Annie Lennox Blurring the Line Between Donor and Activist Anette Kay/Oxfam As an Oxfam global ambassador in Malawi, Annie Lennox meets with women the charity helps to set up small businesses. LONDON - On a balmy morning in May 2007, Annie Lennox was in her west London garden, drinking tea with her right-hand woman Tara Goldsmid and Claire Lewis, who runs celebrity ambassadors for the charity Oxfam. They were brainstorming about a new female forum the former Eurythmics star wanted to create. Something global. Something long-term. Something connecting women who have it all with women who have barely anything. What would such a group be called? They joked: A flock of women? A school of women? A pride? A mob? "I know," Ms. Lennox cried. A circle! No sharp edges, no hierarchy, just a circle of women. Less than a year later, The Circle was launched as an intimate web of 16 influential women that has grown into a network of 150-plus, raising more than £1.1 million, or $1.72 billion, for women's projects around the world. Celebrity philanthropy is neither new nor particularly female. The Beatles donated to Oxfam in the 1960s. Rockstars like Bono of U2 and Bob Geldof have campaigned for poverty relief in Africa for more than a decade. High-profile business leaders like Bill Gates have made billions available to development-related causes. Ms. Lennox and her Circle embody another trend: As more women acquire the financial muscle to support a cause, they seem to feel a special pull to help other women - and get actively involved in the process. Their empathy with less fortunate sisters, often rooted in shared female experiences like motherhood or the stubborn barriers to gender equality that persist from Pakistan to the United States, is quietly blurring the traditional line between donors and activists. On Forbes's list of the world's biggest givers - individuals who have donated at least $1 billion - all 19 are men. Bill Gates leads the pack at $28 billion. Lower down the scale, women are more likely to give and give more than men, according to a 2010 report by the Women's Philanthropy Institute at Indiana University. The number of campaigns and foundations run by and for women has risen rapidly. If in 1985 there were only 32 dedicated women's funds in the world, today there are at least 165, spanning 27 countries on six continents, according to Women Moving Millions, a group of 160 donors who each pledge at least $1 million to empower women and girls. This international sisterhood is still evolving, at times feeling almost a little too fashionable, like a must-have handbag that fades from favor next season. But by effectively making the battle for gender equality a global one it has created an ambitious new frontier for 21st century feminism, "roll-up-your-sleeves feminism," as Ms. Lennox says. In many ways, Ms. Lennox was a feminist icon before she was a feminist. In 1985, sporting a man's suit and peroxide blond crew cut, she roused teenage girls with "Sisters Are Doin" It For Themselves," giving "the conscious liberation of the female state" her husky soul treatment. "Mothers, daughters, and their daughters too, woh yeah," she roared. Woman to woman, we're singing with you. But if her outfit was a conscious statement - "to show people that my partner and I were equals" - off-stage feminism still intimidated her. "I didn't identify enough to be a fully paid up member," she recalled one recent afternoon in a soft Scottish burr. I liked putting on lipstick. I somehow thought that disqualified me. At 57, Ms. Lennox still has the chiseled androgynous look that was the hallmark of her 1980s stage persona but she "no longer has any issue with that word - except that so many still have an issue with that word." At a ceremony in 2010, where she received the Barclays Woman of the Year award, she asked those in the mostly female audience who considered themselves feminists to stand up. Half the room stayed seated. Shocked, she created Equals, a campaign for gender equality grouping 26 organizations, and raised money with two charity concerts. This spontaneous compulsion to "do something" is characteristic of Ms. Lennox. Scoffing at words like charity and philanthropy, she is, in the most literal sense, an activist.