Everybody knows about Jay Leno's taste for topical humor. Far fewer are aware that his wife, Mavis, has long been one of Hollywood's most influential behind-the-scenes activists on behalf of women.
For more than a decade Mavis Leno has made the plight of Afghan women her particular case and this month she and the organization in which she plays a pivotal role -- the Feminist Majority Foundation -- will hold what amounts to a coming out party for the next round in this cause.
The feminist organization with a hip Beverly Hills-adjacent headquarters -- financed with the help of industry activist Peg Yorkin -- now has a global reach and the plight of Afghan women is a particular focus. (The group also publishes Ms. Magazine). Shortly after the Taliban came to power in Afghanistan, Mavis and Jay Leno gave $100,000 to help jump-start the foundations' global women's rights program.
Mavis Leno had been involved with the Feminist Majority -- founded in 1987 by former National Organization for Women President Eleanor Smeal and Yorkin -- for some time and had become concerned about the Taliban's often brutal discrimination against women. When Mavis Leno tried to interest news correspondents in the problem in the mid- to late 1990s, she hit a brick wall.
So she resolved to create a story that would appeal to people in an area she understood: the entertainment media. The entertainment media got it. And hard news reporters followed the stars as they -- like the Magi -- are prone to do.
In 2001 in an online chat on CNN, Mavis Leno told an interviewer: "With the Taliban takeover, the women were immediately, without any exceptions, told to go to their homes and stay there. They were told they could no longer work in any capacity. Since there are a huge amount of war widows in this country who are the sole support of their families this threw many families into starvation.
"The only answer to this problem offered by the Taliban was allowing women to beg if they had no son older than 6 who could beg for the family instead."
Since the American invasion of Afghanistan and the installations of the Karzi government, the situation for Afghan women has been extremely fluid, with progress in some places and deepening repression in others, according to Leno. (Girls attending newly reopened schools have had acid thrown in their faces by Taliban loyalists. Some have been kidnapped on their way to school and sold into human trafficking and prostitution.)
