It's Time to Fire Up the Feminist Movement

As I continue to pontificate about the direction of the women's rights movement after the Fem 2.0 conference, it is clear that despite best efforts by institutions like NOW and the Feminist Majority Foundation, there is still a large disconnect between the leadership and the use of the internet to organize the women's rights movement.

The reason this disconnect exists in my mind is because the leadership doesn't see the power of the online space as a community organizing tool. It's more than just having a Facebook account, a YouTube page and a Twitter handle. You need to look at who is online and who can become part of your cause and carry your message beyond a press release. And as we've known for a while - young women are dominating the social media scene, particularly on the increasingly popular micro-blogging site, Twitter as seen in this graphic below:

Just looking at these stats alone I know that as a feminist organizer, the online space is my best chance at finding like-minded people to carry my message and support the women's rights cause based on demographics alone.  For the major feminist institutions, the online space needs to be a place to recruit, crowdsource and generate political will among a new generation of feminists. While sites like Feministing, Shakesville and Feministe get this idea and have been organizing their own online kingdoms for some time, without the integration of the major institutions who have access to policy makers, there is going to be a disconnect between what is said online and what is done in Washington.

With President Obama in office, the feminist movement has a huge opportunity to create a lot of noise and make demands for the administration to react to. While Obama wants to govern from the center, it is important that issue advocacy groups don't gravitate to that as well or we will lose out on a lot of progressive issues that require a more radical stance.

The new PAC, Accountability Now, is trying to do this from an overall progressive framework and I think women's rights movement must also follow their lead or at least join hands with them. It's no secret that the idea of equality is a radical concept. Let's make sure that we push Obama to react to the demand for real legislation that helps women in poverty, funding for contraception, long term child care options and even addressing the difficult nature of the sex worker industry, while he has 70% approval ratings.

The time is now to act. The call to action has been created. It's time to fire up the movement or watch it burn down to the ground.