Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    What I Told My Daughter: Lessons from Leaders on Raising the Next Generation of Empowered Women
    What I Told My Daughter: Lessons from Leaders on Raising the Next Generation of Empowered Women
    What I Told My Daughter: Lessons from Leaders on Raising the Next Generation of Empowered Women
    Ebook237 pages3 hours

    What I Told My Daughter: Lessons from Leaders on Raising the Next Generation of Empowered Women

    By Nina Tassler and Cynthia Littleton

    3/5

    ()

    Switch to audiobook
    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Empower yourself and the latest generation of girls with this collection of inspiring reflections from notable, highly accomplished women in politics, academia, athletics, the arts, and business, including Madeleine Albright, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and more.

    In What I Told My Daughter, a powerful, diverse group of women reflect on the best advice and counsel they have given their daughters either by example, throughout their lives, or in character-building, teachable moments between parent and child.

    A college president teachers her daughter, by example, the importance of being a leader who connects with everyone—from the ground up, literally—in an organization.

    One of the country’s only female police chiefs teaches her daughter the meaning of courage, how to respond to danger but more importantly how not to let fear stop her from experiencing all that life has to offer.

    A bestselling writer, who has deliberated for years on empowering girls, wonders if we’re unintentionally leading them to believe they can never make mistakes, when “resiliency is more important than perfection.”

    In a time when childhood seems at once more fraught and more precious than ever, What I Told My Daughter is a book anyone who wishes to connect with a young girl cannot afford to miss.

    Editor's Note

    Words from wise women…

    Courage, kindness, compassion, and confidence: influential women share the wisdom they passed along to their daughters in this curated collection by former CBS Entertainment Chairman Nina Tassler. Tassler’s high-powered colleagues and friends — including Sharon Osbourne, Geena Davis, and Madeline Albright — contribute their hard-learned lessons to help empower the other women of the world.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster
    Release dateApr 5, 2016
    ISBN9781476734699
    Author

    Nina Tassler

    Nina Tassler was the chairman of CBS Entertainment and has nurtured some of the most popular shows in television, including The Big Bang Theory, How I Met Your Mother, ER, and the critically acclaimed The Good Wife. She also helped shepherd the global phenomena CSI and NCIS to the screen. Tassler serves on the board for the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation and is a member of the Board of Trustees for Boston University. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two children.

    Related to What I Told My Daughter

    Related ebooks

    Women's Biographies For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      When a 'Diva' Is Diagnosed

      Apr 11, 2018

      When a 'Diva' Is Diagnosed
      3 min read

    • Article

      Long Live Samantha Jones

      Jun 6, 2018

      Long Live Samantha Jones
      5 min read

    • Article

      A Tsunami Of Love

      Mar 7, 2022

      A Tsunami Of Love
      4 min read

    • Article

      Meet Sam.

      Dec 1, 2022

      Meet Sam.
      10 min read

    • Article

      Editor’s Letter

      Feb 25, 2022

      Editor’s Letter
      2 min read

    • Article

      Kindness Changes Everything

      Nov 20, 2018

      Kindness Changes Everything
      6 min read

    • Article

      Honest Reflections

      Nov 1, 2018

      A week after I found out my wife was pregnant, I realised I was going through a hyper-accelerated version of the seven stages of grief. Shock? Check. Depression? Check. Miscellaneous crying jags? Very much check. At one point, my wife asked me whethe

      7 min read

    • Article

      Finding Your Public Voice

      Oct 7, 2022

      Early in my career, I joined a writing group with the word change in its name. When friends asked, “What kind of change are you writing about?” I responded, “Whatever kind of change is happening in my life”—whether that change occurred by chance or w

      7 min read

    • Article

      Taking Back Power

      Dec 1, 2022

      Taking Back Power
      7 min read

    • Article

      Crisis Climate

      Dec 15, 2019

      Crisis Climate
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Cult of Ideal Motherhood

      May 1, 2023

      The Cult of Ideal Motherhood
      10 min read

    • Article

      The Road Less Travelled

      May 2, 2021

      We tend tiny, empty graves hidden in our hearts. We endure the daily tortures – the careless questions and judgement, the thoughtless commentary, the barrage of propaganda. In our fundamentally conservative country, even in the third decade of the 21

      8 min read

    • Article

      Transgender: Helen’s Story

      May 10, 2023

      Transgender: Helen’s Story
      8 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for What I Told My Daughter

    3/5

    8 ratings2 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      Mostly rich, white women telling stories about lessons their privilidged daughters learned at private schools. A couple good essays — Whoopi’s Goldberg, etc.
    • 3/5
      In this case, you can judge a book by its cover. "What I Told My Daughter" is a compilation of short narratives by women leaders and what they told their daughters in response to their professional experiences OR as it may have affected their upbringing.Within this work stories of gender equality, feminism, color blindness, the changing nature of family as more women lead them, and the importance of knowing one's inner compass while choosing opportunities and stations in life.Some of the stories are ones to breeze through and others demonstrate so well how our daughters choose according to what they know or what we tell them is ok to try to know. There were a few gems in here, but maybe wait until it shows up at Costco, I'm guessing around Mother's Day.

    Book preview

    What I Told My Daughter - Nina Tassler

    Through My Daughter’s Eyes

    GEENA DAVIS

    Actress-advocate

    When my daughter, Alizeh, was about five years old, I had a life-changing revelation while watching a video of the Disney film Mulan with her.

    But my epiphany wasn’t what you might guess: that I was thrilled for her to see a female lead character who was a strong and brave (and funny!) leader. After all, this was a story about a young woman who ultimately saves all of China! And I adored it for that. No, this revelation was not brought about by the movie but by something my daughter asked while watching. It was the scene where the other soldiers find out that Mulan is actually a girl and throw her out of the army. Alizeh looked up at me with a deeply wounded expression and asked in a voice filled with emotion, "Why can’t girls be in the army?"

    I suddenly realized the implication of what she was asking, and it hit me like a punch to the stomach: she had no idea that there was inequality between the genders. She hadn’t an inkling, yet, that there were some things that were considered unsuitable for girls—some things that girls were seen as not strong, smart, or talented enough to do. She was asking about one particular character from a certain time in history, and of course I explained that in China, at that time, girls were not allowed to be in the army. I explained that girls are very strong and capable, and that now, women are very important members of the military.

    But the question contained a world of heartache for me: This soulful little girl, whom I had so carefully encouraged to believe she could do anything, would come to learn that not everyone thinks that way. I’d protected her from Cinderella thus far, but I couldn’t ultimately protect her from discovering that untold millions of girls and women throughout millennia had learned the same thing too, sometimes through neglect, misery, or abuse.

    I realized, in that moment, that she would inevitably absorb the message that girls and women are less important to the world than men and boys. And I fully took in the tragedy of that happening, to her and to all girls.

    One of the most disturbing aspects was that the message would largely be taken in unconsciously; she would see things that are meant to train her not to notice gender imbalance, to expect an uneven playing field, to lower her expectations. She would see countless print images, TV shows, movies, video games, and by the time she was eighteen, half a million commercials telling her how she is supposed to look.

    Over the decade prior to our viewing of Mulan, I’d happened to play some very cool characters: a baseball phenomenon, a newly minted road warrior . . . even a female amnesiac assassin. Through these roles, I became keenly aware of the way women are depicted in the entertainment industry—or not depicted, considering how few female characters there actually are. I realized that women in the audience rarely get to see exciting and inspiring female characters. I resolved that, whenever possible, I would choose roles that women might find empowering.

    But as I watched more children’s media through my daughter’s eyes, I was floored to see that our youngest boys and girls are seeing and absorbing the same imbalanced view of the world that our culture peddles to the rest of us. Kids’ media is training children from the very beginning to see male characters doing most of the interesting things, and to see gender imbalance as the norm. As a mother, I thought that surely kids should be seeing boys and girls sharing the sandbox equally in the twenty-first century.

    I took this observation seriously. So seriously that I launched a nonprofit research organization several years ago, the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media. We’ve now sponsored the largest amount of research ever done on gender depictions in media aimed at children, covering a twenty-year span. The results confirmed my worst fears.

    In family-rated movies and children’s television, for every female speaking character there are three male characters. If you look specifically at crowd scenes in films, the percentage of female characters goes down to 17 percent, in both animated and live-action movies. You’d think you’d almost have to go out of your way to leave out that many female characters! We also looked at the quality of the characters, not just the quantity: for example, our comprehensive research on characters’ occupations in family films showed that 81 percent of the jobs were held by men; one of the most common functions of a female character was to serve as eye candy. Topping it all off, there was no increase in the percentage of female characters over the twenty-year span.

    So what message are we sending girls and boys? If the female characters are one-dimensional, sidelined, stereotyped, or simply not there at all, we’re saying that women and girls are less valuable to our society than men and boys. That women and girls don’t take up half the space in the world.

    And the message is sinking in: the more hours of TV a girl watches, the more limited she thinks her options are in life; the more boys watch, the more sexist their views become.

    By feeding our youngest kids a seriously imbalanced world from the beginning, we are in effect training yet another generation to view gender imbalance as the norm. This happened to all of us—it doesn’t matter when you grew up, you saw exactly the same imbalance in entertainment media: the ratio of male to female characters in movies has been exactly the same since 1946.

    I can’t stop our culture from sending disempowering messages to my daughter, no matter how much I limit her media exposure. But I can tell her that it’s wrong. I can teach her that it’s unfair and needs to change. I can’t stop people from complimenting me on her appearance as if she’s just an object. But I can tell her later why that’s inappropriate. Maybe no woman has been president of the United States yet, but her mother has—on TV! I can tell her how to form her own opinions and not let our culture dictate what’s appropriate for women to be and do.

    And I do tell her. Alizeh and her twin brothers have limited exposure to TV and movies, but when they do watch, I am usually right there with them, so I can point out the inequities and misrepresentations; I tell them how to be savvy media consumers. But now, at eleven years old, Alizeh is telling me things. Before I can even lean in to whisper an observation, she will turn to me and say, "Mom, look. There aren’t enough

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1