The Shriver Report – Deborah W. (Debo) Dykes
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Deborah W. (Debo) Dykes

Deborah W. (Debo) Dykes is director of marketing and communications for The D. L. Dykes, Jr. Foundation, producers of FaithandReason® products and seminars.

Ordained in the Episcopal Church, she previously was an elementary school teacher, middle school science teacher, director of academic advance for higher education and was a NASA Teacher in Space finalist. Her participation in a Lilly Endowed program was a transformative experience and suffused her teaching, research, and subsequent authoring of her new children’s book series, Stellarella!

Gender Equality Is a Myth!
By Beyoncé Knowles-Carter
We need to stop buying into the myth about gender equality. It isn’t a reality yet. Today, women make up half of the U.S. workforce, but the average working woman earns only 77 percent of what the average working man makes. But unless women and men both say this is unacceptable, things will not change.  → Read More
A Woman's Nation Pushes Back from the Brink
Are we There Yet? Thoughts on “The Shriver Report Live”
It was 1963 when I sat in my 7th grade civics class in Louisiana and learned that on August 18, 1920, only 31 years before I was born, the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified giving women the right to vote. I was outraged! I raised my hand and blurted out, “What? Ridiculous! You’re kidding me!” Having a male teacher, I spent the rest of class-time writing lines, “I will not disrupt the class with my outbursts.”  → Read More
Creating Characters for Girls: Why I Created Stellarella
This is how it was told to me by my mother.
She walked from the bathroom, down the hallway into their bedroom. She stood next to the bed and starred down at him, a tattered diaphragm dangling from her finger. “Damnit, Ruben! I’m pregnant!” “Damn you!” My mother shouted.
Nine months later, I was born – another girl. It was 1951. It was a horrific time for women when “Father Knows Best,” and “My Three Sons,” was portraying domestic paradises while women led lives of oppression, isolation, and cultural suffocation. My mother, a psychology major with a minor in chemistry, was restricted to a career as a secretary under the dominating authority of a white male boss. It was still a time when the white male hierarchy reigned.
Stellarella did not just come to me; Stellarella grew within me over a lifetime marked by subjugation and oppression. Stellarella developed out of my personal experience of growing up as a girl, becoming a woman, and finally being ordained in the Episcopal Church, a historical institution constructed to reinforce the authority of a male dominant society.  → Read More
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