First National Organization for Atheist Women Mobilizes
Leadership Development Drives Mission
Atlanta, Georgia – June 28, 2012. Secular Woman, Inc. makes its debut today as the first national membership organization dedicated exclusively to advancing the interests of atheist, humanist and other non-religious women. The organization’s stated vision is “a future in which women without supernatural beliefs have the opportunities and resources they need to participate openly and confidently as respected voices of leadership in the secular community and every aspect of American society.”
Secular identity organizations often struggle to attract and retain female members, lending weight to surveys which typically characterize women as more spiritual than men. Secular Woman will offer its members conference travel grants, profiles of secular women, achievement awards and other programming designed to add gender diversity to secular events and bring more nonbelieving women out of the closet and into roles of leadership.
Through strategic partnerships, Secular Woman will also advocate for equal pay, reproductive choice, and marriage equality, addressing political trends the group sees as ideologically-motivated threats to its members’ freedom of conscience. “The ‘War on Women’ dovetailing with the rise of secular activism showed us the time had come for secular women to form our own distinct organization to support our vision of the future,” said Kim Rippere, a Secular Woman founder and the organization’s first president. “Secular women have always been at front and center of the feminist quest for equality and autonomy.”
Rippere is joined on the group’s first Board of Directors by co-founders Brandi Braschler, Vice President of Programs; Bridget Gaudette, Vice President of Outreach; and Mary Ellen Sikes, Vice President of Operations. The four women bring a combined total of more than forty years’ activism in secular and women’s issues to Secular Woman.
“With this organization we plan to focus on promoting the secular female voice, but anyone who supports our mission can join,” said Gaudette. “All are vital to the success of Secular Woman and to the overall secular movement.”
Saw this on Twitter earlier. I looked at their website and really liked it 🙂
I’m one of the founders of Secular Woman. Thank you so much for blogging about us!
I’m hoping for great things from this!
StarStuff, massive conga rats!
Thanks, Pteryxx! I haz teh excitement!
I very much appreciate the fact that their membership pages says, “Anyone who supports our mission is welcome”, and offers gender options of Female/Male/Transgender/Other
W00t Brandi!
*confetti&champagne*, with a *hug* for StarStuff.
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And not a moment too soon. I hope you become a massive force for good
Holy•Guacamole: Beautiful design!
I joined and created a monthly donation. Those are two separate actions. Maybe they can streamline that, or maybe I misunderstood their intentions. Anyway, the only real snag was their donation form gave me an error for a monthly donation, “Contribution amount cannot be more than 1.00.” So I set up a donation for $1/month to establish a subscription at PayPal, then when I got my email receipt, I tried to change my subscription details at PayPal, but I couldn’t increase the amount there either. So I sent an email to Secular Woman to let them know I’d like to give a larger monthly donation.
Mary Ellen Sikes emailed me back right away to say they fixed their donation form to let you establish a donation for any amount per month. And now that I have my electric service back after Friday’s derecho, I went to PayPal.com to cancel my earlier subscription of $1/month (because I didn’t see how PayPal would let me modify the amount), and I went to SecularWoman.org to establish a new donation of $10/month.
So it works – you can create a monthly donation of whatever you like.
Paypal really sucks, it is such a pain in the butt. I cannot wait until Bitcoins take over paypal.