March 1, 2010

CELEBRATE THE CENTER DURING NATIONAL WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH

Today – March 1, 2010 -- marks the 38th birthday of the Center for Women Policy Studies! We hope you will send us a donation – a birthday present -- to celebrate our long history of cutting edge efforts to promote women’s human rights through enlightened public policy. DONATE NOW

Your contribution to the Center today will honor the vision and wisdom and courage of our founders -- Jane Roberts Chapman and Margaret Gates, who launched the Center for Women Policy Studies in 1972 as the first national policy institute to consider the impact of public policy on women.

So, as we celebrate our 38 years of work for women’s rights, we ask you to think back to 1972!

• Sex discrimination in the granting of credit of all kinds was considered “good business practice” and women were denied mortgages and other loans simply because they were women.
• Rape and domestic violence were each woman’s individual “problem” to be addressed only in the “private” sphere and not in public policy.

But Jane and Marge did not agree. So they took action. And their work changed women’s lives. For example,

• The Center’s research found that there was no basis for treating women differently than men in granting credit. The American Bankers Association accepted their findings and worked with the Center for change. The result was passage of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 – spearheaded by women Members of Congress.
• The Center took the lead in defining violence against women as a federal policy issue. In the early 1970s, they helped develop the federal Rape Prevention and Control Act of 1975, launched the first-ever project to design model programs to improve the treatment of women who had been raped, developed protocols for law enforcement and medical practitioners. The Center’s National Resource Center on Family Violence continued this leadership into the 1980s.

To learn more about the Center’s early days, click here to download On the Cutting Edge: The Center for Women Policy Studies at 25 (1997) CuttingEdge.

As we celebrate our first 38 years, the Center remains at the forefront of policy debates on women’s human rights. We continue the tradition of our founders today -- through the Center’s current cutting edge programs on violence against women, the women’s HIV/AIDS epidemic, international trafficking of women and girls as a global human rights crisis, reproductive rights and health, alleviation of women’s poverty – and more.

We are proud to work as “national staff” to the women [and men] state legislators in every state in the Nation who are part of our Contract With Women of the USA® State Legislators Initiative.

We are proud to work with our newest colleagues – women Members of Parliament from
every Continent who participate in our GlobalPOWER® (Partnership Of Women Elected/Appointed Representatives).

DONATE NOW to support the Center as we continue to make history with your support.

Stay tuned for more about our 2010 programs, which we will feature in upcoming ENEWS reports.