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PEF Womens Program sparks new interest
By SHERRY HALBROOK
For years, the PEF Women’s Program thrived — empowering women and producing some impressive achievements such as the election of PEF member Earlene Hill to the state Assembly in 1988.
Today, Hill (now Hooper) is still in the Legislature, but the PEF program she has often credited with giving her the experience and confidence to run for public office has withered into a dusty memory. Or has it?
This year, the program has sprouted new life — first, in Region 10 and then at the recent PEF Convention.
“We decided we wanted to revive the program,“ said PEF Executive Board member Germaine Greco, who co-chairs the Region 10 Women’s Committee with Minerva Osorio.
“Some of the things we’d like to do in Region 10 range from bringing in speakers such as a state Supreme Court judge and a state legislator, to a night at the Aveda (beauty) training salon in Manhattan.” Greco said.
The renewed interest in Region 10 quickly spread.
Pat Smith, a PEF Executive Board member from Region 4, is interested in getting the Women’s Program underway again in Syracuse and throughout the state. “I would love to see it expanded,” Smith said.
In September, PEF convention delegates from throughout the state flocked to a PEF Women’s Program booth and a workshop at the Rochester event.
“Our T-shirts sold out at the booth,” Greco said.
And, although it was organized too late to make it into the convention program, it was standing room only at the workshop which featured speaker Nora Bredes, director of the Susan B. Anthony Center for Women Leadership in Rochester.
The Rochester area is resonant with the movers and shakers, voices and events of women’s suffrage and the early women’s rights movement in this country.
And Bredes reminded the PEF delegates, that without the courage and determination that sparked the first
Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls on July 19,
1848, which was reconvened less than two weeks later in Rochester, American women today would not have enjoyed the right to vote for 85 years.
Although delegates to the PEF convention did not make it through the dozens of resolutions presented to them, including one that would have provided $10,000 to fund a statewide Women’s Committee, Greco said the issue clearly sparked keen interest among many of the delegates.
“We really need to empower women,” Smith said. “We need to educate our members about the issues around women in the work force. I see a women’s program as a mechanism to educate men too. They need to understand our issues before they can support them.” | |
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