Glamour announces its Women of the Year
NEW YORK — Caitlyn Jenner, Reese Witherspoon, ballet dancer Misty Copeland and five women affected by the South Carolina church massacre are among those honoured as this year’s Women of the Year by Glamour magazine.
Victoria Beckham, entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes, Cecile Richards of the non-profit organization Planned Parenthoood and the American women’s soccer Team round out the Class of 2015, announced Thursday. They will be honoured at a gala at Carnegie Hall in New York on Nov. 9.
Witherspoon was selected for the magazine’s December cover, to hit newsstands Nov. 10, while Jenner, Copeland and Holmes will be pictured on foldout covers.
This year is the 25th anniversary of the awards celebrating the achievements of diverse women in entertainment, fashion, politics and business. Amy Schumer will open the ceremony. Former honorees Madeleine Albright, Serena Williams and Billie Jean King will be among the guests to help mark the awards’ quarter-century. Jennifer Hudson and Ellie Goulding will perform.
The announcement of this year’s list came days after word of Jenner’s inclusion leaked, prompting a backlash on social media with criticism of her inclusion as a transgender woman of wealth and privilege. Some apparently thought Jenner was the woman of the year, as opposed to one of many.
“Where there is hateful chatter on Twitter, there is just as much, if not more, love and support. We prefer to focus on the positive,” a spokesman for Jenner said.
Cindi Leive, Glamour’s editorin-chief, said criticism of Jenner’s inclusion “certainly gives you an appreciation for the hostility to the trans community that still exists out there.” The awards, she said, are intended to honour diversity among women leaders and trailblazers who are as “diverse as the population of women in this world.” Actress Laverne Cox, also a trans woman, was among last year’s honorees.
The honorees’ achievements, as noted in the Glamour spread, include:
Witherspoon: She co-founded a production company, Pacific Standard, and started buying up books and scripts featuring female protagonists as a way to fight the gender gap in Hollywood. By 2015, the company’s Wild and Gone Girl earned Oscar nominations for Witherspoon, Laura Dern and Rosamund Pike.
Copeland: She became the first female African-American principal at the American Ballet Theatre in June. Copeland began dancing relatively late in childhood and had got used to being the only woman of colour in the room. Then late-onset puberty brought on curves and a more muscular build that took her physique beyond the tiny ballet ideal. She fought back from injuries and prevailed.
Jenner: The Olympic hero and Kardashian-Jenner family reality TV parent has faced her share of critics since coming out as a trans woman this year, including some within the trans community who felt her wealth and privilege made her an outsider in their world, too. Jenner, who turned 66 on Wednesday, vowed to educate herself while educating others through her docuseries, I Am Cait, which was just picked up by E! for a second season.
Charleston Strong: The shootings in June at the black Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, brought on mass protests over racial injustice. Alana Simmons, Nadine Collier, Bethane Middleton-Brown, Felicia Sanders and Polly Sheppard lost loved ones and two nearly their own lives. But all, one by one, stood up in a courtroom at the bond hearing for the young, white defendant and declared their anger, but not their hate.
Beckham: She came to the fashion world as a Spice Girl celebrity, but rolled up her sleeves to make her own way as a designer as she balanced life as the wife of soccer star David Beckham and mother of their four children, some of whom have followed her into the industry. She has also helped to raise several million dollars for AIDS research.
Team USA: The U.S. national team had been written off as having no chance of taking the FIFA Women’s World Cup. They dominated and became vocal advocates for women in soccer.
Holmes: She founded her fledgling blood-testing company, now called Theranos, in her dorm room after dropping out of Stanford University as an undergraduate but convincing an engineering professor to admit her into his graduate research lab. Her mission was to democratize access to potentially lifesaving lab testing by making it painless, accessible and affordable.
Richards: The president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America is the daughter of a civil-rights lawyer and a politician. She has been an organizer since her days at Brown, where she missed graduation to protest South African apartheid. Richards is responsible for more than 10,000 employees at 700 Planned Parenthood centres across the U.S.