This weekend, The Daily Beast and Newsweek hosted their third annual Women in the World Summit. Among the many accomplished and inspirational speakers and panelists were Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Ms. Magazine founder Gloria Steinem, Nobel Peace Prize winner Leymah Gbowee, and many-Oscars-winning actress Meryl Streep.
The sold-out summit took place at Lincoln Center’s Koch Theater in New York, and managed to send Twitter briefly over capacity with the hashtag #wiw12. The Daily Beast has posted lots of clips of highlights from the event, including a particularly good one, wherein 19-year-old founder and editor of the blog The FBomb, Julie Zeilinger, discusses feminism and the internet.
Here are some choice quotes from other talks at the summit:
“Female authority is still associated with childhood: the last time a lot of powerful guys saw a powerful woman, they were 8, and they feel regressed to childhood by a powerful woman in a way that they don’t feel with a man.” -Gloria Steinem
“We cannot accept that having 19 percent of women in [the U.S.] Congress is OK. It’s politics that defines the economy; its politics that defines social norms. And until we get political power, we are not going to be able to make giant strides.” -Kah Walla, former presidential candidate of Cameroon’s People’s Party
On the reproductive rights debate in Congress: “Why are these women not angry and beating men left and right? I think it is time for women to stop being politely angry. If someone talks about your reproductive right and reproductive issues, something they have no idea about, you should be able to deal with them. Because you only qualify if you’ve gone through the process, if you understand what the process is.” -Leymah Gbowee, Nobel Peace Prize Winner and peace activist in Liberia
“In politics, recruitment of women to run for office is a really big problem, and it’s a really big deal. There are some studies that show that women are one-third as likely to be recruited. So [for example], where a guy is at a law firm, or he owns his business, and someone says to him, ‘Hey, you should really think about running for state legislature,’ and he goes and looks in the mirror and says, ‘Yes, I should,’ women–if they even have that same conversation, which they don’t as often–will look in the mirror and say, ‘Oh, but I don’t know that much about foreign policy,’ or ‘Oh, but I haven’t been doing my job long enough.’ Women maybe need to get a little bit of the phony self-confidence that it takes to run for office.” -Anne Kornblut, deputy political editor of The Washington Post
