Jerri Bird (Shannon)

It has been interesting to hear the different ways in which each of the guest speakers who have visited our class have become interested in leadership and in the idea of being leaders themselves. Laura Liswood described her "shower question" where she thought about what it would be like to have a woman president. Panny Rhodes explained how she was one of the only women in her engineering field and how that affected her work. Jean Cunningham expressed how she never really saw herself as a leader until Metro Richmond Leadership drafted her to run for outgoing representative Doug Wilder’s seat. And last week, Jerri Bird described how she became interested in the leadership of Saudi women after living in Saudi Arabia for ten years while her husband was in the foreign services. Each of these women have had such tremendous experiences with their leadership and listening to their stories is so inspirational.

When Jerri Bird was talking about the organization that she runs with Saudi women in the United States, I was reminded of something that our first guest speaker, Mary Jo Larson, said. Larson advised us to consciously try to find out what is going on with other people and other cultures around the world. She told us that this would give us the information we needed to come back and question our own system. Doesn’t it seem like this is what Jerri Bird did with Partners for Peace? She lived in a handful of Middle Eastern countries for a good portion of her life, and when she came back to the United States she realized that Saudi women were not receiving the sort of media coverage that they needed to share their stories. She started Partners for Peace after educating herself about another part of the world and after noticing that there was a problem that was not being broached.

There was an interesting article in yesterday’s Style & Arts section of The Washington Post called "Touching Up (and On) Feminist Roots." It talks about the Wack! exhibit at the National Museum of Women in the Arts and then it also talks about Hillary Clinton and how she doesn’t just want women to vote for her because she’s a woman—she wants them to vote for her because she’s the best candidate.

Link to the article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/26/AR2007102600462.html