Seattle Art Museum Archives - Ann Hedreen, Writer Teacher Filmmaker

Impatience

therestlessnest2013-04-03T08:00:31-07:00Categories: arts, economics, education, midlife, parenting, Seattle, women's rights, work, writing|Tags: Ada Williams Prince, GeekGirlCon, Jennifer Stuller, Kristin Rowe Finkbeiner, Lean In, Lori Pfingst, MomsRising, OneAmerica, Sandra Jackson-Dumont, Seattle Art Museum, Sheryl Sandberg, Town Hall Seattle, Washington State Budget & Policy Center, Women's Funding Alliance|

“Patience is a virtue.” Who first said that, and why? A quick Internet search points to a few “medieval poets.” Let’s leave it there—in the dark ages—and move on: to why patience is on my mind, and not in a virtuous, well-behaved way. I just spent an evening at Seattle’s Town Hall listening to five dynamic women speak at an event, sponsored by the Women’s Funding Alliance, called “Fresh Perspective: Women Lead a Changing World.” Good title; wish it were true. The speakers had some good news to share—the dramatic increase in the numbers of women obtaining bachelors, masters and PhD degrees; the previously unheard of opportunities for women in government, science, technology, sports. But “Women Lead a Changing World?” No. Not very many of us are leading. Not by a long shot. And the world may be changing, but it sure is taking its time. And we’ve been far too patient. It is time we made a virtue of impatience. When eight of every ten corporations in Washington state have fewer than three women on their boards, it is time to be impatient. When women in Washington* earn 75 cents for every dollar men earn—73 cents, if you have kids; 60 cents if you’re a single mom—it’s time to be impatient. When Washington slips from first to eighth in the nation for female political representation, it’s time to be impatient. When 415 thousand women and girls in our state have no health insurance, when reproductive rights are under assault, when one out of four children [...]

Seattle Grown Up

Call me provincial, but I still get excited when I see anything about my hometown in the New York Times. Last Saturday, there we were, on the cover page of the Arts section, under the headline: “A Place Comfortable With Boeing, Anarchists and ‘Frasier.’” What an oddball trio of references, I thought. Then I saw it was a story about Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry, better known as MOHAI, which has just reopened in the grandly re-imagined Naval Armory at the south end of Lake Union. The hometown booster in me was excited. Proud: the nation’s newspaper of record was covering the museum that, more than any other, I think of as our museum. I love the Seattle Art Museum too, but MOHAI? It’s about us. When I walked in for the first time, there was the Lincoln Toe Truck and the giant, neon Rainier Beer “R.” Even so, I felt disoriented, though in a mostly good way: the way I feel when I see one of my children’s preschool friends, now all grown up. This was not the museum I visited when I chaperoned those preschool field trips. No. This new MOHAI is a grown-up museum about a grown-up city. Fresh evidence that while I may still be provincial, Seattle is not. And like any newly minted grown-up, MOHAI had all kinds of things to teach me. For example, New York Times writer Edward Rothstein’s reference to Seattle’s pioneering Denny Party, arriving via the Oregon Trail, which I smugly thought he got wrong? I [...]