Grandma Magic Episode 1: Paola Gianturco: Documenting Women’s Untold Stories
Paola Gianturco: Documenting Women’s Untold Stories
In our first Grandma Magic podcast episode, we talk to Paola Gianturco, a photojournalist and author. She started in business, addressing the glass ceiling, and has since dedicated 25 years to publishing untold stories of women leaders. Her books cover topics like empowering traditional handicrafts for economic development and showcasing women’s leadership in climate change. One of her notable works is the 2012 book Grandmother Power, highlighting the roles of grandmothers in societies worldwide and featuring several members of the Grandmother Collective.
After you listen, visit Paola’s website for Cool: Women Leaders Reversing Global Warming to learn more about women leaders in climate change. You can also find various opportunities for climate action. Below is the presentation she and granddaughter Avery gave on the project at the Commonwealth Club.
TRANSCRIPT
Lynsey Farrell (Host): Welcome to Grandma Magic, a podcast from the Grandmother Collective. We are a nonprofit organization that supports and advocates for a world where a grandmother’s power is seen, cultivated, and activated for positive change. The Grandma Magic Podcast is an opportunity to learn more about the unique positions that grandmothers, aunties, and other older women around the world can play in advancing positive social development.
By talking to and learning from grandmother changemakers we hope this series inspires you, brings you joy, and helps you recognize the enduring magic and wisdom that comes from grandmothers everywhere. My name is Lynsey Farrell, and I’m your host today. Today we’ll be talking with Paola Gianturco, a photographer and author who has documented women’s lives in 63 countries.
After 34 years in business, Paula went on to write seven photographic books with a lens towards women’s issues. Her 2012 book, grandmother Power, a Global Phenomenon, has been an inspiration for many in our network. Profiling activist grandmothers in 15 countries on five continents. Paula is also a grandmother and co-authored her last two books, Wonder Girls: Changing Our World and Cool: Women Leaders Reversing Global Warming with her two young granddaughters.
I’m excited to learn more about your career, your thoughts on women’s issues, and your own grandmother journey today. Thank you for joining us.
Paola Gianturco: I’m glad to be here. Thank you for inviting me.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): So to start, could you just share a little bit more about your background and maybe specifically what led to this path to focus on women’s issues? Do you have a foundational woman or women in your past?
Paola Gianturco: As soon as I had graduated from school, I began working for a retailer who was the first retailer in the country to cater to working women, because at that point in the 1960s, the women’s movement was just beginning and many women were just beginning to work outside of the house.
After that, I worked for the first women-owned advertising agency in the world. At one point we had 75 women and maybe one or two men, and the government told us that we were discriminating and we were required to add men to the staff. So I had a long experience of working only with women. And after that I began working at an advertising agency where I was one of a few women on staff and in client meetings.
I was often the only woman in meetings for six months at a time. So I had, Sharp contrast between the first part of my career and the second part of my career. And I was so interested in the glass ceiling and what was causing that, that I decided to use my then one month vacation, who has time for a one month vacation.
I asked to take it in half day increments, and I went back to school. And began studying women’s studies. I took those classes wherever I could as undergraduate courses, as graduate courses, as continuing education. There were no women’s studies classes when I was at school at all. So all of that was new to me.
And during that time, I had access to all of the libraries that related to those courses, which gave me an opportunity to do a lot of research about why the glass ceiling existed, that led me to frame a matrix of 12 different points, all of which seemed to me to dovetail, or layer, to cause the glass ceiling.
And Mills College heard about that and asked if I would teach a course about women in leadership, which I did with a collaborator. Stanford heard about that and asked if we would teach that same course there as an executive institute for what was then called the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, which we did for four or five years.
Then this course was offered somewhere and during that time I had been walking around on the mountain where I live on Mount Tam north of San Francisco, and wondering what next, what now? I had a sense that my communications career was coming to an end, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do next.
So I walked on the mountain and asked myself What next? What now? What next? What now? and ultimately I decided to take a one year leave of absence to do a book, not about the glass ceiling, but in fact I wanted to do a photographic book. My father had put a camera in my hands when I was eight and I had loved photography my whole life and I thought this was going to be a relaxing sort of vacation project.
I invited a friend to do this book with me. Both of us collected folk art, so we decided to go and meet and photograph women artisans around the world. And we visited some 15 countries, I think for that first book, which ended up being titled in Her Hands, Craftswomen Changing the World, because we discovered that the women were making crafts to sell in order to send their children to school. And it seemed to me that that was going to change our world over time. Your world, my world, the world. so that was the beginning. And as you can see, for most of my adult life, women’s issues had been very much on my mind and part of my experience.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): So, were you at retirement age or you had just reached a point where you felt you had done everything you could in the business space and needed to capture this other calling?
Paola Gianturco: I was 55 when I made that shift. That’s not really retirement.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): No. No. Especially not today.
Paola Gianturco: No. I just decided to start a second.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): Yeah. One thing we’ve been talking about a lot is that this work that we’re doing in capturing the stories of older women, especially older women, changemakers is very much shining a light on the fallacy that you have to have it all figured out in your thirties or your forties and that there really are so many opportunities to keep remaking yourself.
And, we’ve even been thinking this is a story we should be telling to younger women and really ensuring that the wisdom of older women is shared. So you’re really giving us evidence of that. I wonder if you can speak a little, I think it sounds like you were one of the pioneers of really talking about women’s leadership, especially in creating coursework around that.
Can you talk a little bit about it? Why the focus on women even up until today? What is unique to women’s leadership that is important to tell as distinct from men’s leadership?
Paola Gianturco: That’s a really hard question because as you know, the difference between the genders is small, and the difference within genders is larger than that. so it’s very difficult to draw those kinds of conclusions and I’m scared about doing it. I will say that, as I was working with grandmothers, it was very clear to me that they wanted to lead change in the world, because they wanted to benefit their grandchildren.
They were very conscious of the changes that they wanted to make in order to make the world a better place for their children and grandchildren. So that was definitely a point of commonality. The other thing that I discovered about grandmother activism was that I know how many grandmothers there are in the US today.
You probably do know this.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): There’s not a really good number, but it’s more than grandfathers for sure.
Paola Gianturco: That’s true. The most recent number I have read about grandparents is that about a third of the population in the US is grandparents.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): Parents and it’s like 1.2 billion in the world, grandparents, but we don’t have the number specifically for women.
Paola Gianturco: Exactly. but nonetheless, there are lots of them. And this usually surprises people, one of the reasons is that women start to be grandmothers for the first time when they’re about 47 or 48 or so. Which is much younger than most people think about when they think about grandmothers.
They think about little old ladies in rocking chairs. But in fact, the largest number of grandmothers it seems in the US right now is somewhere between 47 and 64. And those are people who were likely to have been activists when they were younger. That was certainly the case for many of the women whom I interviewed for the book, grandmother Power.
They had worked in the 1960s and seventies and maybe early eighties, on human rights. They had worked to increase, literally all of the human rights, to change discrimination. Racially and ethnically, and religiously and politically so they were used to causing change and they were not about to stop now.
They were simply applying what they had learned earlier to make the world better for their grandchildren.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): We’ve been having also a conversation about the earning of elderhood. You age, but to become an elder and to take the responsibility of what that means isn’t always, what people are not sort of always recognizing that responsibility or earning their elderhood and one of the things that we’re hearing from grandmothers all the time, and I wonder if this was maybe your own personal experience or, experience that you had in that grandmother work, is that there is a status change that comes with the birth of that first grandchild where you become a new type of person, maybe you become an elder and you feel that sense of responsibility for the wider world.
You’re really thinking about a better future. Do you feel that that is the case, maybe in your own personal situation or in, the conversations that you’ve had with women?
Paola Gianturco: I don’t think I’ve quite asked that question that way, although I wish I had. It’s a fascinating idea. My own experience was that I was so delighted to have these new granddaughters. I have two granddaughters. As you mentioned, it changed my life in a wonderful way. I wasn’t sort of imbued with a new sense of responsibility.
I was imbued with a new sense of joy and I was fortunate early in their childhood to have had a wonderful conversation with them. And they call me grandmother. I’ll tell you this story. They call me grandmother and they call their other grandmother, grandma. And they had been to visit their other grandma, their grandmother, other grandmother. I came to visit one time soon after that. And because they were habitually calling their other grandmother, grandma, they called me grandma by mistake. And they kept doing that and they were mortified. And I said, it’s okay because we are all grands and so are you. Well, they were at that point, ages five and eight and we started right then that minute in that conversation, a Grand Club. And immediately the five year old said she wanted to write our motto. She wanted to create our motto. And I said, okay. And she said, “We are grand will always be grand. Go grand!” And threw her arms up in the air. And her older sister said she wanted to do our pledge, and she said, “We are grand, will always be grand. Together we’ll stand, we’ll lend a helping hand.
And that couplet “together will stand, will lend a helping hand” really defined our relationship to each other. And from the beginning it was very clear that I would help them and they would help me. And there were many, many instances in which they helped me.
And if you want, we can talk about some of those stories. but that really was the premise of our relationship starting at the beginning. Now, did that assume a responsibility of being an elder? I’m not sure. I was establishing a new kind of relationship for us. And that maybe it’s what other people would like to copy.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): Yeah, actually, I would like to hear more about the relationship you have with your granddaughters and, how did you get to the point of deciding to co-author books with them and what was that experience like? I know that you did interviews, did you travel with them as well?
Paola Gianturco: Yes. Let’s talk about Wonder Girls first, because that’s the one I did with Alex. Both of the girls were 11 or 12 when we were working on these books together. It was a natural development in both instances, and it grew from a real need to have their perspectives on these books. Wonder Girls was a book about.
Girls who were ages 10 to 18 who were activists. to my knowledge, nobody had documented girls that young. At that point, the book came out in 2017 and in fact, I had for several years been aware that activist girls were making big changes literally all over the world as I had traveled for the prior couple of books, I had been making notes to myself about girls who were doing interesting work. but I thought it was inappropriate for me as a grandmother to be writing about Wonder Girls, without the perspective of a Wonder Girl in the project. I really needed to have the perspective of someone who was nearer the age of the girls in the books.
So I invited Alex to do that project with me, because I had a real need for her help and she knew that and I think was pleased to be invited to work with me. Yes, we traveled together some, not as much as I would like to have, but we did go to Mexico together. It was great traveling with a 12 year old.
I mean, for one thing, she knew everything about technology that I don’t know. She was using Google Translate to figure out what was on the menu. She was the only one who knew what was on the menu in Mexico. I had no idea. I would get as lost as I was driving around to do interviews with her in Los Angeles and she would say, I’ve got it, grandmother.
And she would get out her Google Maps long before I understood what to do with the Google Map. But more than that because she had learned to take pictures from her father, just as I had learned to take pictures from my father. She hadn’t had formal lessons in photography and so her creativity was sort of unbound.
She came at taking pictures in a very imaginative new way. She planned the composition of the pictures, in a way that was much freer than what I was doing. So in fact, I learned a lot from Alex as we were working on Wonder Girls.
The same was also true, when I invited Avery to work with me on Cool.
Avery again was ages 11 and 12. I’ll tell you something, if you don’t have an opportunity to hang out with 11 or 12 year old girls, figure out a way to find one and spend lots of time with her. It is great.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): I will have one in five years.
Paola Gianturco: Well, you’ll, you’re, you’re in for a treat. Again, I needed Avery’s perspective. Cool was a story about girls and women around the world who were working against climate change. And because the big impact of climate change, unfortunately, is going to fall on people who are the age of Avery as a grownup.
I really thought it was appropriate to include her perspective in that project. She and I traveled with her father, all over the United States. We did about eight interviews in the US and I did the rest of that travel because of course, if you’re 11 or 12, you have to go to school. That’s boring if you’re a grandmother who wants company.
So again, I learned amazing amounts from Avery and she helped me when I was in real pickles, as I was saying earlier. So for example, on the very first interview, we got there early by about 15 minutes. We were sitting in the car outside of the building where we were to interview a woman who runs an international company.
And Avery offered me a caramel, and at first bite, the caramel took the cap off my front tooth and I was just unglued. I thought, “How can I do this interview without moving my mouth? And then I thought maybe I could have Avery do the interview by herself. She and I had made up all the questions together, but she’d never even been in an interview, much less conducted one.
So as I was sort of ringing my hands and worrying. She said, “Grandmother, can you embrace this situation?” And I said, “what?” And I said, “what are you talking about?” And she said, “Well, once we begin talking, nobody’s gonna be looking at your tooth. They’re going to be looking at your eyes.” And she just began talking me down until it was time to go in and I thought, I’d just have to go do this.
And she was absolutely right. Of course, nobody, not one person in that room said anything about my missing front tooth, that I looked like an old witch. And as we left afterwards, somebody had been drawing with chalk on the sidewalk. They had left some big, fat pink, blue, red, white chunk, and it. Avery picked one up and drew a heart on the sidewalk and inside it wrote “Grands Forever” to cheer me up. So in fact, my grand girls help me and I sometimes, I hope, help them.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): It would be really nice to actually have them here to share with us what their experience of going with you was like. Did you see this week that the Surgeon General has declared we’re having a crisis of isolation or a crisis of loneliness in the United States?
And I wonder if you, I mean, you’ve given us some advice for connecting with your grandchildren in a particular way and there’s lots of organizations and people trying to really, create better quality grandparent grandchild relationships, but in general, do you have any sort of ideas about other ways that people across generations might connect that you’ve learned from your travels and experience?
Paola Gianturco: It’s very interesting because as I’ve traveled, I’ve seen the full range of grandparent grandchild relationships. I’ll give you an example, in Mali there are six villages where the grandmothers, not the grandfathers, the grandmothers are sent out of the village and essentially isolated in villages of their own.
And they send a child out with food for them every day, but they otherwise have no connection with. Even their own families?
Lynsey Farrell (Host): Are they widows?
Paola Gianturco: No.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): They’re still married.
Paola Gianturco: They are, some of them. So that’s one extreme. On the other hand, in some instances, grandmothers are taking care of children. In fact, that was the beginning of the book, Wonder Girls. I was interviewing women in Kenya for a prior book called Women Who Light the Dark was about activist women around the world working on many different kinds of projects. And I found myself having arrived early, sitting with probably 25 or 30 women from this village and I thought, how can I begin to break the ice?
So I asked them how many children they had. Which is a fairly safe question to ask and they all answered in the same routinized way. They said, I have four and eight adopted. I have six and 15 adopted. I have 5 and 20 adopted. And I finally thought I understood what they were talking about. Because it became clear that what they meant by adopted was that they were raising grandchildren who had been orphaned by eight, and I met grandmothers who were doing that literally all over that J shaped geography that runs along the West coast and Southern edge of Africa.
Down at the bottom up to Namibia. and I thought the grandmothers hold the future of this continent in their hands. so that will give you the idea of the full range of relationships, I observed. There is every shade of relationship imaginable.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): So if you’re in the US and you’re feeling disconnected from the generations and we’re being told there’s a generation gap and that people aren’t, spending time with each other, is there a model or an approach that you’ve ever encountered or maybe in your own life that people could be emulating?
Paola Gianturco: One thing that occurs to me and it’s not necessarily a natural thing for people my age to do, but I text my granddaughters, which gives them an opportunity to answer if they want to and when they have time to. It isn’t anywhere nearly as intimate as it could be, but it’s sort of a placeholder that says, I love you and I’m interested in what’s cooking for you.
Increasingly I think it’s necessary to invent ways to, sort of skirt distance and time, and sort of plant yourself in another person’s life, in a way that’s fun for them.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): Yeah. and that meets them where they are a little bit.
Paola Gianturco: Yes.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): So you’re meeting them where they are with a text. Nobody wants a phone call anymore.
Paola Gianturco: I know.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): I call my mother, but I was a generation before the cell phone was everywhere. So one thing that I’d really love to understand, I’m trying to do the math, did your Grandmother Power book come out after you became a grandmother?
Paola Gianturco: Grandmother Power was published in 2012. I became a grandmother in 2004.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): Oh, okay. So you had already gone down this pathway and felt inspired. What has been sort of the thread for you in choosing the topics of this other than women and activism, which is very clear. Where is the sort of inspiration hitting you and how do you make the decisions that you make?
Paola Gianturco: They all grow from observations being out in the world and the discovery that no one much has written about what I want to cover, in the instance of each of these books, they. Have been at the time they were published, virtually alone in their subject matter.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): You know, we often talk about women, grandmothers, being this invisible workforce. They’re invisible in many aspects of life. Is that a piece of this as well, why people haven’t written it?
Paola Gianturco: Let me just back up a minute because I must not have made it clear that the decision to do all of my books, not just the grandmother book, but all of them has come from the discovery that no one has written about that yet, whatever that is. And in that case, it could be. women activists around the world.
There had been books. Let’s look at Cool, the newest. When Cool: Women Reversing Global Warming came out there was a book about women in the United States who were working against global warming that came out about a month before Cool did, but there was nothing about women around the world who were working against global warming.
So there is a perverse side of me that loves doing something that hasn’t been done before and I am always looking for a way to reflect what I discover. As I am traveling around the world, I’m making notes about what else I see so it wasn’t just grandmothers hadn’t written about it, it was that all of these issues had in fact not really been covered.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): Yeah. I guess what I’m saying with the invisibility is, activist girls or activist grandmothers or activists, climate change women, are maybe not invisible, but taken for granted or not assumed to be as powerful in the space as they are. So maybe I would hypothesize that’s why it hadn’t been written.
Or if it’s a new trend and you caught it, maybe I’m wrong.
Paola Gianturco: I think it’s a little of both.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): What are you working on next? Do you have another book in you? You don’t have any more grandchildren, right? So no more, collaboration.
Paola Gianturco: I have two step grandchildren, but with Cool I have a conviction that climate change is an existential issue of our time, so I really want to spend the next three or four years working on generating climate action. That book not only tells the story of women climate leaders, but it also tells their recommendations for what people, readers can do to affect climate change and curb it. And each chapter ends with three to six ideas. And if you scan with your phone a QR code, you will fly to the project website, which makes those suggestions very concrete. I’ll give you an example, the Lord Mayor of Sydney, Australia. The first suggestion was never, ever stop demanding more. From your elected officials, and when you fly to the project website, it breaks that down, so it tells you how to find out who your elected officials are and what their email addresses and telephone numbers.
Then it gives you a sample telephone conversation that you could have with them or a member of their staff. So it gives you a sample email that you might send to them. And then if you’re really hooked on climate advocacy, it tells you how to sign up for Al Gore’s courses on climate activism. So the, the suggestions become very actionable and concrete in every instance. Avery and I hope that by telling these stories will inspire readers to take actions themselves and then give them the tools with which they can take action.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): So is it an ongoing project past the development of the book.
Paola Gianturco: The book is only part of the project and that’s true of my other books as well, because in some instances there is a photographic exhibit. There is always a set of presentations and interviews like this one, that follow from the content of the books and my hope is to continue doing presentations about Cool and the actions that people can take for the next several years.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): And will you constantly be updating the actionable steps?
Paola Gianturco: Yes.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): Yeah. Very neat. That’s the beauty of the internet, that we can be constantly updating, but it’s also like you feel a sort of responsibility to do that as well because it’s not a static thing that now ends up on a bookshelf.
It’s gonna be a living thing. That’s really neat.
Paola Gianturco: And the other thing is Avery and I have been doing some of these presentations together. Avery turns out to be very poised and a very comfortable public speaker and she and I have presented both at the World of Affairs Council in San Francisco and at the Commonwealth Club, in San Francisco, both of which are really prestigious platforms. And she’s very cool, very cool about this.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): Well, I mean, she does have the model of a grandmother to show her the way. But I also think we’re navigating a group of really aware young people. They know what’s happening in the world. They’ve got access to information that, in my adolescence, I did not have access to.
So I think it’s been really fun to watch the change making journeys of young people as well.
Paola Gianturco: Exactly, you said it well. I agree.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): And so one of the things that we’re really hoping is that, that thread, what you, I think are really showcasing is that you can be in this relationship, this intergenerational relationship that supports us all. And it’s a kind of very significant and important piece. Not just a top down, but a bottom up. I don’t think that’s the right phrasing, but, older to younger, back and forth reciprocal relationship.
Paola Gianturco: I think that’s exactly right. Reciprocity is a good word.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): Paula, do you have a favorite story of, an older woman, change maker to end our podcast with?
Paola Gianturco: The royalties from all of my books go to nonprofit organizations that are working on the issues in the book. And the royalties from Grandmother Power: A Global Phenomenon go to an organization called the Stephen Lewis Foundation in Canada. Let me give you a little bit of background about Stephen Lewis.
Stephen Lewis was the Canadian ambassador to the UN. Kofi Annan named him as his Special Envoy to Africa on Aids, Malaria and TB, and he came back having served his term, and determined that he would spend the rest of his life trying to quell AIDS in Africa, but he didn’t have lots of money. And so he had the idea that grandmothers in Canada could help him raise money.
And there are now some 8,000, maybe more by now, Canadian grandmothers, and they make money out of the air. They make crafts. They make baked goods and sell them. They sell ice cream at the beach. They’ve catered weddings. They will do all kinds of things to make money for the Stephen Lewis Foundation to administer as grants to grandmothers all over Africa who are raising children orphaned by AIDS.
And the African grandmothers make grant applications sometimes for just a very small amount of money, maybe just enough to buy seeds to plant a community garden so they can feed the children or. enough money so they could buy a swing set so they can give the kids something to play on after school.
So they’re not extravagant big grants, but using the Canadian grandmothers’ funds and sending them as grants to the grandmothers in Africa is really the purpose of the Stephen Lewis Foundation. I first met, to answer your question, the Stephen Lewis Foundation through interviewing for the book.
I met Joanne O’Shea who lives in Berry, Ontario, and she has for a long time been the head of a grandmother group there, a Stephen Lewis grandmother group there called Grandmothers and Grandothers. She includes grandmothers for obvious reasons, and grandothers could be just about anybody who wants to support the work that they’re doing.
She has five grandchildren, I think maybe six by now. and she used to be in education. So she wasn’t used to being a leader of anything. Somebody would have an idea about a way they thought they could earn money, and she would just put out signup sheets and whatever. Signup sheets got enough names on it to make something happen.
They would do that. It was a great way for consensus leadership to evolve. she has. Come to some of the presentations that I’ve done both in Canada, and in the United States. And she has her own work in Berry as well as at my events. dances of gratitude and. I had never heard of a gratitude dance until I met Joanne O’Shea.
In fact, I think she may have made it up but I will never forget that we were presenting in Traverse City, Michigan, I think, and she arrived from Canada, with her music CD and played it after we were done. And we began dancing on stage, making it up as we went along. And suddenly everybody was dancing in the aisles.
They were dancing in front of their seats, they were dancing on their seats. They were yelling and screaming. There must have been 250 people dancing and in a gratitude dance. That was just wonderful and memorable. So that may not be the kind of story you expected, but sometimes, grandmothers think of amazing and creative ways to unify people, and get them excited about things.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): No, that’s exactly the story that I would’ve wanted. I often think about grandmothers as you know, the culture keepers, the ritual makers, the people that without whom we wouldn’t have that feeling of identity and connection. So I hope she’s still doing gratitude dances all over Canada. All rituals and traditions are invented anyway, and mostly by grandmothers. So that’s a really neat story. And we do know the work that they’ve done, on the continent, has been life changing. So, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing this holistic story of your own grandmother experience, but also the light that you’ve shined on women’s issues over the past however many years.
It’s been wonderful to connect with you.
Paola Gianturco: Thank you for inviting me. It was a pleasure to be with you.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): Thanks.
