Flaunt! Build Your Dreams, Live Your Sparkle! with Lora Cheadle

For Every Girl, Woman or Female Activist, How can We Best Make Our Voices Heard? Could it be, by asking a Suffragist? April Young Bennet began studying the lives of suffragists to inform her fight for gender equality within her religious community. Interesting, as a member of patriarchal religion, she chose to embrace both her religion and her feminist views, and has been organizing, educating and making her voice heard ever since. She is an organizer for the activist organization Ordain Women and an advocate for better state and federal laws that affect children and families, addressing the wage gap, healthcare, education and juvenile justice. April began the Religious Feminism Podcast to help feminists of different faiths share ideas and collaborate toward common goals. She blogs about Mormon feminism at the Exponent II. She is an activist fighting for gender equality on a wide range of fronts, including her popular Religious Feminism Podcast. She sought to explore what enabled these pioneers to succeed against great odds. And how that could inform her own activism, and what she learned led to her book, Ask a Suffragist: Stories and Wisdom from America’s First Feminists asks, “What can they teach us today?” The most striking message woven into the fabric of April’s extraordinary and intimate look at the women who first stood for women’s rights is the degree of support and sisterhood that they gave to each other. While print, broadcast and social media were the drivers behind the explosion of the #MeToo Movement today, it was women filled with determination to exert their rights joining together that so echoed the journey of their courageous predecessors–Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth-and some whose names may not ring a bell…Maria W. Stewart, Antoinette Brown, Angelina and Sarah Grimké, Ernestine Potowska, and Elizabeth Blackwell. The result is a close-hand look at these amazing women as they interweave with each other, written in novelistic style, but taken from their own letters, diaries and accounts. You learn what motivated them, what they had to overcome, how they navigated in a world dominated almost exclusively by men, how they collaborated with or had to endure life with their husbands, how they juggled activism and family, and how they effectively used the media to call forth and unite both men and women to their cause.