something snapped inside her and she set out to prove him wrong.

“I was actually co-owner of a drum company … it was kind of a start up and we began working on a marketing plan and I was pretty much the fulltime marketing director. When it came down to the website, our business partner told my husband,  ‘I’ll handle the website, women just don’t do web design,’” said Gretchen.

She left the drum business shortly after that. Because she already had a great deal of experience teaching computers on a professional level, she decided to begin researching web design and learning how to build one herself.

“I was brought up with a computer in the house my entire life. So I just picked it up on my own. I knew a lot about computer programs and applications and so I taught people,” said Gretchen. “I went to the library and checked out every possible book I could on web design. In about 2 weeks, I put together the website the way I wanted it,” she said.

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Sonali

When you speak to Sonali Argade, you can’t help but smile. Her energy is infectious. And when you listen to her music, your smile will grow even wider. When you find out what she’s doing with the profits of her music sales, your heart will smile as well.

Sonali is one of the newest singers in the pop music world. The young Floridian recently moved to New York City this past September to study at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music. Before that, Sonali was involved in music for most of her life. She played jazz guitar at the Players School of Music, attended Berklee College of Music’s Five Week Summer Performance Program for Voice, and then attended the School of Rock Program. At age 18, she is now attending New York University (NYU), while improving her skills at the institute.

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Brenda Summerville

There are as many paths in faith as there are in life. Sometimes those paths are opposite, sometimes they’re parallel and sometimes those paths can cross and even interconnect. For Brenda Summerville, the interconnection between these two paths is all too familiar as she works her way from the corporate world into a world of ministry. The Chicago-based career woman will graduate with a Master in Divinity from the Chicago Theological Seminary this coming May and has quite a list of plans to help empower women and her community.

After spending about 20 years in corporate America, Summerville decided she needed to make a change for the better in her life. “I’m just coming into my own space, being my voice,” said Summerville. “I want to give back and help women.”

As she dives into her new path with both arms, Summerville is making plans to publish a couple of books and potentially either work in parish ministry or help other churches.

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