Yesterday as I sat crammed into an overloaded van with my entire family driving through too many states to keep count, my thoughts were totally wishing I was attending the amazing Berkeley Cybersalon. This one was entitled: Mommies Online: Another Feminist Revolution? It featured some of my very favorite mommybloggers. One of which is our very own BlogHer Mommy & Family Editor Mary Tsao. Also on the panel was BlogHer's Grace Davis, Lisa Canter, my own Mommybloggers partner in crime Jenny Lauck and Joan Blades. A dream team if I ever saw one!

Mary's take on the whole thing gives you a wonderful glimpse into the panel discussion. I highly recommend you go read it!

The topics ranged from how these women got into blogging to spreading important topics through Mommybloggers. As always happens when you have a panel of mommybloggers, the topic of privacy and just how much information do you or should you put out there.

Other topics we touched upon were the issues of privacy and whether or not we blogged anonymously. Also what are our limits, i.e., what do we *not* blog about. I wasn't surprised to learn that some of the panelists who blog using first and last names and seemingly hold nothing back (Lisa!), admitted to not blogging about everything. I admitted that while I don't blog anonymously, I also don't blog about more of the sordid details of my relationship with Mike. In other words, I try not to bitch online about my husband or talk about our sex life.

Some of the other bloggers don't blog about their teenaged children. Grace does.

See? What an awesome talk this created? So what else did they talk about? They obviously spoke about BlogHer as both a great conference to meet other bloggers as well as a great community to read more from women bloggers all over the world. In addition, Jenny spoke about Mommybloggers as places where the audience members could go to find more mommybloggers as well as daddybloggers.

Lisa Canter also blogged about it and shared some of the issues that really hit home with her.

Motherhood - as we all know - is a completely political statement. And given that we are the strangely disenfranchized majority - I predict the bloggerspace will continue to be a unifying space. I was shocked by the statistics of paid maternity leave that Joan Blades presented, It goes like this:

Out of 162 countries there are 4 that don’t have paid maternity leave:

Papua new Guinea
I forget the other 2 - something like Zimbabwe - small small countries

and then (drum roll)

USA!

Now if that isn’t fucking ridiculous - I don’t know what is. It goes right there with what I think of our healthcare situation.

I must admit I am biased when it comes to this panel of women because I already know them to be intelligent, capable and amazing women. To have them in the same room, on the same panel discussing Mommyblogging makes me so jealous that I was stuck on the road and not in this room. Thanks to Lisa and Mary for recapping for those of us who could not be there! I am waiting to read the panel discussion recaps from Grace, Jenny and Joan, too!

I will update you when the podcast goes live!

[Image courtesy of MomsRising.org]

BlogHer Contributing Editor Jenn also blogs at Mommy Needs Coffee and Mommybloggers.