Happy International Women's Day!

Today is International Women's day, a holiday which has been used widely to celebrate women's achievements and highlight continuing inequalities.  The International Women's Day website theme for 2012 is "Connecting Girls: Inspiring Futures" which I think is a pretty awesome theme.  Since getting two fantastic nieces I have started thinking more and more about how to help bring up girls to be strong, confident, and full of self-worth in a society full of so many negative messages.  I try to teach them that the fact that they are smart, fierce, and funny is at least as important as being "pretty"; to expose them to strong role models like Matilda, Violet Baudelaire, and Lilo, not just Disney Princesses all day every day, but sometimes it feels so hopeless when the whole wide rest of the world says the opposite.  Sometimes though, sometimes when I am feeling demoralized and just tired of feminism, I remember why I fight for gender equality:

Because I want to see what these fierce girls can make of themselves in a world without limits