Infinite Women

11/11/2025

Yahey go you Transforming Clare, thank you so much for your support, every little helps xx

With Infinite Women – I just got recognised as one of their top fans! 🎉

11/11/2025

So true

I think this says it all… 😔

11/11/2025

Goldie Hawn has done some incredible things in her life and not least was the programme of Mindfulness for kids in schools across America

Goldie Hawn once said, “They thought I was a giggle — I knew I was a storm.” When she first stepped onto the set of Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In in the late 1960s, television was a carnival of stereotypes, and the “dumb blonde” was its favorite act. Goldie was handed skimpy scripts filled with air-headed lines, designed to make her sparkle, not speak. But she refused to be just the glitter. Before cameras rolled, she took a pen, trimmed the jokes that mocked women, and rewrote the rest so they landed on her terms. The audience saw a blonde in body paint laughing at chaos — but behind every laugh, there was calculation, rhythm, and quiet rebellion.
“I wasn’t going to let anyone else write my story,” she later said. “So I started writing it myself.”
Born in Washington, D.C., Goldie Hawn had trained as a ballet dancer before fame found her. She was disciplined, introspective, and ambitious — traits Hollywood rarely rewarded in women who looked like her. After Laugh-In made her a national name, she was immediately typecast. Every new script asked her to be cute, dizzy, and silent. When a director once told her to “just stand there and look pretty,” she smiled and replied, “I listened. And that’s exactly why I’m speaking.”
The world saw charm; what they missed was control. Hawn studied comedy like architecture, building every line, every pause, every toss of her hair to serve timing and truth. Beneath the laughter, she was creating a roadmap for women who wanted power without apology.
By her early thirties, Goldie Hawn was no longer just an actress — she was a producer, a rarity in an era when few women held creative authority in Hollywood. Her production of Private Benjamin (1980) was a seismic act of defiance. Studios dismissed it as “too female,” predicting audiences wouldn’t pay to see a woman’s story about independence. Hawn ignored them. The film became a box office hit and earned three Academy Award nominations, including one for her. “I wanted to show that a woman’s awakening could be funny — and powerful,” she said.
She went on to craft characters who laughed at their own pain, women who fell apart with style and rebuilt with grit. In Overboard, Death Becomes Her, and The First Wives Club, she weaponized humor against vanity, aging, and sexism — topics Hollywood often avoided unless they could be turned into punchlines. Goldie made them conversations.
Offscreen, she became something entirely different — a seeker. While her peers chased youth and glamour, Hawn turned inward. She immersed herself in meditation, neuroscience, and spiritual psychology, long before “mindfulness” became a buzzword. In 2003, she founded MindUP, a foundation teaching children emotional resilience and focus through science-based mindfulness education. “I didn’t want fame to raise me,” she explained. “I wanted to raise myself.”
And she did. While critics sometimes dismissed her optimism as naïveté, she knew it was armor — the same optimism that carried her through Hollywood’s changing tides, public scrutiny, and decades of being underestimated. Kurt Russell, her longtime partner, once said, “Goldie’s light is not soft — it’s fierce. People don’t realize that until they try to dim it.”
Through it all, Hawn never lost her giggle. But that giggle — once dismissed as shallow — became her signature act of resistance. Every laugh she delivered was layered: part joy, part survival, part reminder that intelligence can arrive wrapped in warmth.
Today, when she looks back on her career, she doesn’t talk about fame or awards. She talks about balance, clarity, and the work of staying awake in a world built to distract. “Happiness,” she says, “isn’t luck. It’s discipline. You choose it every day.”
Goldie Hawn never needed to shout to prove her worth. She smiled her way through a system that tried to silence her, rewrote its lines, and built her own stage when doors closed.
Because being underestimated was never her weakness — it was her disguise. And behind that golden laugh was always a woman who knew exactly what she was doing.

10/11/2025

Definitely a lesson we all need to be reminded of.

Take time to pause and rest.

In 1955, every kindergarten classroom went silent at 1 PM—twenty little bodies on striped mats, learning a lesson we've forgotten how to teach.
The ritual was sacred. After morning songs and finger painting, after graham crackers and counting games, the teacher would dim the lights. A vinyl record would drop onto the turntable with that distinctive soft thump. Something gentle would begin—maybe Brahms' Lullaby, maybe just instrumental strings that sounded like afternoon sunshine.
And without a word, twenty five-year-olds would find their mats.
Striped canvas rectangles, each one claimed by a small person with serious ownership. Shoes tucked underneath. Blankets pulled to chins—some store-bought, some homemade, all carrying the particular smell of security and home. The classroom would exhale as one.
Naptime.
For millions of children who grew up between 1950 and 1975, this was as fundamental to kindergarten as learning your colors. It wasn't filler. It wasn't babysitting. It was curriculum—written into lesson plans, protected by educators who understood something we've since forgotten.
Young children weren't built for non-stop productivity. Their nervous systems needed reset buttons. Their imaginations required space to wander without assignment. Their bodies were still growing in ways that demanded rest, not just at night, but in the middle of the learning day.
Teachers became guardians of this quiet. They moved between rows on soft feet, smoothing blankets, placing gentle hands on restless shoulders, reading stories in voices barely above whispers. They understood their job wasn't just filling minds—it was protecting the whole child.
Some kids actually slept, exhausted from the overwhelming newness of school and the physics of being five. Others lay with eyes open, watching dust motes dance in the single beam of light sneaking through drawn curtains, lost in the kind of daydreaming that only happens when the world hasn't yet taught you that stillness is wasting time.
Even the fidgeters—the ones who stared at ceiling tiles and counted minutes—learned something crucial: Sometimes you have to be still even when you don't want to be. Sometimes rest is part of the work, not separate from it.
Then something shifted.
Through the 1970s and '80s, a new anxiety crept into American education: What if our children were falling behind? What if kindergarten was too soft, too playful, too... restful?
Academic pressure trickled down from high schools to middle schools to elementary schools and finally landed on five-year-olds. Kindergarten stopped being about socialization and started being about "kindergarten readiness." Pre-reading skills. Early math concepts. Measurable outcomes.
Naptime started looking like wasted instructional time.
District by district, the mats got rolled up and stored in closets. The turntables were replaced by overhead projectors, then computers, then tablets. The quiet disappeared. By the 1990s, mandatory rest periods had vanished from most public kindergarten classrooms, surviving mainly in expensive preschools and full-day programs.
Today's kindergarteners spend six to seven hours in structured learning. Reading groups. Math centers. Computer stations. Recess if the schedule allows. Lunch. More instruction. Homework sometimes.
No pause. No dimmed lights. No permission to stop performing.
And we wonder why childhood anxiety has exploded.
The children who experienced it carry the memory like a photograph: The scratch of the turntable needle finding its groove. The weight of your favorite blanket. The particular quiet of twenty children breathing in rhythm. The radical permission to close your eyes and rest while the world kept spinning outside.
Naptime wasn't just about sleep. It was about learning that rest has value. That quiet serves a purpose. That you don't have to produce every single moment to deserve your place in the room.
It was a lesson taught to five-year-olds that most adults have forgotten: Pausing isn't failing. Stillness isn't laziness. Rest isn't something you earn after you've accomplished enough—it's part of what makes accomplishment possible.
We eliminated it because we thought childhood was too easy. Because we convinced ourselves that earlier academic pressure would create more successful adults. Because we mistook busyness for learning and stillness for waste.
But here's what we lost: Today's kindergarteners have more structured academic time than 1950s third-graders had. We've eliminated the pauses and wondered why children are more anxious, more dysregulated, more exhausted than ever before.
Maybe it's time we remembered what we used to know.
Not that children should sleep half the school day—but that rest, quiet, and unstructured time aren't luxuries or rewards for good behavior. They're developmental necessities. They're how young nervous systems learn to regulate. They're how imaginations grow.
We used to build it into the day, right between morning songs and afternoon play. We dimmed the lights, dropped the needle on a record, and gave twenty little people permission to stop trying so hard for thirty minutes.
We taught them that being still was part of learning, not opposite to it.
Maybe we should teach ourselves the same lesson.
Because if we couldn't trust five-year-olds to rest without guilt, how did we ever expect them to grow into adults who know how to pause without shame?
The mats are still in storage somewhere. The lesson is still true. Maybe it's time we brought both back out.

10/11/2025

Despite what many folks might think about Barbie (& Ken) this story highlights how very different our world was back then, before we had ever heard of them.

A world where girls dolls were babies and most women were expected to be mothers and homemakers.

Our aspirations have changed and maybe, just maybe Barbie had something to do with it.

Ruth Handler watched her daughter play with paper dolls imagining adult careers. In 1959, she created Barbie—the doll that let girls dream beyond motherhood. Then she built a toy empire.
The 1950s. Post-war America. Women who'd worked in factories during World War II were being pushed back into domestic roles. The "ideal" woman was a housewife and mother. Career ambitions? Those were for men.
In this environment, Ruth Handler was building a business.
Born Ruth Marianna Mosko in Denver, Colorado, on November 4, 1916, to Polish-Jewish immigrant parents, Ruth grew up with entrepreneurial drive. In 1945, she and her husband Elliot Handler, along with their friend Harold "Matt" Matson, founded Mattel—initially making picture frames, then dollhouse furniture, then toys.
By the early 1950s, Mattel was growing, but Ruth noticed something about the toy market: all the dolls available for girls were baby dolls. The message was clear—girls should practice being mothers. That was their destiny.
But when Ruth watched her daughter Barbara play, she saw something different.
Barbara loved her paper dolls. But she didn't make them babies to care for. She made them adults with jobs, with lives, with adventures. She gave them careers—teacher, businesswoman, fashion designer. She created entire worlds of adult female possibility using flat paper cutouts.
Ruth had a realization: girls wanted to imagine their future selves, not just practice motherhood. They wanted to dream about who they could become.
But there were no three-dimensional dolls that offered that.
In 1956, while traveling in Switzerland with Barbara (then a teenager), Ruth saw a doll in a shop window that would change everything: Bild Lilli.
Lilli was a German doll based on a comic strip character—an adult woman with a curvy figure, fashionable clothes, and a knowing expression. But here's the complicated part: Bild Lilli was actually marketed to adult men as a gag gift, a bachelor party joke, a sexual novelty.
Ruth Handler saw something else: the potential to adapt this concept for children.
She bought several Lilli dolls and brought them back to America. She pitched the idea to Mattel's all-male design team: create an adult-bodied fashion doll for girls that would allow them to imagine grown-up roles and careers.
The response was immediate resistance.
"An adult-bodied doll is inappropriate for children," the designers said.
"Little girls won't want to play with a doll that has breasts," the marketing team argued.
"This will never sell," the toy buyers insisted.
Ruth Handler ignored them all.
She pushed Mattel's designers to create prototypes. She insisted on high-quality fashionable clothes—not baby clothes, but outfits that represented real adult wardrobes and careers. She demanded the doll look aspirational, stylish, modern.
She named the doll Barbara Millicent Roberts, after her daughter. Barbie, for short.
(Later, she'd create Ken, named after her son Kenneth.)
On March 9, 1959, Barbie debuted at the American International Toy Fair in New York.
The initial reception from toy buyers was lukewarm. But when Barbie hit store shelves, something remarkable happened: girls went crazy for her.
In the first year, 300,000 Barbies sold. Within a few years, Barbie was the best-selling doll in America. By the 1960s, Barbie was a global phenomenon.
Why? Because Ruth Handler was right. Girls wanted to imagine themselves as grown-ups with options. Barbie came with careers—she could be a nurse, a stewardess (the aspiration job for women in the early '60s), a fashion model, a career woman.
As decades passed, Barbie's careers expanded: astronaut (1965, before any American woman went to space), doctor (1973), Presidential candidate (multiple times starting in 1992), paleontologist, computer engineer, robotics engineer—over 200 careers total.
Ruth Handler had created more than a doll. She'd created a cultural icon and, arguably, a tool for expanding girls' sense of possibility.
But the story isn't simple or purely positive.
The Controversies:
Barbie's body proportions have been criticized since the beginning. If scaled to human size, her measurements would be physically impossible and unhealthy. Studies have shown that Barbie's body ideal can negatively impact young girls' body image and self-esteem.
For decades, Barbie was overwhelmingly white, blonde, and represented a narrow standard of beauty. The first Black Barbie didn't arrive until 1980—21 years after the original. Meaningful racial diversity took even longer.
Barbie promoted consumerism and materialism—she needed endless clothes, accessories, houses, cars. Critics argued this taught girls that happiness came from purchasing things.
And Ruth Handler herself? Her story didn't end triumphantly.
In the early 1970s, Mattel faced financial difficulties. In 1975, Ruth Handler was forced out of the company she'd co-founded amid accusations of financial fraud. She and other Mattel executives were charged by the SEC with falsifying financial reports. She was eventually convicted, fined, and sentenced to community service.
It was a stunning fall from grace.
But Ruth Handler wasn't done yet.
In 1970, she'd been diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy. The experience of finding a comfortable, realistic breast prosthetic was frustrating—available options were uncomfortable and unnatural-looking.
So Ruth did what she'd always done: she invented a solution.
In 1975 (the same year she left Mattel), she founded Nearly Me, a company that manufactured more realistic and comfortable breast prosthetics. She worked with designers and surgeons to create products that helped women feel whole after mastectomy.
It was her second act—proving that even after scandal and health crisis, she could identify a problem and create a practical solution.
Ruth Handler died on April 27, 2002, at age 85 from complications after colon surgery.
Her legacy is complicated. Barbie is both celebrated and criticized. The doll empowered some girls to imagine broader possibilities while potentially harming others' self-image.
In recent years, Mattel has worked to address some criticisms—introducing Barbies with diverse body types (curvy, petite, tall), skin tones, abilities (wheelchair Barbie, Barbie with prosthetic limbs), and representing more realistic career diversity.
Whether these changes redeem Barbie's earlier problems is still debated.
But here's what's undeniable:
Ruth Handler was a female entrepreneur who co-founded and helped lead a major corporation in an era when women were expected to stay home.
She identified a gap in the market and created a product that became one of the most successful toys in history.
She challenged conventional wisdom about what girls wanted and needed in their play.
She continued innovating even after personal and professional setbacks.
Her story isn't simple. It's not purely heroic. It includes business success, cultural impact, legitimate criticism, scandal, health struggles, and comeback.
In other words, it's human. Complicated. Real.
Ruth Handler created Barbie to let girls dream beyond the limited roles society offered them in 1959. The ex*****on was imperfect. The impact was massive. The conversation continues.
And that, perhaps, is the truest legacy: Ruth Handler started a conversation about girls' aspirations, body image, representation, and possibility that we're still having today.
Not bad for a toy.

10/11/2025

Georgia O'Keefe today is the first day of hearing your name but for sure there is more to learn

New York City.
Alfred Stieglitz, the most powerful art dealer in America, discovered charcoal drawings by an unknown woman teaching art in Texas. The drawings were unlike anything he'd seen—abstract, powerful, unapologetically sensual without being sexual.
He hung them in his gallery without asking permission.
When Georgia O'Keeffe found out, she stormed into his gallery and demanded he take them down. He refused. They argued. And then, somehow, they began one of the most complicated creative partnerships in art history.
But this isn't a love story. This is a story about a woman who refused to be anyone's muse.
Georgia O'Keeffe was born in 1887 in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin—stubborn, quiet, and certain from childhood that she was going to be an artist. Not an artist's wife. Not an artist's model. An artist.
She studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League in New York, learning traditional techniques from men who painted women as objects to be looked at, never as artists doing the looking.
Georgia learned their techniques. Then she left to find her own.
In 1912, she took a teaching job in Amarillo, Texas. Then Canyon. The desert changed her. The vast sky, the emptiness, the way light hit red rocks and turned them into something almost holy. She started painting what she felt, not what she saw.
Abstract forms. Colors that pulsed. Shapes that suggested flowers, bones, landscapes, but weren't quite any of those things.
That's when Stieglitz discovered her work.
They married in 1924. He was 60. She was 37. He photographed her obsessively—over 300 portraits over two decades. Some n**e. Some in profile. Some capturing her hands, her face, her body in ways that made her both subject and collaborator.
The art world decided Georgia O'Keeffe was Stieglitz's muse. His creation. His beautiful discovery.
Georgia had other ideas.
In 1924, she began painting flowers. Not delicate botanical studies. Massive, monumental flowers that filled entire canvases. A calla lily as tall as a person. An iris that opened like a cathedral. Petals rendered in such intimate detail you could see the veins, the folds, the architecture of growth.
"Nobody sees a flower really," she said. "It is so small. We haven't time, and to see takes time—like to have a friend takes time."
So she made them impossible to ignore. Six feet tall. So large you had to stand back to see the whole thing. So close and detailed you felt like you were inside the flower, not just looking at it.
Male critics immediately interpreted them as sexual. Freudian. Vaginal. Female sexuality rendered in paint.
Georgia's response? "Well—I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower—and I don't."
Translation: That's your hang-up, not mine.
She kept painting flowers. Huge, unapologetic, impossible to dismiss as "pretty" or "delicate" or any of the words men used to diminish women's work. Her flowers were powerful. Architectural. Demanding.
And she kept painting them her way, regardless of what anyone said.
But New York was suffocating. Stieglitz's world was galleries, critics, cocktail parties, endless talk about art instead of making it. Georgia needed space. Silence. A place where the light was clean and the sky went on forever.
In 1929, she visited New Mexico for the first time. It was like coming home to a place she'd never been.
She started spending summers there. Then longer. Then most of the year. Stieglitz stayed in New York. Their marriage became a long-distance arrangement where they lived separate lives connected by letters and the occasional visit.
When Stieglitz died in 1946, Georgia didn't perform public grief. She settled his estate, handled his gallery, and within three years, she'd moved permanently to New Mexico—first to a house in Abiquiu, then to an even more remote property at Ghost Ranch.
She was 62 years old. And she was just getting started on the work that would define her.
For the next four decades, Georgia O'Keeffe painted the desert. Bleached animal skulls against blue sky. Adobe walls. Red and orange cliffs. The geometry of landscape reduced to its essential forms. She painted what tourists ignored—the bones, the rocks, the way light changed color on sand.
She traveled—to Peru, to Japan, to anywhere the landscape interested her. She flew in small planes to see rivers from above. She painted clouds from airplane windows because she liked the perspective.
As she aged, Georgia didn't soften. She got sharper. More particular. More protective of her time and space. She wore black. She kept her hair pulled back. She looked at the world with eyes that had spent decades learning to really see.
In her 70s, macular degeneration began stealing her central vision. Most artists would have stopped. Georgia switched to pottery. When pottery became difficult, she switched to watercolors with assistance. When that became impossible, she supervised younger artists creating work from her vision.
She painted—in whatever form she could manage—into her 90s.
Georgia O'Keeffe died on March 6, 1986, at age 98, in Santa Fe. She'd outlived Stieglitz by 40 years. She'd created over 2,000 works of art. She'd shown the world that flowers could be powerful, that deserts could be sacred, that a woman could be an artist without being anyone's muse.
She never explained her work. Never apologized for it. Never softened it to make critics comfortable.
"I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life," she once said, "and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do."
Georgia O'Keeffe didn't paint flowers to be pretty. She painted them to demand attention. She didn't move to the desert to escape—she moved there to see more clearly. She didn't reject the art world's rules—she simply walked so far past them that the rules couldn't reach her anymore.
Every woman who creates without asking permission. Every artist who paints what they see instead of what they're told to see. Every person who chooses solitude over compromise.
They're walking a path Georgia O'Keeffe cleared by refusing to be anything other than exactly herself.
She painted flowers six feet tall. She lived to 98. And she never, ever explained herself to anyone.
That's not rebellion. That's freedom.
In honor of Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986), who painted what she saw, lived how she wanted, and proved that the biggest art comes from refusing to make yourself smaller.

10/11/2025

Great lesson in just 60 seconds

10/11/2025

He walked eighteen miles barefoot through Nebraska winter so his daughter could wear the only pair of boots—and when they finally made it to town, what happened next changed both their lives forever.
January, 1888. Thomas Hendricks was a widower with a six-year-old daughter named Clara and a homestead claim that had failed three years running. Drought, grasshoppers, then a fire that took the barn—nature had methodically destroyed everything he'd built. He'd borrowed against the land until there was nothing left to borrow against. The bank would foreclose in spring.
Thomas made a hard decision: walk to North Platte, eighteen miles away, and look for work that could at least feed Clara through winter. They had one pair of boots between them—children's boots that barely fit Clara. Thomas wrapped his feet in burlap sacks and cloth.
The walk took two days in brutal cold. Clara rode in a small cart Thomas pulled, wrapped in every blanket they owned. His feet bled through the wrappings. Frostbite turned his toes black. But Clara stayed warm.
When they reached North Platte, Thomas went door to door asking for work—anything, any wage. Most people took one look at his desperation and said no. A desperate man might steal. A man with a child might ask for charity they didn't want to give.
On the third day, with their food gone and nowhere to sleep, Thomas was sitting outside the general store trying to figure out his next move when a woman named Margaret Chen approached him.
Margaret owned a boarding house and restaurant. She was Chinese-American, which meant she understood what it felt like when doors closed because of who you were. She'd seen Thomas around town, noticed his bleeding feet, noticed how carefully he rationed the bread he bought for his daughter while eating nothing himself.
"Can you cook?" she asked.
Thomas admitted he could—his late wife had taught him, and he'd been managing meals on the homestead.
"Can you keep books? Basic arithmetic?"
He could do that too. He'd been a clerk before trying his hand at farming.
Margaret made him an offer: room and board for him and Clara in exchange for kitchen help and bookkeeping. Wages would be modest but fair. Clara could attend the town school—Margaret would make sure of it.
Thomas accepted before she could change her mind.
For the next year, Thomas worked in Margaret's kitchen and managed her accounts. Clara attended school and helped with small tasks after classes. Margaret taught Thomas her recipes—Chinese dishes alongside American fare—and showed him how to manage inventory, negotiate with suppliers, and handle the business side of food service.
Thomas learned he was good at it. Really good. He had a knack for creating economical meals that people loved, for managing tight budgets, for making a business run smoothly.
In 1889, Margaret had a proposition: she wanted to expand, open a second location in Ogallala. She'd provide the startup capital if Thomas would run it as a partner—60/40 split, with Thomas earning full ownership over ten years through profit sharing.
Thomas couldn't believe it. "Why me?"
Margaret's answer was simple: "Because you walked eighteen miles barefoot to save your daughter. A man with that kind of determination doesn't fail. He just needs an opportunity."
By 1895, Thomas owned his restaurant outright and had opened a second location. By 1900, he employed fifteen people—many of them other desperate folks he gave second chances to, just like Margaret had given him.
Clara graduated high school, then attended normal school, becoming a teacher. She later wrote about her father in her journal: "People remember the walk. They talk about his sacrifice. But the real story is what he did with the opportunity someone gave him. He didn't just survive—he built something that employed families, fed communities, and proved that desperation isn't destiny."
Thomas Hendricks died in 1924, at seventy-one, a respected businessman and employer. His obituary mentioned his "successful restaurant enterprise." Clara's eulogy told the real story: of the barefoot walk that almost destroyed him and the woman who saw past his desperation to his capability.
When Clara cleaned out her father's belongings, she found something tucked in his desk: a pair of worn, child-sized boots—the ones she'd worn on that winter walk. Attached was a note in his handwriting: "These carried us to a new life. Pride would have killed us both. Margaret Chen's kindness saved us. Never forget that accepting help isn't weakness—it's wisdom."
The boots are now in a small museum in North Platte, along with a photograph of Thomas, Margaret, and Clara taken in 1895 outside the restaurant. The plaque reads: "Sometimes survival takes sacrifice. Sometimes success takes help. Always, it takes both."
The real heroism wasn't just Thomas walking barefoot—though that took courage. It was accepting help when pride said to refuse it. It was recognizing that Margaret Chen's offer wasn't charity but opportunity. It was building something lasting from a moment of desperate need.
And it was Margaret Chen seeing past the bleeding feet and desperation to the capability underneath—and investing in a man when everyone else saw only risk.
Two people, both marginalized in different ways, who understood that survival sometimes means helping each other up.
That's a different kind of frontier story. But it's the one that built communities while the violent legends just made good tales.