Red Silk Carpet #94 Feb 2024 Jean Peelen digital cover by Shelly Jernigan Pekala

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On The Cover JEAN PEELEN In Honor of Women’s History Month: The Iconic Jean Peelen Releases Memoir: Feisty Gains Popularity Among Millennials

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BILLIE ELLISH Emma Stone Lily Gladstone Laurie Towers

In Honor of Women’s History Month: The Iconic

Jean Peelen Releases Memoir:

Feisty Gains Popularity Among Millennials By Jules Lavallee

Jean Peelen was born and raised in New Jersey. She flunked out of college, married a minister, and became a mother. Awakened by the Civil Rights Movement, she went to law school at 35 to become a Federal civil rights attorney. Jean wrote policy and enforced laws requiring equal educational opportunity for all students, regardless of a student’s race, gender, or disability. Jean negotiated the first Title IX intercollegiate athletics cases ensuring female athletes receive comparable resources, services, and opportunities. Jean became fascinated with the theories and forms of leadership. This curiosity led to a Federal Reinventing Government award for transforming a traditional workplace into a team-based, high-performing, and highsatisfaction organization. This honor led to her appointment to Chief of Staff of a 20,000-person Federal agency overseeing all U.S.-sponsored international

broadcasting. Retiring at 59, Jean transformed herself into a commercial model and actress. She was featured in two national campaigns for women’s health. After her retirement from modeling, she ran for public office as city commissioner in a small Florida beach town, fighting developers’ intent on destroying paradise. Jean’s third retirement at 82 led her mid-pandemic to write a book about her life: “Feisty: A Memoir in Little Pieces.” Jean now lives in a tiny house, in a tiny house village, in the mountains of North Carolina. From there she writes, speaks, and leads workshops for those who wish to live an unbounded life. You truly are a Renaissance Woman. Share your background. My first years were in the 1940s when television became the first medium to bring the world into ©Red Silk Carpet

middle-class homes. In the 1950s, the popular TV show was “Leave it to Beaver.” Beaver’s mother June became a primary role model for women’s lives. Women were meant to serve their husbands and their children. This was no accident. In the 1940s, women had been in the workforce replacing men who were at war. In the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, women had to be chased back into the house to make room for returning men. It made sense to spread the doctrine that a woman’s role, her Godgiven job, was to be wife and mother. This ethic meant my longing for more, to be part of a larger world, to live as I wished, went squarely against the norm. I kept my longings to myself. I made small attempts to strike out. My parents planned for me to attend the local New Jersey teachers’ college. I told them I wanted to become a missionary so they would allow me to enroll at a small church college in the Midwest.

I did not do well in college. High school had been a breeze. I already knew everything that was taught there, but when I hit college, that was no longer true. And I had never learned how to learn. I didn’t know how to study. I pulled out and went home, the first person in the family to go to college and the first to fail at it. I went to work in a factory typing orders for airplane parts. When the nice young Michigan man I had dated asked me to marry him, I said yes, please yes. One marriage, two children and twelve years later, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and the hippy movement hit the world and I reveled in all of it. I divorced, finished college, and went to law school, two children in tow. It was the beginning of my real life, of a life I chose, of a life I still choose. You have always been fascinated with the theories and forms of leadership. Tell us about your appointment to Chief of Staff of a 20,000person Federal agency. When I was a middle-manager in the U.S. Dept. of Education Office for Civil Rights, the big boss asked me to take on a major challenge. The D.C. home office was top heavy with people double checking the work of the ten regional investigative offices. The plan was to either fire 50 D.C. people or to create a new field investigative office from D.C. volunteers. I took the challenge to create a new office. My first step was to hold a meeting of potential volunteers. I asked them to describe their perfect place to work. The list

that resulted became the bedrock principles of the new office. • Every person will have a window (yes, this was the #1 wish). • Every person will be respected. • The work will be worthy. • The work will be high quality. Based on my commitment to these principles, 53 people signed up to learn entirely new jobs and work in an entirely new way. Within one year, the D.C. Metropolitan regional office won a prestigious Reinventing Government award from VicePresident Al Gore. The honor came to the attention of a man who had just been appointed as Director of the International Broadcasting Bureau, an agency that oversaw all U.S. international broadcasting. The agency was heavily political and perpetually in crisis with parts of the agency at war with other parts. He asked me to be his Chief of Staff, to help revolutionize that workplace. I told him he was crazy to hire me, that it was like asking someone who had run a McDonald’s to now organize feeding the world. He hired me anyway. A great leap of faith. I don’t know whether anything I did there would have been worthy of any award. I do know that the job opened new, international worlds for me, and I am forever grateful. At 82, during the pandemic you decided to write your story “Feisty: A Memoir in Little Pieces.” What was the catalyst for writing your book? In 2018, I moved to a 400 square foot tiny house in a tiny house

village in the mountains of western North Carolina. While I loved my house, village, and God knows, the mountains, I was quickly frustrated with nothing meaningful to do. I went to the movies, and lunches, and taco Tuesday trivia, but still felt frustrated and purposeless. Then the pandemic hit. Movies, lunches, and tacos went away along with almost all human contact. When you are alone and need to depend on yourself to maintain at least sanity if not a joyful life, you’d best get really creative. I decided to write about my life. I didn’t know I was writing a book, I just wanted to write about everything in my life that has stayed in my memory all these years. Since I didn’t want to start with “I was born in 1941,” I started listing memories. Memories come in all sizes. Some are huge: births, deaths, tragedies, divorces, lovers. Some are tiny: a story your mother told when you were four, an embarrassing teenage incident, one sentence from a teacher, a chance meeting on a street, a moment in the Grand Canyon. I fell in love with telling the tiny memories – those distinct moments in time that have stayed with me all of my life. There is a reason they have stayed. They raised an emotion, and that emotion has been part of my growth. So, I wrote “Feisty.” Sixty-five tiny moments in time. Over the next two years, “Feisty” became my occupation. I loved every minute of writing (even the painful editing part) and now I love every minute of sharing my story with others.

Who has inspired you? It was a man who created a seismic shift in who I was going to be in this world. His name was Alfred Lloyd Tenneson Scott. In 1968, he was the janitor in my minister husband’s all-white church in Mobile Alabama. He had worked there for forty years when he asked for time off to go to the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr. The church was horrified to find out he was the uncle of Coretta Scott King. No one knew his last name in the church. It was the custom at the time to call servants, particularly African American servants by their first names only. The church wanted to fire him as a dangerous agitator. His sheer bravery in his stand for his family in the face of dangerous consequences to him, including the loss of his 40-year job, moved me into commitment and action and determined the course of the next 25 years of my working life and the direction of my entire life. Feisty has become a favorite among Millennials. Why do you think your story is resonating with younger people?

I was shocked to realize that “Feisty” was being enjoyed and handed around by millennial women. I was, after all, writing about old times, old feminists, old attitudes. I thought I was writing for women in their 60s and 70s. But no. The bad old times have come back with a vengeance and viciousness unmatched in this century. The return of racism and sexism has brought all of the old issues up again. Young women today are not only facing all of the old ways in which society disapproved of them before the civil rights movement, they also are facing new challenges unthought of by me and my contemporaries, like living in a time where social media illuminates everyone’s lives and where the continuation of the planet is a real question. I asked one young woman what it was that appealed to her about “Feisty.” “Ah,” she said. “You were open about the costs of what it takes for a woman to reach for greatness. And you told your story in a way that I could hear it. You were real.” What are some of your favorite topics to speak on in the circuit?

Here are some of my favorite topics to speak on – in no particular order. Reinvent yourself! Every person should shake up his/her/their life at least every twenty years. Become someone new and different. Contribute in a new and different way. Old women, new roles. Older women can take up new and exciting roles as leaders, teachers, and mentors to young women. Here’s why and how. The myth of retirement. It does no one any good to retire their bodies, spirits, or minds from creative activities. Retirement, when one goes from work to only leisure is a distinctly American unhealthy habit. I have retired three or four times, but never for real. Live your life fully for all of your years.

Write your life. The most effective, least expensive healing therapy is writing about our lives. Why and how to write about your own life. www.jeanpeelen.com