The Salemite

Issue date: 10/31/06 Section: News

Media Credit: MCT Campus Peggy Newell looks out a bus window and views the rebuilding efforts of ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) in the Lower 9th Ward in New Orleans, Friday, October 27, 2006. She and other members of WDN (Women Donors Network) traveled to New Orleans to look for ways to aid Katrina victims.

For the Women Donors Network, a community of women philanthropists that until now has chosen to remain out of public view, Monday represents a national coming-out party.

Alarmed about the integrity of new electronic voting machines and voter lists, the Menlo Park, Calif.-based network will run full-page ads in the national edition of the New York Times instructing voters how to ensure their vote is recorded Nov. 7, and what to do if they suspect it isn't.

For an organization whose members individually give more than $100 million a year to progressive causes and Democratic political candidates, the campaign represents a first foray into public action. WDN members donated $200,000 in three weeks to bankroll the effort, one illustration of women claiming an arena once dominated by men _ philanthropy _ to drive social and political activism.

"I think women are sort of coming into their power around money," said Mary Morris Willis, a Women Donors Network board member.

From John D. Rockefeller to Bill Gates, the popular image of the wealthy philanthropist has been male. That stereotype was probably always wrong, historians of philanthropy say, because wives or daughters frequently were the impetus. But as a generation who grew up during the feminist era gain more economic parity with men, begin to think about their legacy and inherit much of a projected $41 trillion generational transfer of wealth, they are gaining a sense of the power of their philanthropic dollars.

In California and the United States overall, women already give a greater share of their income to philanthropy than men. Experts expect that trend to strengthen.

"This is a new phenomenon and it's really gathering momentum, of women giving in their own name to causes they espouse, including feminist causes," said Kathleen McCarthy, director of the Center on Philanthropy at the City University of New York Graduate Center. "If you control a majority of the country's wealth, you can really change things in ways that women before you really could not, and you can use that realization to remake the world in your own image."

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