Leadership Profile Blog Post, Due February 16

Leadership Profile Assignment

In class we have been discussing the dominant cultural view of leadership and how that understanding of leadership might be challenged by gender. Further still, we have investigated what a transformational feminist view of leadership might look like.

We have begun to see how feminist women leaders must be accountable to their principals, values, and goals. What might it mean to be accountable to the goal of feminist transformation? How might women’s leadership be accountable to women?

In grappling with what feminist women’s leadership might mean, I want us to think about women leaders. I want us to know of them, to have their stories become the fabric from which we weave our own principals, values, and goals.

Alice Walker reminds us that each generation of women must scour back through history to find the legacies of “our Mother’s Garden;” that women are in a constant state of digging up, looking back, so that they may find the foothold upon which to carve their path.

We, too, will begin our journey forward by looking back.

To this end, I ask that you recover a woman leader and profile her. We will compile our class list on the blog but also send a copy to me so that I can begin a collection to be built upon in each section of this class.

The should include the following:

·      Leader:  Brief introduction to the woman as leader, you are encouraged to include media like a photograph, audioclip, video file, newspaper clippings, manuscript image, etc. (though this is not always possible)

·      In Action: How does she meet your criteria for feminist leadership for social transformation? For women’s leadership?

·      Context: Where and when did she lead? Whom did she lead and what was the “situational” context of her leadership?

·      Cultural impact: What did she do? That is, what do you imagine she accomplished?

·      Resources: This should include places for more information (museums, societies, etc.), a list of texts about and/or by the author, etc.

·      Works Cited

You must complete this in 800 words or less. You may not use a figure you are already familiar with, as the purpose is to explore and find not reaffirm (be honest). For this assignment, you may not use a contemporary leader—that is, I want the leader to be someone you have to recover not simply ask for an interview. If you are the kind of person that needs specifics, the woman must not be born after 1930.