AUTHORS AT SXSW EMBRACE NEW FEMINISM
Two new books help teens, women embrace their stories, become advocates.
Amov ement is definitely afoot. Two new books guide teenage girls and women in discover
ing t heir power and joining the resistance.
More books are on the way, including “The Confidence Code for Girls,” from TV journalists Claire Shipman and Katty Kay,
but first we talked to Emma Gray, author of “A Girl’s Guide to Joining the Resistance: A Feminist Handbook on Fighting for Good” (William Morrow, $16.99), and artist and author Elle Luna, who wrote “Your Story Is Your Power: Free Your Feminine Voice,” (Workman Publishing, $17.95) with author and psychotherapist Susie Herrick.
Both Luna and Gray were in Austin for South by Southwest this week. Gray, who writes about women’s issues for The Huffington P ost, was in town to do her podcast, “Here to Make Friends,” which presents a feminist view of ABC’s “The Bachelor.” Luna talked about h er book and led
participants through a conversation about how we think about women.
They both were inspired by the 2016 election and 2017 Women’s March. For Gray, she spent election night outside the headquarters of where Hillary Clinton supporters expected to be witnessing the election of the first female president, only to be shocked at the results.
She watched the crowd of people crying turn into a crowd of people marching in the streets the day after inauguration. “I saw that grief and fear translate into something productive,” Gray says.
It could have gone the other way, she says. “What I should have expected but didn’t initially was how many women were inspired to run for office. The cynical side of me thought that women would be discouraged.” Instead, groups like Emily’s List and She Should Run saw women signing up within weeks of the election. “That has kept up,” Gray says. “And we’re starting to see these women win.”
True success will be when we move beyond the “firsts” and get women in these roles regularly, she says.
Luna, whose previous book was “The Crossroads of Should and Must,” was approached by her editor to write “Your Story Is Your Power” in response to the election and march and to encourage more women to speak out and participate in the midterm elections. Luna brought in Herrick, who is the author of “Aphrodite Emerges” and has been studying feminism and misogyny.
“We’ve really been looking at the stories we tell ourselves,” Luna says. “We were both stuck in similar ways in our lives at different times.”
Both Luna and Gray are writing about feminism, but in different ways. Luna’s book is about working with your internal makeup to become more powerful. Gray is giving you the how-tos of resistance.
The timing is right for books like theirs, Luna says.
“It is exciting,” Luna says. “Emma (González) in Florida standing on the front steps (of her school) saying, ‘ENOUGH!’ … and Tarana Burke and the Me Too movement. … She recognized that women need a safe place to share stories of sexual abuse and harassment.”
Both books are made for teens and people in their 20s and early 30s, but could appeal to more mature women, too.
“A Girl’s Guide” is filled with lessons Gray learned from interviewing many powerful women. Many of these women she knew as part of her job at The Huffington Post. They are women such as the organizers of the Women’s March and other causes and politicians such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former Texas Sen. Wendy Davis.
Gray hopes that women and girls will use the book as their jumping-off point. “I see it not as the definitive text but more of the beginner’s guide,” she says.
One thing that runs through the advice from powerful women is the importance of women telling their stories. “Almost all of them mentioned how important storytelling and their own narrative was in informing their own activism and in connecting people,” Gray says.
Luna talks about that inner narrative and how to work out what’s going on in your head to become more powerful, and she does it by mixing words with artwork and painted words of quotes from famous people. Luna was inspired by Instagram and the way that people scan for information and are drawn to images. She sees it as a book that appeals 50 percent to the left side of the brain and 50 percent to the right side. It’s one that can be scanned, then glanced at, then read, then delved into more deeply, depending on what you are ready to get out of it.
“Your Story Is Your Power” takes women through three different parts of their world that might be holding them back. The first is the water they are swimming in: all those messages, those advertisements, those rap lyrics, those movies, that tell women that they are less than men. The book looks at the fairy tales of “Cinderella,” “Snow White” and “Beauty and the Beast.” “What are we really telling girls, that they have to be beautiful housekeepers, slender and demure, get the prince and become the queen?” Luna says.
The second is their family story that might inform how they view the roles of women and men. The third is their own personality and how personality types might be leading women to make the same mistakes over and over again.
Luna’s book uses the symbol of a labyrinth for discovering your power — which Luna and Herrick think of as electricity rather than strength or dominance over another person.
The labyrinth has two parts, the spiral and the meandering. The spiral represents going inside of yourself deeper and deeper and then coming back out. The meandering is the process of discovering. It’s very rarely a straight line.
“This book is: How do we create that safe space internally where we can get really close to the water we are all swimming in and begin to wake up and flip on the light?” Luna says.
It’s the idea that when you find your power and work on the internal, then you can work on the external. “In my own experience, when I stopped taking it internally, like hell was I going to take it externally,” Luna says.
Working on the internal, that’s what helps women speak up. “That is what changes everything,” she says.
It’s figuring out why you get stuck in the ways you get stuck. She likens it to bowling: The book is the bumpers that help you avoid rolling a gutter ball. It helps you see where you want to go and helps you get there rather than making the same mistakes over and over again and winding up in the gutter again.
For Luna, it was about working on the voice in her head and how she talked to herself. Now she tells herself, “You need to say something nice to me; be my advocate.”
Sometimes the labyrinth can feel like taking two steps forward and 20 steps back, she says: “I’m still in the labyrinth.”
Luna wants to help women to work on the internal but also help lift up fellow women. Right now her goal is to get more women to vote by helping to make sure their friends are registered, by taking people to the polls to vote.
“How do we stand up and say, ‘Enough is enough’?” Luna says. “Now we’re not going to be quiet and be cute. We’re going to rock the boat until we right the ship.”
Gray points to the March for Our Lives on March 24 and the gun control movement coming out of the shooting in Parkland, Fla., as perfect examples of the possibilities. “Young people have always been the driving force of social movements,” she says. The kids in Parkland, like many before them, “had the audacity to imagine what could be,” she says.
“A Girl’s Guide to Joining the Resistance” offers passionate words of inspiration, but it also offers practical tips such as what app you can use to write to your congressman or call up your senator.
Gray encourages women to pick something manageable that they are passionate about rather than trying to do too much at the same time. “People can get very overwhelmed, very easily,” she says. “Small things do matter. You can pick one cause for now. ‘This is what I can do.’”
She encourages women to get support from people who might be different from themselves. “Men absolutely have a role as allies in this resistance,” she says. “We absolutely need to bring them into the conversation.”
While Luna’s book focuses on the messages girls receive and how to combat them, Luna recognizes that boys are also receiving messages, too. One friend told her about being taunted as a 10-yearold when he recognized the beauty of a sunset and pointed it out to two friends. The response was, “Who are you, a girl?” “Girl” was a derogatory term.
The men who have shown up at events for the book have expressed sadness for what they recognize the women in their lives have gone through, she says. Luna recalls one man who was from Israel and told a story about being in a synagogue where only the men could turn the Torah scroll’s rollers. When a friend’s daughter ran forward to try to touch the Torah, she was yelled at. He told the story with tears in his eyes because he knew the message that girl had received.
Gray equates men joining the resistance to the way white women need to show up for women of color and for people who are transgender.
Gray’s hope is that even more millennials and the first members of Generation Z will vote. For their parents, she says, “You’ve prepared your kids well for this world. Now it’s your time to support them. You’ve raised these empowered young women. I would hope that we would all support these young women. They’re smart as hell.”