IMAGINING OURSELVES: Global Voices from a New Generation of Women
Edited by Paula Goldman • Foreword by Isabel Allende
P.R. Contact: Monique Muhlenkamp

New Book Shares Global Insight in Answering the Question "What Defines Your Generation of Women?"

Starting out as a young woman’s idea shared with a friends Imagining Ourselves: Global Voices from a New Generation of Women (March 8, 2006, New World Library) is the result of an emailed question: What Defines Your Generation of Women?

Paula Goldman, a PhD candidate at Harvard, found herself talking about how her generation of women differed from previous generations. Curious about how others saw themselves, she sent out an email to friends, colleagues, and women she had met through her studies and travels. The wide-ranging responses encouraged her so much that Goldman approached the San Francisco based International Museum of Women and proposed a book idea — the rest is history in the making. Thousands of entries later, Paula Goldman and her co-creators chose 105 entries, representing 57 countries and virtually every populated region of the globe.

Entertaining, challenging, enlightening, funny, inspiring, shocking, and most of all, thought-provoking, the contributions include photographs, songs, poems, paintings, collages, and prose. Sharing the differences between their worlds and their mother’s worlds, the contributors discuss their lives and the lives of their families — all from a global perspective made possible with the advent of the Internet.

These brave women do not shy away from the challenges of their world, including: child prostitution; AIDS; genital mutilation; hunger and poverty; oppressive religious and political regimes. Neither do they hesitate from sharing their cultural strengths: the Russian woman who turns down the opportunity to become a mail-order bride; Israeli singer Achinoam Nini tells how her life changed when she gave birth; Venezuelan painter Valentina Campos celebrates the close ties between grandmothers and granddaughters; Def poet Aya DeLeon fantasizes about going clubbing if women ran the hip hop industry; and Toyin Sokefun of Nigeria explores the space between society’s “ideal beauty” and women’s self-images and what represents true beauty.

With a reach far greater than Paula Goldman dreamed possible at the beginning of her musings, Imagining Ourselves sets out to build bridges and to demonstrate the power of each individual life, and the collective power of today’s generation of women as a whole. Information on the web at www.imow.org.

About the Author
Using art and literature as forms of cultural advocacy, Paula Goldman has helped create bridges across polarized political divides and worked with women’s groups and agencies from Bosnia, Latin America, Western and Eastern Africa, and South Asia. Like many of the women in this book, Paula has presented at conferences throughout the world, including India, Spain, and Ghana.

IMAGINING OURSELVES
edited by Paula Goldman • Foreword by Isabel Allende
March 2006 (International Women’s Day) • Women’s Issues
Trade Paperback • Price: $26.95
ISBN 1-57731-524-3 • 224 pages • 8 " x 10 "