Hello movie fans!

As some of you may know, the Academy uses ranked choice voting to select best picture, best actor, and best actress. You can learn more about how the Oscar voting process works on the FairVote website.

Dear all,

Historical note:

Susan B. Anthony - champion of women's suffrage and equality lived from February 15, 1820 to March 13, 1906. Her arrest for voting in 1872 led to a very public trial. In 1878 she and Elizabeth Cady Stanton petitioned Congress for the right to vote - this amendment, widely known as the Anthony Amendment, became the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920.

Dear friends,

In a piece on Vox, Tez Clark revisits University of Chicago law professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos' paper that explores political power through the lens of race and gender. His conclusion is that women are "the most politically powerless group...women have the least influence on policy at both the state and federal level. Despite their large population share and the range of laws protecting them from discrimination, women continue to be alarmingly powerless relative to men."

Dear friends,

The extraordinary Frederick Douglass was born in February 1818 and died on February 20, 1895. His devotion to women's suffrage, among many causes, was so complete that in 1872 he was chosen to be the running mate of Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president of the United States. They ran together on the Equal Rights Party ticket. Cedar Hill, his home in Washington, DC, is an amazing place to visit.

Dear friends,

What a busy week in the world of presidential politics.

Hats off yet again to the team at Presidential Gender Watch a program of the Center for American Women and Politics, Rutgers University, and the Barbara Lee Family Foundation for their excellent social media around the presidential campaign and debates. The messaging is made even more powerful with Tweets and retweets from the great folks at @AAUW and many others.

(from the fabulous offices of Whitman Insight Strategies - seems like a fitting challenge to us all!)

Dear friends,

I hope you have all had a great week and that those of you in the path of this blanket of snow are safe and sound. How fortunate we all are.

Dear friends,

This week marked the birthday of Alice Paul, born in 1885 she was a suffragist, Quaker, author of the ERA, New Jersey born and bred, who said this about equality “when the Quakers were founded, one of their principles was and is equality of the sexes. So I never had any other idea, the principle was always there” and this about the the Woman's Party "it's made up of women of all races, creeds and nationalities who are united on the one program of working to raise the status of women." Google celebrated with the image above and Heavy.com published Alice Paul: 5 Facts You Need to Know.

Here are a couple of pieces that caught my eye this week:

Adrienne Kimmell, executive director of the Barbara Lee Family Foundation wrote a piece that appeared in Refinery29 on the swearing double-standard for women politicians.

Dear friends and allies,

I thought I would share a few things that have captured my attention in the last couple weeks in case any of you are sitting around in front of a cozy fire this weekend looking for a distraction from newly-acquired novels and weighty periodicals.

Dear friends of gender parity,

It's a busy time of year for all of us so I thought I would send along a couple videos to watch:

The first video from Now This entitled: A United Nations Report Shows the U.S. is Failing Women At All Levels, is a sobering reminder of the many challenges we face as we begin our work together in the new year.