feminist media Archives - LiisBeth

LiisBeth & rabble.ca Have Merged

PK Mutch — Sun, 10 Sep 2023 15:07:55 +0000

Word doesn’t always get around evenly, so in case you missed it, here’s the scoop!

In April 2023, LiisBeth Media, a leading feminist media publication focused on feminist enterprise practice merged with rabble.ca, Canada’s longest running (founded, on April 18, 2001) online, award-winning, lefty, independent, community-driven news outlet.

Since then, we have been on quite a journey. But lovin’ every minute! Mergers, or in this case, mind-melds between two indie, under-capitalized entities with long to-do lists is like travelling on a cow path versus a super highway. We are diligently taking it one kilometre at a time.

About rabble.ca

Cofounded by Tonya Surman (Centre for Social Innovation), Mark Surman (Executive Director, Mozilla Foundation) and Judy Rebick (Canadian feminist activist, journalist) in 2001, rabble.ca is one of the first digital journalism organizations in Canada, and the first to incorporate as non-profit. rabble.ca has been at the forefront of reporting on national politics with a credible progressive lens that centres on issues of social movements, labour, and grassroots activism. Feminist journalism has always been part of the editorial focus. With LiisBeth in the house, their coverage of the feminist economy will increase.

On LiisBeth

LiisBeth was launched in 2015 by pk mutch and grew to serve and inform over 30,000 unique annual readers and 2700 newsletter subscribers. The media enterprise also co-launched the Entrepreneurial Feminist Forum, the Feminist City Walk and sponsored feminist initiatives like VenusFest and The Don’t You Want Me Campaign. The goal of the feminist media upstart was to raise awareness and interest in the feminist enterprise space, support feminist enterprises in whatever form, and connect feminist entrepreneurs globally.

LiisBeth and rabble.ca began working together in 2021. It was soon clear that coming together would benefit both readership communities.

On the Merger

pk mutch, founder and publisher of LiisBeth is excited about how this “exit in community” will evolve.

“The LiisBeth board and team are all super proud of this merger which took a lot of care, thought and planning for a year to bring to a close.”

The overarching goal? Continue to invest in great feminist economy reporting and bring these ideas and stories to a larger, all gender audience. Plus, bring more feminist enterprise content, to more people; strengthening and amplifying our collective culture making work.”

Mutch adds “To be clear. We did not “sell” LiisBeth. LiisBeth is a community and a living system. You can’t sell a living community. But you can successfully bring communities together when everyone involved cares about the same things. It’s an exit in the community–versus an exit of economic extraction.”

To find out more, and meet the rabble.ca team, we invite you to watch the two-minute video (above) which explains how it will all work.

What’s Next for pk?

This is the third time mutch has transitioned an enterprise she created with friends and aligned supporters.

“My relationship with LiisBeth was a loving one. And it’s hard to put your lover into the arms of another. But like sci-fi writer Octavia Butler says, “What you change, changes you. Change is the only constant. God is Change.” When it’s clear there is a new and better path forward for your enterprise and the ecosystem connected to it, you have to get out of the way. Liisbeth needed a bigger mother tree to nourish and grow it from here.”

pk mutch plans to focus on teaching, writing and nourishing her other enterprise, Highwire Collective, which has been starving for attention in the last two years.

“I can’t help but seed and build out ventures. I love creating. I believe revolutionary feminist and post-capitalist enterprise work is what all entrepreneurs should be learning about today. It’s a niche form of political and economic norm-busting form of activism. It’s also a deeply creative, transformative craft. I am thinking of going super dark for a year to open up more blank space. I want to plunge into Mariana Trench of post-capitalist economics and new socialism conversation and learn how to put theory into practice at an enterprise level.”

What’s Next for All of Us?

Over the next several months, pk mutch, Kim Elliot, publisher of rabble.ca and the rabble.ca team will continue to work behind the scenes to develop and launch a new editorial plan and strategy to lift up and amplify feminist economy writing and reporting.

One of the first initiatives executed right out of the gate is the integration of a weekly LiisBeth fieldnote into rabble.ca’s weekly roundup.

In the meantime, as work behind the scenes continues, all of LiisBeth’s seven years of content and archives will remain live on this site. There are over 480 articles here to explore.

You will begin to see more changes on our home pages over time.

Meanwhile, note that our monthly newsletter has ceased production.

All queries are now being reviewed by rabble.ca’s editorial team.

Updates to the site and posting of new content will be sporadic until the new plan is in place.

We appreciate your patience as we go through a bit of a bumpy period as we continue to evolve the plan in the coming months.

That said, to make sure you don’t miss a beat, we invite you to sign up to rabble.ca today (it’s open access) for updates.

It was yet another one of those high energy, motivational entrepreneurship conferences held in a large, carpeted conference hall at a slightly dated mid-town hotel.

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A Bridge to the Past: Flashes of Activism from rabble.ca

Isobel Carnegie — Mon, 28 Jun 2021 23:39:11 +0000

I don’t remember 9/11.

Maybe that’s because I was a Canadian toddler, rather than American, or was just too young — but opening to the first story in Everything On (The) Line: 20 Years of Social Movement Stories from rabble.ca I am transported back by the moving words of Monia Mazigh and Barâa Arar, mother and daughter of Maher Arar, a Syrian-Canadian who was arrested on September 26, 2002.

This transportive ability — to travel back in time and to live something you have a different memory of — is the primary accomplishment of rabble.ca’s compilation of stories from the last twenty years.

rabble.ca is an independent, nonprofit award winning left wing media outlet with 1M unique readers annually worldwide, based in Vancouver (original territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations). They aim to extend and amplify the work of social movements and front-line activists in Canada.

Everything On (The) Line is a collection of stories, but also the fossilized voices of journalists and activists during high-intensity moments in Canadian politics. Editors S. Reuss and Christina Turner have unearthed articles from rabble’s archives which capture the concerns and opinions of the activists, feminists, and fighters before us —concerns that still exist today.

The articles speak from Indigenous rights to climate change; personal accounts of protests and violence; outrage and critique for the government. The collection focuses on the personal lives of Canadian citizens impacted by these threats, while also panning out to inspect the governments of the early 2000’s, tying traumas from the violent injustices occurring around the world together: uniting pain but also hope across two decades.

The aim of the collection is not only to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Rabble, but to allow the past and present to converse; articles from 2001 in tandem with essays from 2020.

It is an opportunity for readers to “reflect on the social movements that challenged capitalism, racism, settler colonialism, and patriarchy over the past two decades.” (5)

Readers hear the personal stories from Monia Mazigh and Barâa Arar, to personal accounts of when Black Lives Matter Toronto turned the Pride Parade into a protest. Words from protestors of the G8 Summit burn with anger still, 19 years later.

In her piece “What Do We Want and Where Are We Headed?” Pamela Palmater expresses how “ultimately, we want to be free to govern ourselves as we choose; free to enjoy our identities, cultures, languages, and traditions; free to live the good life as we see fit.” (129) This desire for freedom and respect echoes throughout the twenty-four pieces in the book.

Anger and fear and distrust bubble up within these essays.

Amber Dean writes about attending Robert Pickton’s trial in 2007 for the murders of Sereena Abotsway, Mona Wilson, Andrea Joesbury, Marnie Frey, Brenda Wolfe, and Georgina Papin — asking how colonization can be over when the violence persists?

Michael Stewart picks apart the Harper government’s inability to “cope with the tender, patient, ironclad solidarity of Indigenous people in Canada.”

Murray Dobbin asked in 2009 how the government would face their denial and complacency in the face of crisis.

All are systemic issues still present today; the final section with pieces from 2015-2020 carry ghostly echoes of the first section from 2001-2005. This disturbing parallel calls for transformative justice, addressed by Walters and Zellars in their 2020 essay on abolishing the police and collective care. They call this turbulent time an “[opportunity] for reflection and growth [which] must be central to our abolitionist imaginings” and to “have the courage to dream, try, fail, try again, and fail better.” (173)

The collection also contains new essays from esteemed writers such as Nora Loreto. In her piece “Real Change Meets Radical Tactics” Loreto traces the resurgence of feminist action in recent years, raising the point that “for what remains of the mainstream feminist movement, the dominant frame is still firmly white. Whiteness obscures the fact that women do not experience systemic violence in the same way. It creates a tent so large that feminism becomes a matter of self-identity […] feminism has become slippery and toothless.” (145) This comment spoke to me as a reader, as a feminist, and as a member of LiisBeth, because whiteness is a barrier in the feminist organizations I see and participate in.

LiisBeth’s masthead is primarily (some queer) white women; “Everything On (The) Line” was compiled by two white women; LiisBeth partners with rabble.ca’s, putting together a monthly roundup. A white, queer woman is writing this review, the last in a funnel of white voices.

That being said, 35 per cent of LiisBeth’s contributors are women of colour and over 50 per cent of the articles written in the last year featured enterprises and projects founded or operated by women of colour, queer women and trans folk.

When rabble.ca was founded, a UNECE study found 40 per cent of journalists in Canada were women, and 97 per cent of journalists across all media were white, according to a study done by Laval University in 2000. This statistic from Laval University, as well as the point that there was (and still is) no current study to compare this data to, was mentioned in a rabble.ca piece in 2016 by Joanna Chu titled “The face of Canadian Journalism is still white — and it’s time to push back.”

The collection spurs questions and invites reflection not just on the state of our world, but also journalism — those who wrote before us and how future writers will curate, cultivate and uplift all voices.

It’s an opportunity to see how far we have come, but also look at where we still need to go.

Everything On (The) Line is not perfect, because history is not perfect. What we glean from these reverberations of rallying voices is that the next twenty years should be equally as action-packed, as fueled by the desire for change. We should read about and reach for change, as the voices of rabble.ca have.

The fifth section of the collection is titled “Activism and Indie Media: Pasts and Futures”, where publisher Kim Elliot and Mathew Adams call rabble.ca a bridge for the social movement, and reflect on how the launch of rabble.ca in 2001 gave them the focus of “[amplifying] the voices of resistance struggles and movement-focused news.”

Hopefully, Everything On (The) Line can be the bridge to the past that lays the foundation for the next twenty years of rabble.ca.

Anthropology for Non-anthropologists

Meral Mohammad Jamal — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 10:55:41 +0000

The first time Anya-Milana Sulaver (she/her) went back to visit her extended family in former Yugoslavia, she was trampled by a herd of pigs while picking tomatoes with her grandmother. It was the early ‘80s. Her grandmother had taken her there for the summer. She recalls how different the whole experience was for an urban girl who grew up in the West.

Years later, the culture shock from that first trip made her realize how different her family’s upbringing and context had been from her own.

This realization fascinated her. On subsequent trips there, Sulaver found herself increasingly interested in culture and communities. The duality of her experiences, that she was living through two cultures, drew her to “spaces of translation”— where she could understand the interconnectedness of her family’s history and identity with Yugoslavia and her own identity as a Canadian.

Anya-Milana Sulaver, founder at Peeps Magazine. Photo by Franzi Molina.

After completing her first degree, Sulaver started working as an associate producer for a company that focused on telling the stories of Indigenous communities in Canada. The documentary she’s most proud of investigated the signing of Treaty 7 by speaking with elders from the Blood, Siksika and Peigan reserves who retained the treaty’s oral history. The final documentary was broadcast nationally and shown to students from Blood 148, a First Nations reserve in Alberta that was established under the provisions of the treaty.

“The course of the work that’s followed has supported [my] lifelong ambition to ensure that when you’re speaking about a culture or peoples that those people [are] given the opportunity to ensure that representation is true to their values.”

The path that followed included getting two more degrees: a BA in International Development and a Masters in Interdisciplinary Studies (Anthropology, Humanities and Film), culminating in the founding of Peeps Magazine in 2015. An independent digital publication, Peeps shares insights into people and cultures around the world.

Photo by Christopher Pike for Peeps Magazine.

Tapping into Deep Research

Peeps, supported by Ontario Creates funding and a membership subscription ($21 quarterly/$70 annually), is produced by a team of 14 design, development and editorial staff, along with two curatorial managing editors who are experts in medical anthropology, and race and gender studies. Initially a print publication, Peeps transitioned to an online platform to reach a wider audience, providing readers with long-form articles that are often described as anthropology for non-anthropologists.

Sulaver founded Peeps because she wanted to bring knowledge to lay readers that was trapped in academic conversations, journals and conferences. Peer-reviewed and verified research takes years to trickle out to mainstream media—she estimates five to 10 years. She had a hunch that people were hungry for the information, especially published by an organization that takes care to verify the facts. So she built Peeps to help fill this gap.

A Peeps story, based on solid research and verified information, provides context and history to help readers gain that understanding.

Examples of this include the ways residents of post-apartheid Johannesburg, South Africa, confronted social inequalities in shared spaces; how “a clan of femcees” or female rappers were united by “a drive to dismantle gender stereotypes” in Iceland; or the role superheroes play in understanding contemporary society and how women are perceived. Authors bring hyphenated experiences – anthropologists/artists/filmmakers – to the writing of the stories.

The magazine was shortlisted for the Stack Independent Magazine Awards in 2016 in two categories—best launch and best original non-fiction story, “Winning and Losing in Modern China,” which investigated online vigilantism and gaming culture in Hangzhou, China. Written by Graham Candy, a PhD candidate for anthropology at the University of Toronto at the time, the article was also awarded Best Special Interest Story by Magazines Canada.

Sulaver describes Peeps approach to story telling as “participant observation.” Writers are usually historians, ethnographers and anthropologists who have spent decades in a particular community, bringing an academic rigour to frame their understanding of their experiences. Accurate analysis coupled with empathy, personal accountability and discipline are hallmarks of their storytelling.

A recent feature looked at the New Zealand government’s recognition of the Whanganui river as a living being, possessing human rights. Written by Anne Salmond, a distinguished professor of Maori Studies and Anthropology at the University of Auckland, the article recounts her personal relationship with the Maori community and how Maori chiefs, mayors, ambassadors, and local residents pressed to have the world’s first waterway gain this “person” status, considered revolutionary in placing the vital waterway “in a new relationship with human beings” and securing economic and legal support to protect it.

Sulaver says the editorial team confirmed permission from the Maori community, especially elders, to publish photos from Salmond’s time there. The Peeps team, led mostly by feminist women, are focused on building relationships, empathy and trust through their work. “We don’t want to prescribe solutions for people with the information—do with it what you will,” says Sulaver. “We’ve given you the information. We’ve given you resources to learn more about this. You know who the expert is on this. You can ask them on our website. But by not being prescriptive, the point is still there: the point is learning about other people and being an active listener to how they are in the world and how they see themselves in the world.”

She adds, “The goal is to have a product that people read and go, ‘I feel like I know those people so much better.’ Rather than, ‘Okay, this is how I invest my money, or this is how I can do this.'”

Combatting disinformation

As the publication enters its sixth year, Sulaver says Peeps remains devoted to verification as antidote to the exponential growth of disinformation in journalism. “We knew that fake news was a big problem six years ago—soon to be seven years—when we first started developing the core concept for the magazine. And it was something that I was adamant that we have an answer to in our infrastructure.”

The problem of fake news began long before The Donald was elected president of the United States, and Sulaver believes it will continue to exist long after Trump leaves. “This conversation is not new. I think that Trump is simply the giant snowball at the end of an avalanche. And [it] isn’t just the media—it’s politics, it’s academia, it’s all of our institutions that have been run by people who look the same, and who forgive the same flaws and sins in themselves. And over time, cumulatively, that adds up.”

For Sulaver, combatting disinformation moving forward involves giving people the power to share their stories and culture in a way that’s research-based and verifiable. With a small, devoted membership, she believes Peeps provides a platform to do just that.

The New Measure of a Womxn: Wielding Power

Farzana Doctor — Fri, 06 Mar 2020 13:16:23 +0000

Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash

Yesterday, while at a local theatre, I waited in line for the gender-segregated washrooms. As usual, the queue for the women’s went straight out the door and halfway down the hallway, while the men’s looked almost empty.

Most of us have grumbled about this poor architectural planning, but after spending this past week with Lauren McKeon’s No More Nice Girls: Gender, Power, And Why It’s Time to Stop Playing by the Rules, I labelled the problem differently: this is yet another example of how the world is designed for cis men.

No More Nice Girls, Lauren McKeon. Released March 2020 by Anansi Press

No More Nice Girls is a well-researched and infuriating (in all the right ways) book about power and how women’s and non-binary people’s power is routinely undermined. It’s packed with statistics on how marginalized people are taught to shoehorn themselves into a system intentionally designed not to fit. With an intersectional lens, the author lays out the way power inequities play out in politics, the economy, law, media, science, technology, city planning, and other areas.

McKeon challenges the myth that more women need to just work harder (and be “nice” while doing so) to reach for the top of existing power structures. Here’s one of the shocking statistics: when women CEOs do manage to reach the top, they earn $0.68 to every dollar their male colleagues make.

She also takes on the #GirlBoss trend, which encourages women to contort and bend instead of working to change the system. “They must be a boss, but not bossy; authentic, but Insta-trendy; real, but not harsh; beautiful, but effortless; killin’ it, but not thirsty; busy, but glowing with Goop-ified self-care; vulnerable, but just the right amount; tough, but just the right amount; confident, but not extra; warm, but not weak; decisive, but not rude; your bitch, but not bitchy.”

What interested me most about No More Nice Girls were the examples of how power might be reimagined and redefined, and how this power can lead to social equity.

For example, what if we viewed power as breaking silence and healing from trauma? Citing Tarana Burke, #MeToo’s founder: “What we’re doing with #MeToo is building something that doesn’t exist. Literally. It’s an international survivor-led and survivor-focused social justice movement.”

Power can also look like projects that intentionally decentre cis men and focus on the needs of women and non-binary people. McKeon offers anecdotes about the Toronto Newsgirls Boxing Club, The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, and the co-working space The Wing, all of which were created to be safe spaces and “where men no longer write the rules.”

But feminism is a work in progress, and McKeon raises essential questions about who gets included and excluded in these spaces, urging feminists to challenge their intersectional praxis: “In many ways, the women-only movement has mirrored the challenges of feminism itself: the centering of biological definitions at the expense of transgender women; the exclusion of Indigenous women and women of colour from its most visible and influential positions; claims of battling tokenism while institutionalizing that same philosophy in its own histories and organizations.”

Another chapter is devoted to the power of feminist entrepreneurship, such as Ali Ogden’s Bon Temps Tea Company, which gives micro-grants to women to encourage and support their feminist work, and Taran and Bunny Ghatrora’s Blume, a chemical-free period-product subscription box that includes politicized information about menstruation. These and other examples spotlight ways in which “a feminist-first enterprise that’s built with sincerity can phenomenally change the economic landscape.” They can create kinder workplace cultures that value mentorship, collaboration, staff wellness, and are trauma-informed. Among other things, they can include breastfeeding rooms, child care, and be more intentional in their hiring practices.

McKeon ends with reflections on Women Deliver, a global feminist conference that took place in Vancouver in 2019. Moderators closed main-stage panels with a question about how speakers would use their power. McKeon optimistically writes, “This question was a way of reminding everyone there that they did have power, now, even if it didn’t always feel like it—even if their power didn’t look anything like traditional power…. All of it put a drop more power into this new bucket. It evened things out. It remade the world.”

No More Nice Girls made me ponder the ways I use my power. I’m an author working within a publishing industry context that is still racist, sexist, ableist, and heterosexist. I do my best to mentor, share space (and when appropriate, make way for others), amplify the work of marginalized writers, collaborate to create opportunities, and push from the outside to help steer the slowly moving literary ship in the right direction. It’s easy to grow cynical, to question whether these efforts drive real change, or are just drops in a bucket. But McKeon’s optimism made me reconsider the power of this work. Could it remake the world?

I know that it’s possible to design washrooms to be accessible, safe, inviting, and not segregated by gender. It’s possible because people have done the advocacy and work to design them. Now it’s time to use our power to disrupt oppressive systems and create a world that includes all of us.

Farzana Doctor is the author of four novels, including the forthcoming Seven (Dundurn, August 2020).

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https://www.liisbeth.com/2019/08/14/feminism-a-key-idea-for-business-and-society/

https://www.liisbeth.com/2018/03/15/another-brick-in-the-wall/

https://www.liisbeth.com/2019/09/24/feminist-in-the-city/

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THE END OF FEMINIST MEDIA?

PK Mutch — Thu, 19 Dec 2019 16:19:13 +0000

Image adapted from Media Blog NewsWire

On December 8th, the New York Times declared the end of feminist blogging in the US adding “Now many of those [feminist] sites are dead or dying, and Jezebel is under new management, part of a stable of publications run by the hedge fund-controlled ownership group, G/O Media….”. The deceased or absorbed by mainstream media list continues.

Closures and mergers are traumatic for all stakeholders including founders who likely worked for free much of the time, and wage dependent staff impacted by change. But are acquisitions or onboarding of established editorial teams into larger media brands all that bad? One could argue it’s great that mainstream media finally recognizes that feminist narratives are important to 50 per cent of its readers. In some circles, the fact that someone even wants to acquire a feminist enterprise in the first place is a kind of win–like when Walmart decided to go green.

However, we all know what happens when corporate culture takes over a successful indie startup. The values that underpin financial maximization doctrines ultimately change the nature and editorial voice of the once loved enterprise. Think Ben & Jerrys. Whole Foods and Amazon. And NOW magazine, Toronto’s feminist leaning news outlet led for 38 years by Alice Klein. NOW Magazine (25 million readers) was purchased by an all-male led publicly traded investment group just two weeks ago, Media Central Corp (a long running investment vehicle/enterprise formerly named IntellaEquity Inc. who in its exchange filings, describes itself as a diversified investment and venture capital firm focused on providing investors with long-term capital growth by investing in a portfolio of undervalued companies and assets).

Frighteningly, NOW was bought for a mere $2M, roughly the cost of two Mikimoto Empress pearl necklaces ($996,000 USD each). As a long-time fan of the publication, the aquisition price is bewildering given the paper’s important role, reach, and impact in Toronto. It tells us something about how GDP style metrics fail to capture the true value of a social purpose enterprise. It also says a lot about how today’s alt media companies are valued—even by savvy investors. Media Central Corp plans to buy up to 100 “undervalued” or stuggling alt media assets in the next five years. You have to ask yourself, why.

Is Feminist and Indie Media Dead?

While it’s true that many publications are closing or being acquired by financial maximization driven corporations, it is also true that each year, more and more new indie sites are launching. Recent success stories in Canada include Village Media which owns and operates 11 local digital news sites and 15 (and counting) additional partner sites. Feedspot’s 2019 Best Feminist Blog list has grown from 10 to 20 (LiisBeth is on the list too!) in the feminist media space, and new publications pop up almost as quickly as others close. From a feminist perspective, its concerning that most of the new outlets are male-led and majority owned.

Notwithstanding, clearly there is an appetite for indie journalism and media. So, what’s the real problem here?

The fact is, surviving and flourishing as an indie media enterprise takes more than passion, crackerjack content, clicks and coin—it requires a resourceful founder with attitude, and the willingness to swap big for bold—more Ani DiFranco, less Warner Bros. It will also a design thinking approach to core legal, governance,and capital structures.

It also takes an effort to boldly rethink the revenue model. From afar at least, it seems to be that while these important feminist blogs (I read them too) had awesome content, most were set up as traditional non-profit or for-profit enterprises. Millennial in the front, old school at the back (largely advertising or influencer dependent). The reality is that media outlets can no longer compete for advertising revenue with rapacious social media giants like Facebook and Google (The Discourse reports that today, a mere ten cents per advertising dollar spent in Canada goes to actual media publications).

I know this sounds depressing. But I personally believe there is a way. It it starts with being super careful and intentional about growth and an interest in alternative legal forms (cooperatives, collectives) plus capital structure innovation.

Here at LiisBeth, we have an annual budget of about $35,000 after three years of operating (hey, it was $5,000 at first). Approximately 30 per cent of our revenue comes from reader donations (you). The rest comes from conferences, seminars, events, and consulting gigs related to feminist enterprise development. We do not sell ads, accept sponsored content, or generate influencer income. This fall we invested $7,000 into our Feminist Enterprise Commons (FEC) initiative (we wanted to get off of Facebook groups and provide readers with a place to communicate and support each other without being in Zuckerberg’s eyes—and make the unbridled organization richer with our data). Approximately 85 per cent of our spend goes to paying for articles and editorial work. The rest covers the cost of digital licenses we need to publish (WordPress, InDesign, Mailchimp, etc.) and stuff like accounting and legal. As the publisher, I am the only volunteer staff member. We have no investors. No bank debt. No credit card debt. Last year we received our first grant ($10,000) from the City of Toronto to publish ten profiles of feminist entrepreneurs in Toronto. We watch every penny. We re-invest every dollar that comes in. We have an awesome advisory board and steady list of contributors. And about 19 000+ unique annual readers.

New initiatives for next year include building up our Feminist Enterprise Commons, raising funds for an Emerging Feminist Journalism Scholarship program, and test driving an experimental correspondent program in either Vancouver or New York. After taking a deep dive look into alternative governance and capital structures, we are also working to transform LiisBeth into a multi-stakeholder cooperative by June 2020.

Some might say that given our meager top line and spend we are not yet a “serious” business. At which point I quickly remind everyone that Bust, Shamelss, Bitch, Herizons, Ms, Rabble.ca, AdBusters, and other status quo busting media were once a startup like ourselves. After 20 years, these survivors are still serving millions of readers collectively via both print and digital offerings. Despite existing on the equivalent of starvation level, vegan diets, they have grown and learned to competently surf wave after wave of tech driven disruption with the help of a loyal and committed core reader community.

So sure, a bunch of feminist blogs succumbed to what feminist business thought leader CV Harquail describes as the “Stargate” like “the magic circle” of business, but that doesn’t mean feminist blogs or indie media is disappearing. It means the sector is evolving and healthy. New blogs and outlets will appear to fill the void. Existing ones will change. Others will close or get bought out. Activity like this is the hallmark of a living, breathing sector.

The big media sector at present, is in a state of a gut-wrenching macro level transformation. It looks bad from industry heights above. But here on indie’s ground level, I see signs of regeneration. Many of those now out of work editors and journalists energized by moral outrage will be bitten by the spirit of entrepreneurship. Having learned a lot in the trenches, I have confidence they will reemerge to reinvent the industry in ways previously unimagined.

And all you need to do, dear readers, to accelerate that change, in the name of an informed, robust, and accountable democracy, is to support them (and in particular womxn-owned/led outlets) not only with your attention and admiration—but also with your dollars.

Creating researched and inspirational content to support and advocate for feminist changemaking takes hundreds of hours each month. If you find value and nourishment here, please consider becoming a donor subscriber or patron at a level of your choosing. Priced between a cup of coffee or one take out salad per month.

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Related Reading

https://www.liisbeth.com/2019/04/02/will-next-generation-news-media-ownership-be-gender-balanced/

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Stuff Your Stockings With Feminist Joy

Champagne Thomson — Tue, 26 Nov 2019 13:27:42 +0000

Photo: Champagne Thompson

Most practices of the Christmas season contradict my feminist values, the gendered narratives of Christianity conflated into the season of “giving,” with women carrying the burden of holiday shopping, cooking, and social coordination. Then there’s the “give and get”—giving a charitable donation in time to get a charitable tax receipt by year end.

For me, holiday giving and celebrating should not be powered by a capitalistic consumer agenda but by love, thoughtfulness, kindness. During the holiday season, winter solstice in particular, I focus on hope and gratitude for female* energies rather than the pinging of POS machines in shopping malls driving us into debt. Do our loved ones really want that? I don’t think so.

This year I endeavoured to find a way to engage with the festivities, in ways that make my heart happy. I visited three events featuring feminist makers and changemakers: the Made by Feminists Market at Toronto’s Gladstone Hotel; Ottawa’s Feminist Fair; and the Indigenous & Ingenious Show and Sale in Toronto. You can check out their crafty arts online, as I am sure they will inspire you to new ethical shopping heights, as they did me.

Here are some of my feminist faves that are sleighin’ it!

SaSa Naturals, Toronto

This powerhouse family team walks the feminist talk! Sisters Sarai (22), Jahdiel (25), Kristine (27), and their mom, Carolyn, run SaSa Naturals, an ethical, all-natural approach to self-care that emphasizes the power of women’s bodies. The co-founders are incredibly knowledgeable about each product and ingredient as well as traditional hygiene and wellbeing practices of women around the globe. They source goods directly from female-run shea nut farms in Ghana and even visit regularly to ensure female farmers are being treated equitably and that plant-based products are produced sustainably and free from chemicals. Products include all-natural deodorant alternatives, delectable soaps, bath bombs, lip chap and Yoni steam kits (unlike Amazon’s selections, these vaginal cleansing kits use herbs that honour the sacredness of womanhood). By using traditional medicinal practices rather than chemicals, the SaSa team is building a sassy brand that reminds women that our natural selves are our true selves. Check out their Instagram page to place orders that can be shipped to both Canada and the United States.

Radical Roots

Kristen Campbell, an ecological restoration maven, founded her company almost two years ago as a way to make beautiful change in the era of climate crisis. She handmakes seed bombs—ethically sourced native plant species balled up in clay—that you can chuck at any barren patch during your morning walk or your own garden for that matter. Add rain, and flowers spring up. Bees and butterflies will love you, as native habitat springs from these flower bombs. Beautifying the world has never felt so therapeutic as hucking an enviro-friendly bomb of life to Mother Nature! An excellent gift for the outdoorsy, flower-loving, tree-hugging types in your life or for anyone who just wants to drop an f-bomb—and feel great about it.

Read My Flowers

Helena Verdier discovered a love for transformative upcycling while studying at Carleton University. Now 26, she has made a business of repurposing some of our favourite literature into works of visual and wearable art. She creates paper flower crowns, centrepieces, and floral decor, showcasing and selling her flower-power pieces on her Instagram page. Seeing Verdier’s artistry highlighted on the Feminist Twin’s page enticed me to make the trek to their Feminist Fair in Ottawa for their sixth annual event where I discovered plenty more feminist gift-giving ideas.

Hand Stitched by Claire

Remember those framed embroidery pieces hanging in grandma’s house, greeting you with cheesy, sentimental sayings, like “Home is where the heart is” and all that? Well, Claire’s (Claire ask us to not publish her last name) embroidery art is not that. The 30-year-old stitches radical, feminist ideas into her hoops such as “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle” and “Ovaries before brovaries” as well as slogans for the woke such as “If it is inaccessible to the poor it’s neither radical nor revolutionary” and “Hang on lemme overthink this.” She also draws on racialized voices for inspiration. From Serena Williams: “The day I stop fighting for equality…will be the day I’m in my grave.” Such soulful, gut-punching, and often hilarious affirmations gave me the most painful belly laugh—and sure to deliver the same kick to your pals. Claire ships her work straight to your door—and accepts custom orders should you know exactly what will tickle a friend’s feminist fancy.

Chief Lady Bird

At Indigenous & Ingenious, I visited Chief Lady Bird, an Anishinaabekwe artist who resists colonization through her mixed media prints, brilliant murals, skateboard decks and youth-focused projects that focus on Indigenous resilience, sex and body positivity, as well as calling attention to the importance of Indigenous women in our communities. She recently illustrated Nibi’s Water Song, a brilliant children’s book about Nibi’s quest to find clean water in her community, highlighting the need to listen to Indigenous voices and protect our planet for future generations. You can order Chief Lady Bird’s art on her Instagram page. She takes commissions for custom pieces too.

But the greatest gift I took away from my foray into these feminist fairs? The knowledge that every dollar we spend casts a ballot for the world we want to inhabit. One maker told me that the money she made at the event will help pay her rent this month. When we buy from our brilliant sisters, we are also giving a gift of survival and support in the fight to dismantle the patriarchy. Now, I can deck the halls with that!

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The Art of Change

Mai Nguyen — Tue, 26 Nov 2019 13:23:36 +0000

Feminist Art Conference 2014, OCAD University, Toronto

The process for art-making can boil down to something like this: Make art, get feedback, make art better. Sounds easy, right? It wasn’t for Ilene Sova. In 2012, the Toronto artist-activist was painting portraits of women who had disappeared in Ontario for her Missing Women Project. She wanted to talk about the hard issues she was tackling in her art—patriarchy, misogyny, systemic racism, violence against women—but there wasn’t a group of fellow feminist artists to turn to, at least not a formally organized one.

Sova put out a call for submissions and volunteers and got a rush of responses, including from people in Kenya and Colombia. On International Women’s Day in March 2013, she launched the first Feminist Art Conference (FAC), a multidisciplinary event that brought together artists, activists, and academics of different gender identities, ages, nationalities, and feminisms so they could show their work and use it to spark discussions around important feminist issues.

The conference sold out in two days, attracting 120 participating artists and 150 attendees. “Clearly what I had been missing in my own social practice was something that others in our creative communities were also yearning for,” says Sova. FAC’s subsequent annual conferences have been equally as successful, especially the 2017 event that happened the day of the Women’s March.

‘Ashaba’; No human can look at her directly by Karen White explores unseen oppression. By covering her face while staring straight at the viewer, the artist makes us feel both complicit and engaged in the exploration of colonialism and imperialism.

Art That Moves

Feminists have been long fed up with the fact that women’s art continues to be undervalued, underrepresented, and often completely ignored. The feminist activist group Guerrilla Girls have been calling out the gender and racial inequality in the arts since 1985 when they picketed the Museum of Modern Art in New York for featuring only 13 women out of 169 artists.

That inequality persists today. Female visual artists earn just 65 percent of the annual income of their male peers, according to a 2018 report by the Ontario Arts Council. Since 2013, women have only accounted for 36 percent of solo exhibitions at Canadian galleries; it’s dramatically less for non-white women. Gender disparity also exists in the performing arts space, which FAC attempts to redress in their events.

FAC has heard all the reasons why feminist work is often shut out of commercial spaces and public institutions. It’s not mainstream or universal (i.e., not male). It’s too angry and personal (i.e., too female) to be good. No one (i.e., men) will buy it. FAC’s response? Carve out spaces to showcase intersectional work that might be deemed taboo elsewhere, for instance, on topics such as rape culture, transphobia, racism, ableism, domestic violence, missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, media representation, cultural appropriation, environmental degradation, and Islamophobia. Nothing is off limits. FAC featured a graphic novel about trauma and abuse, Girl in the Attic by Hyein Lee, which contains such difficult subject matter that FAC added its first-ever content warning.

Girl in the Attic by Hyein Lee explores themes of trauma and abuse by drawing the viewer into the narrative.

According to Sova, people attending FAC events say they are really touched because the art reflects current social issues that affect them. “This creates a very impactful experience for those viewing art or experiencing a performance,” says Sova.

After hosting four conferences, FAC changed its name to the Feminist Art Collective to reflect its expanding mission. It now hosts artist residencies on the Toronto Islands. And its next event—the Feminist Art Festival, March 5 to 7, 2020, at OCAD University—will include a reception, conference, performances, film screening, makers’ market, and a two-week exhibition featuring the work of visual artists.

The Art of the Action

Since day one, FAC has operated as a grassroots organization run entirely by volunteers. Currently, the core team consists of 30 people from a variety of backgrounds and experiences.

Carissa Ainslie, who took on the coordinator role after Ilene Sova became the Ada Slaight Chair of Contemporary Painting and Drawing at OCAD University, describes their current organizational structure as non-hierarchical. “We try to be intersectional in terms of who we’re including in the conversations that we’re having,” says Ainslie. “Ensuring that everyone has a voice at the table is really important regardless of what their experiences have been.”

FAC’s biggest challenge is finding the time and money to put on events, particularly without a physical office or paid staff. It didn’t help that the Ontario government slashed arts sector funding from $18.5 million to $6.5 million earlier this year but, before that, FAC did not have much success getting grants as their conferences are so unique they don’t “tick all the eligibility boxes.” Instead, they’re exploring other options such as sponsorships with companies that align with their values.

For now, FAC relies on in-kind donations for printing services, food and beverages for receptions, and space rentals (OCAD University is a signature partner and hosts the festivals as well as committee meetings). Ticket sales (with pay-what-you-can options) and their annual Made by Feminists market at the Gladstone Hotel also brings in funds.

Despite budget constraints, FAC continues to grow. Submissions for the 2020 festival were up to 187 from 130 in 2017, coming in from Australia, South America, Europe, United States, and Canada. Ainslie says the political landscape has changed since their last conference in 2017 with the #MeToo movement encouraging people to talk openly about sexual harassment and gender inequality.

A voting committee of 11 people (artists, curators, activists, community members and academics) will select the final artists to participate at the festival, through a selection process that considers social justice issues, intersectionality, the collective’s mission and, of course, the strength of the art itself rather than the artist’s professional record.

Not Missing, Not Murdered by Amanda Amour-Lynx features the shirt the artist wore the night she was sexually assaulted. Photo: Black Umbrella Photography, Rebecca Tisdelle-Macias

With FAC serving as a spring board, past participants have gone on to show or perform their work in other venues and countries, collaborated with artists they met at FAC events, and even started conferences (see Black Futures Now and M.I.X.E.D) as well as a literary magazine (Living Hyphen).

Says Ainslie: “The world is a bit ridiculous and I hope people can come together and have some good conversations. We try our best to support the artists the way we can. We can’t always do that with funds but we can by creating a space where artists can build their CV and present work that may not be welcome anywhere else. We just want the best for all the artists involved.”

The Feminist Art Festival runs from March 5 to 7, 2020 in Toronto. Get your tickets here.

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Moving Pictures: What We Learned from Women Filmmakers at TIFF 2019

Margaret DeRosia — Tue, 24 Sep 2019 12:23:10 +0000

Cynthia Erivo (Harriet) on the red carpet in at TIFF 2019 in Toronto. Photo by Frazer Harrison

Last year, the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) and its counterparts in Cannes and Venice committed to achieving gender parity in film selections by 2020, signing the historic 5050×2020 agreement. With the Share Her Journey fundraising campaign, TIFF created the Micki Moore Residency (for female screenwriters), the inaugural TIFF Talent Accelerator (for female directors, producers, and writers), and achieved gender parity in both the TIFF Filmmaker Lab and TIFF’s programming team.

Despite those initiatives, the total number of female-fronted films barely nudged up from 35 to 37 percent at TIFF, a fact lamented by TIFF’s own co-head, Joana Vicente. In 2019, Venice selected only two films by female directors for its 21-film competition while Cannes selected four out of 19. Unlike Vicente, the heads of Cannes and Venice argued that redressing exclusion by quotas alone could dilute quality.

Women directors enjoyed the last laugh at that, with Manele Labidi’s Arab Blues winning Venice’s audience choice award, and Mati Diop taking the Grand Prix at Cannes for her film Atlantics, while also making history as the first Black woman director to compete at Cannes.

Here at LiisBeth, we wondered what happens when women get the opportunity to direct the storytelling? Do film plots, points of view, and ideas shift? And what might feminist entrepreneurs directing enterprises of their own take away from these narratives?

Five Films, Five Takeaways

At TIFF 2019, many international films made by women rejected facile notions of “girl power” or “leaning in” in favour of more dissonant, challenging plots. Take this cross-section of five films, which unsettle assumptions about who women are, what we can achieve, and what our models for work can be.

Arab Blues: Things Rarely Go According to Plan

I can see why French-Tunisian director Manele Labidi’s bittersweet comedy won the audience choice award at Venice. It was my favourite, too.

The film follows young, intrepid Selma (Golshifteh Farahani), who studied in Paris for 10 years, as she returns to her hometown in Tunis to start her own psychotherapy practice for locals, post-revolution.

Challenges abound. The labyrinthine licensing bureaucracy forces Selma to work around the law. Locals are amused or irritated by her services. Yet her sessions soon become truly rewarding moments in the film. They not only reveal the limits of Selma’s tacit mentor, Freud (whose portrait hangs on her office wall), but also how she is an outsider in her own hometown.

Ultimately, Selma’s status as an outsider helps her forge her own path and build a more culturally nuanced “talking cure.” Starting from a vague desire to “help,” Selma learns why she really chose this path, which deepens both her practice and her clients’ lives.

The takeaway: Entrepreneurs know that the best laid (business) plans can fall apart fast. Many opportunities must be seen—and seized—on the fly. Only much later can we see why we started.

How to Build a Girl: Success at Your Own Expense Equals Failure

Courtesy of Protagonist Pictures

Coky Giedroyc’s UK film brings to life Caitlin Moran’s semi-autobiographical novel. Working-class ’90s teenager Johanna (a dynamite Beanie Feldstein) morphs into “Dolly Wilde,” a mean-spirited music journalist alter ego. Her scathing review of Queen, for example, bears the withering headline, “Bohemian Crapsody.”

Discussions of entrepreneurship often emphasize the value of failure. How to Build a Girl, however, reveals that failing can be a lot harder for a working-class girl stuck among posh bros. For Johanna, there’s no safety net if she doesn’t win, yet dudes set the terms for that “win.”

The more Johanna becomes Dolly, and the more men reward her, the more we see all the problems of her “success.” That makes for a refreshing feminist rebuke: Don’t mistake sexist cynicism for intelligence, let alone success.

No spoilers, but this well-written script will have women, especially those who’ve had to play “one of the guys,” cheering on nerdy, smart-girl Johanna long past the closing credits.

The takeaway: Trying to become someone you’re not isn’t worth it—even if all signs point to a win.

Harriet: Don’t Lead Later, Lead Now

After directing the haunting Eve’s Bayou in 1997, Kasi Lemmons joined a coterie of Black American filmmakers who seemed on the cusp of transforming the film industry. Sadly that did not materialize thanks to persistent Hollywood racism.

Lemmons’ latest, Harriet, suggests a new day. It’s a suspenseful biopic of Harriet Tubman, who escaped slavery and then returned to lead others to freedom along the Underground Railroad. Indeed, Harriet begs the question of why it took so long for the story of this amazing woman to reach the big screen.

Played with verve and grit by Cynthia Erivo, the diminutive Harriet displays a fierce will to eliminate slavery. Underestimated, even by herself at first, she begins in fear-driven flight, and then buoyed by faith and success, dives undaunted into leadership.

Harriet illustrates and intertwines three layers of Black female leadership—Harriet Tubman, Erivo in an Oscar-worthy performance, and Lemmons as auteur. For all three, defeat should have been inevitable, but they persevered.

The takeaway (in Harriet’s words): “I’ve come this far on my own, so don’t you dare tell me what I can’t do.”

Atlantics: Communities, Not Individuals, Generate Heroism

For those in social justice–driven enterprises, it’s hard to keep fighting the good fight, day after day. Directed by Mati Diop, this Senegalese-French-Belgian co-production, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes, is both ghost story and love story, a poetic, magical take on how we can keep on pressing on—if we don’t try to go it alone.

Atlantics opens with several men demanding, but not receiving, unpaid wages for their work on a half-finished high-rise in Dakar. From there, we see the relentless, sun-bleached ocean. Crashing waves foreshadow how the men will soon be doomed refugees, a juxtaposition that drives two star-crossed lovers apart.

Or do they part? Atlantics dives into magical realism to suggest that unresolved historical trauma will have the last say. Mourning women left behind start to embody the men’s ghosts—and demand retribution. Eschewing realism, Atlantics offers a powerful, poignant parable.

The takeaway: By acting as a community, substantive social change can unfold.

Three Summers: Adversity Can Reveal Surprising Allies

We don’t always know who our allies are until push comes to shove, and those who show up may not be whom we expect.

This Brazilian-French film, directed by Sandra Kogut, offers a canny exploration of class struggle. The legendary Regina Casé plays Madá, the lead housekeeper at a wealthy resort in Rio de Janeiro. Over three summers, we see how her boss’s white-collar crimes affect but do not defeat Madá.

Based on the real-life Operation Car Wash investigation in Rio, Three Summers isn’t interested in rich criminals. They’re more sad sacks than masterminds. Instead, the film spends time with the staff, mostly women led by Madá. They are as pragmatic and resourceful as they are funny and kind, even when caught in the crossfire.

Madá transitions from identifying with her employers to supporting her coworkers and strikes up a friendship with her ex-boss’s elderly father, Lira. He’s abandoned—like the staff—and considered useless by his own self-absorbed family. Three Summers builds a plucky collective of who’s left behind, and how they survive this failed (last?) resort.

The takeaway: Allies take surprising forms. We need to stay connected to those who show up for the hard work, for these allies will prove far more valuable in the end.

That’s a wrap! If you attended TIFF, what films made you leave the theatre inspired and ready to act?

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Lessons from the Downfall of a Feminist Leader

Stephanie Newman — Thu, 15 Aug 2019 11:17:58 +0000

Victorial Claflin Woodhull, Politician, Entrepreneur, Feminist

Victoria Claflin Woodhull became the first woman to run for president of the United States in 1872, more than a century before Shirley Chisholm and Hillary Clinton. She gave speeches at several suffragist conventions, befriended Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, and advocated for women’s rights as a leader of first-wave feminism.

Yet few people have heard of Victoria Woodhull. Those who have don’t often realize that Woodhull was also a serial entrepreneur who notched many “firsts.” She was the first woman to set up a brokerage firm on Wall Street. She published the Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, the first feminist newspaper of its kind in the United States. It gained national notoriety, advocating for a woman’s right to control her own sexuality and calling out the societal hypocrisy of tolerating married men having mistresses. It was also the first American publication to print The Communist Manifesto.

Yet, after achieving all those firsts, Woodhull was tossed in jail, her reputation was shredded, and she lost the fortune she made. Her feminist beliefs came at a high cost. But there are many lessons feminists can take from the spectacular rise and downfall of this 19^th century feminist entrepreneur.

Lesson #1: Dire Necessity Can Breed Opportunity

Victoria Woodhull’s entry into entrepreneurship wasn’t a choice, let alone a privilege.

Woodhull was born in 1838 in Ohio to an impoverished family, and her family’s hardships forced her into an enterprising way of life. Her father committed insurance fraud and gambled. Her mother only allowed Woodhull to attend school intermittently between the eighth and eleventh grades, and her parents forced her into marriage a few weeks before her fifteenth birthday, under the assumption that her husband—Canning Woodhull, 28, who claimed to be a doctor— would economically provide for his young wife. But her husband was an alcoholic, had several mistresses, and did not practice medicine.

Before divorcing her husband (and keeping his name), Woodhull returned to her parents’ house with her two children in desperate financial need. Her father set her up as a fortune teller in an Ohio boardinghouse. “At that time, there was enormous interest in the occult,” writes Woodhull’s biographer Marion Meade in Free Woman: The Life and Times of Victoria Woodhull. “Vicky predicted future events, gave business advice, solved bank robberies, straightened the feet of the lame, and made the deaf hear again. Or so she later would claim.”

And so, Woodhull launched her first business, offering psychic services, which set her on an entrepreneurial path that led to considerable success later in life.

Modern women entrepreneurs can see a version of their story in Woodhull’s. According to the 2018 Global Entrepreneur Monitor Report, as many as 17 percent of entrepreneurs in North America are motivated by financial need. Many women start businesses not because they want to quit full-time jobs or seek career fulfillment, but because they desperately need money and see no other options. This trend is known as “necessity entrepreneurship.”

In running her first business, Woodhull learned how to read the market for trends, honed her people skills through client interactions, and eventually won herself the mentor she needed to pivot to other businesses.

Lesson #2: The Precarity of Male Funding

In 1863, Cornelius Vanderbilt was the wealthiest man in the United States. Woodhull met him after she moved to New York City with her new husband, Colonel James Blood, and her younger sister, Tennessee (Tennie) Claflin. Keen to have his fortune told, Vanderbilt attended his first psychic reading with the sisters and became a repeat customer. Traces of sexual interest permeated through his relationship with the two—he asked Tennie to marry him; she refused—but he continued to book their services and eventually started teaching them how to buy and sell stocks.

The sisters acted on his advice. At the time, women were not allowed inside the New York Stock Exchange, even as visitors, so they sent Woodhull’s husband to make their trades on Wall Street. Eventually, the sisters opened their own brokerage firm, becoming the first women to do so, with Blood serving as their accountant and secretary. Vanderbilt agreed to invest in their enterprise. He was no feminist, but the idea of two women on Wall Street “appealed to his sense of humour,” biographer Meade wrote.

Vanderbilt’s role in Woodhull’s business has echoes in today’s relationship between male venture capitalists and women-run businesses. Vanderbilt provided crucial financial support, and Woodhull knew that having a male mentor in her corner was advantageous, but their business relationship didn’t change the rules of the patriarchal culture she operated in.

Initially, Woodhull’s reputation soared, and with it came financial success. Journalists had unusually kind words for the first woman to ever work on Wall Street, and she became an immediate sensation in the press (though, as one might expect, reporters focused more on her elegant outfits and physical beauty than her business).

Woodhull soon became very wealthy. She moved into a mansion in Manhattan, opened her doors to her family, and turned her home into something of a salon for New York City radicals.

But the precariousness of Woodhull’s reliance on Vanderbilt’s investment became clear after she developed a public persona as a feminist. She spoke at women’s suffrage conventions and, with her sister Tennie, started the feminist newspaper Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly. She helped launch a new political party, the People’s Party, later named the Equal Rights Party, and ran for president in 1872.

Not surprisingly, when Woodhull’s advocation of “free love” (a woman’s right to decide when to marry, divorce, and bear children without social restriction) sparked criticism, Vanderbilt withdrew his support and money, with disasterous consequences for Woodhull’s brokerage firm and newspaper. Without Vanderbilt’s stamp of approval, she was no longer considered a dignified businesswoman. Other men stopped doing business with Woodhull, and she was forced to shutter her newspaper and her office on Wall Street.

Lesson #3: The Personal is Political

As Woodhull built her public reputation as an entrepreneur, publisher, and politician, she kept her personal life out of the public eye. Her marriage situation would have been confounding to her contemporaries. Divorce was rare. She and her husband considered themselves “free lovers,” engaging in extramarital affairs. Woodhull even welcomed her first husband back into her home in Manhattan when he showed up at her door, drunk and homeless.

Woodhull’s personal life blew open in the New York press when her vengeful mother, Roxanna Claflin, filed a lawsuit against Woodhull’s husband, claiming he tried to murder her. The charges were quickly debunked in the courtroom, but reporters covering the case leapt on the salacious details of Woodhull’s home life, revealing to all of New York City that Woodhull lived with “both of her husbands.” By then, Woodhull was a widely recognized feminist, and the negative press fuelled accusations that the women’s movement would destroy the crux of Victorian society: the sacred family unit.

The scandal accelerated the bankruptcy of Woodhull’s brokerage firm and snuffed out her nascent political career.

Modern women entrepreneurs may identify all too well with the web of “conditionals” that trapped Woodhull: You can use your voice, so long as the public approves of what you say; start a business, but only if you can attract and retain the financial support of men; pursue sexual freedom, but at your own peril and risk losing your career and reputation.

Woodhull’s downfall utterly disproved the belief she held at the peak of her success, that women simply have to act like men’s equals in order to become their equals. Only after her business and political ambitions imploded did Woodhull understand how wrong she had been.

Lesson #4: Patriarchy Has Many Ways to Silence Difficult Women

Desperate to save her reputation, Woodhull used her newspaper to plead her case and amplify her voice. She wrote in the Weekly: “Victoria C. Woodhull’s personal and individual private life is something entirely distinct from her public position…. If Mrs. Woodhull has valuable ideas, what has her past history to do with them?” When that didn’t win over detractors, she took a more aggressive stance in a letter to the New York Times, contending that plenty of men practiced free love and received no criticism for it. “I shall make it my business to analyze some of the lives,” she concluded.

The first person she took to task was Reverend Henry Beecher, the most famous pastor in the country with more than 2,000 congregants gathering for his Sunday sermons. He publicly railed against free love and prostitution, while privately conducting numerous extramarital affairs. Woodhull was friends with one of the couples involved in Beecher’s infidelity, so she published an exposé about the reverend’s hypocrisy in the Weekly.

A young male lawyer levelled obscenity charges at Woodhull for her article on Beecher’s affairs, and Woodhull was actually jailed—for weeks—as her trial date was continually postponed. With Woodhull behind bars, the Reverend’s reputation was restored, while Woodhull’s was further damaged.

When Woodhull was finally released, she fled to England, married a wealthy count and lived out her remaining 44 years disavowing feminist philosophies she once held so dear and had worked so hard to make reality. Woodhull became the type of woman her younger self would have been dismayed by: fearful, quiet, repressed.

Lesson #5: The Strength of Feminism Is in Diversity

It’s hard not to read Woodhull’s story as a dire warning. When a woman speaks up, it’s often her reputation and personality rather than her ideas that are put on public trial. Perhaps this is especially true when the woman in question is an entrepreneur, politician, or media figure—or all three as Woodhull was. The financial and personal repercussions were severe for Woodhull who lost her home, her family, her life’s savings, even her faith in feminism. With such an historical precedent, is it any wonder that more of us don’t start companies, dare to effect change, or run for office?

Certain aspects of Woodhull’s plight remain shockingly relevant. Women-run businesses still rely heavily on financial support from male investors who determine the (patriarchal) rules they must abide by. The media still puts women on trial for the public offence of being a woman—passing judgement on looks, dress, personality, and behaviour—as well as punishing every deviation outside “acceptable” norms. Woodhull’s allegations against the untouchable Reverend Beecher foreshadow #MeToo exposés of powerful men, but a lone woman’s voice still doesn’t carry much weight; it took many years and victims before Harvey Weinstein was brought to justice. And Woodhull’s wrongful imprisonment for daring to take on a powerful man sadly echoes in President Trump’s “lock her up” taunts aimed at his political rival, Hillary Clinton.

Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly feminist newspaper had challenges that contemporary feminist publications still face. In her final post on Rookie, founder and editor Tavi Gevinson wrote about the complexities of raising money from male investors and then having to be answerable to them, as Woodhull was with Vanderbilt. Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner parlayed their public personas to grow an audience for Lenny Letter, which tied the fate of the publication to the reputations of the founders, as Woodhull’s newspaper was. When the two celebrities tweeted their support for a man accused of sexual assault, some writers were so angry they boycotted the site, undoubtedly contributing to the closure of Lenny Letter soon after.

Woodhull’s rise and fall, both in the context of her own time and ours, has a key takeaway: there is a particular danger in over-identifying any one person, business, or publication with the feminist movement. Today’s socially conscious entrepreneurs seem to understand the pitfalls of attaching a feminist media business to a personal platform. Consequently, more publications try to amplify a multiplicity of perspectives. Kayla E., editor-in-chief of Nat. Brut literary magazine, emphasizes that publishing a feminist magazine comes with this responsibility. “It’s not just about my singular vision as an editor,” she says. “We have a duty to advocate for our readership. I want Nat. Brut’s legacy to be that we cared, that we saw people, heard people, and gave a platform to people who wouldn’t have otherwise had one.”

Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly didn’t survive past its sixth birthday. Hopefully, feminist publishing successors, amplifying a chorus of feminist voices, will be much harder to stamp out.

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Will Next Generation News Media Ownership Be Gender Balanced?

PK Mutch — Tue, 02 Apr 2019 15:42:23 +0000

The world needs more women media company entrepreneurs

It’s April 2019. How difficult is it to launch and grow an innovative an independent journalistic media enterprise as a woman? Especially since the industry appears to be financially collapsing all around us. What unique barriers do women media entrepreneurs face? Is there any equity inspired public support?

Three years ago, along with the support of a few advisors and friends, I launched LiisBeth. We noticed and became increasingly concerned about the significant and persistent gender, diversity and inclusion issues in the growing entrepreneurship and innovation economy. We saw that no one was dedicated to interrogating it from a feminist point of view. We ignored the fact that media enterprises were folding all around us. In the Canadian news media space alone, over 260 outlets have closed in the last 10 years. The fact that there are fewer journalists today than ever before didn’t give us pause either. Since 2011, for every job lost in journalism there have been 17 jobs added in public relations and advertising (-1,230 vs. +21,320). We tenaciously believe the fourth estate—versus spin doctoring—remains important to any functioning democracy, and that storytelling can change lives, society, and the course of history. We persist despite the odds. We pivot and iterate. That’s what entrepreneurs do.

But back to what it’s like to grow a media enterprise as a woman? Two quick answers come to mind.

It’s beyond hard. Investors love media tech platforms. But are wary about investing in journalistic content. Even fewer want to spend money investing in feminist-led editorial programs that might upset the status quo. Or unnerve friends in positions of power who helped them get to where they are. Fear of reprisals for truths told are a real concern for many. Society also doesn’t like to hear women who think. Feminist writer Rebecca Solnit notes: “Who is heard and who is not defines the status quo. Those who embody it [the status quo], often at the cost of extraordinary silences with themselves, move to the centre; those who embody what is not heard, or what violates those who rise on silence, are cast out.” What she is telling women media entrepreneurs is this: Starting a fashion blog or parenting media property would be far less risky. And likely more successful in attracting readers and growth bucks.

Barriers? Plenty. Starting with having an opinion, and a vagina—especially a mature one. Women publishers in search of truth, with iron stomachs and interrogative skills, scare people. Women entrepreneurs face significant access to investment capital barriers. Women over 50, like myself, are ineligible for the majority of publicly funded entrepreneur support programs which generally favour youth. As if that demographic, lovely and challenged as it is (I have an 18-year-old), is the only one capable of innovating and in need of income. We end up bootstrapping and growing our ventures one relationship-based subscription at a time, only scratching the surface of our true potential, feeling very much alone.

Yet, we need more women-led news media entrepreneurs than ever before. If what we want is a more inclusive society—and democracy—we need more women of colour, Indigenous women, feminists, and LGBTQ media enterprise founders in this space.

A report released in December 2018 by The Discourse underscores the need even further. The report says, “…the majority of [news media] upstarts are founded by men, and predominately white men. Most female founders are also white. If news outlets owned and operated by women and people of colour cannot access support to start and grow, the next generation of Canadian media will not represent Canadians in their ownership, newsrooms, stories published, and communities served.”

The good news is that many enterprising women of all backgrounds are beginning to notice the opportunity. Toes are in the water.

Yet unless readers and innovation economy ecosystems begin to support promising, diverse, women-led media outlets with their dollars, these new enterprises and their hungry journalist freelancers will experience the life-span of a Mayfly.

For those of you who have been reading about the Canadian federal government’s new $645M news media support fund and think this might be the answer—it’s not. At least not if what we are looking for is the development of diverse media enterprises. The fund’s criteria excludes small startups because it’s a tax credit, which means it’s only helpful if your enterprise generates a taxable profit in the first place (highly unlikely for a startup). Applicants are also disqualified if they “significantly promote a particular interest”. For example, outlets with a mandate to advance gender equity as part of their reporting work. Throughout, it favours large, established patriarchal print-led news organizations over startups that can add new voices to the mix.

Erin Millar, the founder of SheEO supported and venture funded news media startup, The Discourse Media, expressed similar concerns. In The Discourse March 30th newsletter, Millar writes “As currently described they [funding program criteria] will disincentivize entrepreneurship and investment in early stage startups, and will ultimately chill innovation.”

The Canadian Periodical Fund’s business innovation grant program is also startup phobic—set up to fund “new projects” like consultant-led strategic planning exercises and small “i” innovation band-aids for established, large magazines. Versus supporting a digital startup’s growth phase with operating grants that can help them grow beyond the tadpole stage. At present, its idea of what a startup needs is a mere $5000 in seed money. If you are in the biz, you know that $5000 doesn’t even cover the cost of funding the development of two decent stories—if you aim to pay fairly i.e. at minimum writers’ union wages.

Given these facts, it is remarkable that entrepreneurs exist in the media space at all. Especially since industry analysts and experts routinely point out that in a social media-for-free world, traditional news and magazine industries are dead. Adding, “Besides, millennials don’t read.”

No wonder even patient social impact investors run for the hills.

However, my observation is that millennials do read and there are studies that back me up. In fact, people of all ages are reading more than ever. People are tired of vapid and often sponsored content, and are increasingly willing to pay for what they read—if they trust and find value in a publication’s editorial program. People are also realizing one media source—just like one doctor— can’t meet all of one’s needs. We need a variety of sources and formats to make healthier sense of what’s happening in an alternative fact, AI infected, digital media world.

So is there hope for entrepreneurs thinking of starting the next “Canadaland” or “Atlantic Monthly”? According to a recent research report by newcomer Discourse Media, “..there is a promising, emerging sub-sector within the media industry consisting of independent, digital media outlets using audience-pay models to deliver public service journalism in communities underserved by existing media. This sub-sector is innovative, dynamic, fast-growing and positioned to have a disproportionate impact on the renewal of the Canadian news ecosystem with a relatively modest investment.”

As a reader-supported feminist media upstart, LiisBeth is proud to be part of a rising tide of original content-creating entrepreneurs. And we hope you, our donating readers, are equally proud to be part of an indie media movement. A movement that will one day topple today’s dominating, but weakening, thunder-foot media giants and give way to an emergent landscape of vibrant, flowering and taproot-like ventures which will add texture, balance, and colour to today’s civic discourse.

We are already seeing some great examples of new indie digital media outlets though again, the large majority are male-led. The list includes The Narwhal, Taproot, Edmonton, Working it Out Together (WOIT), The Logic, Rabble.ca, The Pointer, Indian and Cowbo, The Sprawl, Media Indigena, The Public Record, and The Deep.

History is full of examples of the power of the pen.

If you are keen to make a difference and help drive much needed systems change but not prepared, or in position, to start your own news media enterprise, consider at least emailing your local MP and ask them to advocate for a gender-based analysis of media ownership in this country, and the incorporation of a “set aside” in this fund that will ensure the advancement of women-owned media outlets.

Our hopes for a future gender-just world just might depend on it.

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Related Articles from LiisBeth!

https://www.liisbeth.com/2019/02/20/writing-under-his-name/

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