With your eyes open every one of us can recognize that women are missing from corporation board rooms, on Wall Street and Silicon Valley and on construction sites.  In fact, where people are making the most money in our economy, women are an unusual sight. And every one who takes their child to day care or visits a nursing home can recognize that men are absent in these jobs.

Not just friends that I talk to, but strangers in the grocery line agree that our country is on the precipice of changing this basic inequality. A just economy is one which is more women-centered.  It is where our economic well-being is structured around the health and safety of families and neighborhoods. To be more women-centered is to create job opportunities that put families first and focus on the places we call home.

Springfield is one of the richest grounds for us to create more gender and racial economic equality. Women and people of color can grow this city by reusing Springfield’s wealth of raw materials and restoring our built environment. Restoring infrastructure, like water pipes, underground gas lines, transportation systems, healthy buildings and outdoor spaces is place-based work and is therefore accessible to women. 

This year, the U.S. Department of Labor began a full-out effort to build Registered Apprenticeship programs as a means for low-opportunity citizens to gain access to dignified, living-wage work. Massachusetts can help grow a more equitable workforce by engaging community colleges in utilizing existing resources through preservation, material reuse and environmental health and safety industries that are inherently more women-centered than exclusive high-tech and construction fields. From this ground, women can bridge the gap between family and equal work.  

Jenny Cavanaugh completed her Master’s Degree in Design and Historic Preservation at UMass by giving us her research and conclusions linking existing resources to women’s economic opportunity.  Her Capstone Project featured OWW to illustrate the connection between women in the trades and Springfield’s legacy of buildings which sheltered and grew generations of the city’s workforce. Read her study. She calls upon STCC and DCAMM to open possibilities with resources already in hand.

Dear Michelle Obama:
This post is dedicated to you for describing that moment in our lives that we have in common as girls, young women and old women, all over the world, in every hovel and every castle. It is the moment we recognize our dilemma:  Do we accept the vulgar taunt, the terror of a stare, the instant of degradation when a hand, uninvited, touches our bodies?  Or do we pretend we don’t notice?  Do we carry on in the face of disrespect because, as you said, to do otherwise might seem like we were weak? 

No.  You spent time with girls at the International Day of the Girl, to “remind them of how valuable and precious they are.”  You told them – and from New Hampshire you told all of us—that by their courage over “unthinkable obstacles” just to go to school, they deserve to be treated with dignity and respect.  

In Phoenix, Arizona you kept talking to us.  You told us “be encouraged.”  Hope is what we have and hope will see us “through all the hateful, hurtful rhetoric” of this campaign.

Mrs. Obama, we want you to know that in Springfield, Massachusetts, we have a place, it is our workshop, where we renew our value as women every day and where we claim our right to dignified and fulfilling work.  We have created a place where men enter only as equals.  

And we will keep this place alive because, as you said:  
“… in difficult times, we don’t give up.  We don’t discard our highest ideals.  No, we rise up to meet them… We rise up to embody the unwavering hope that keeps us going -- day after day, generation after generation.   That is the power of hope.”  

So, Michelle Obama, we want you to know WE ARE ENCOURAGED!  

​Sincerely,
Nannette, Meraly, Melissa and Pam