Gloria Steinem - February 13, 2002
A 21ST CENTURY FEMINISM
Gloria Steinem
Author, journalist and feminist; co-founder, Ms. Magazine
A great deal of effort has gone into trying to make feminism misunderstood. Rush Limbaugh, of course, is chief among the culprits here, since he has coined the word "feminazi," which is especially offensive because it is historical. The Nazis were anti-feminist and came to power specifically against feminism. But there have been other, more subtle efforts, just as there have been to demonize words like "liberal" and "affirmative action." Feminism means what it says in the dictionary: The belief in the whole social, political and economic equality of women and men. Obviously, women and men can and should be feminists.
It means a major revolution and transformation. It isn't the way the world is running. We are not looking at the world as if female human beings and people of all colors mattered, which is the goal of feminism. There is resistance to taking away the world's single biggest source of unpaid or underpaid labor, not to mention the world's means of reproduction, which is probably the reason why reproductive issues are the key to women's movements around the world - whether it is fighting against female genital mutilation in many countries of Africa and the Middle East, or smuggling contraception into Ireland, or the fight to be able to have children in safety as well as not to have children.
There are also other wonderful words. We don't have to say "feminism." We could say "women's liberation." We could say "womanist." We could say "mujerista." These are all good words that simply mean the full humanity of both women and men.
The patriarchal-nationalist system has been going on in various stages between five and eight thousand years. That's only 5 percent of human history, so maybe we should declare this an experiment that failed. Even in this young country there have been two waves. First was the suffragist and abolitionist wave, which took more than 100 years to gain for women of all races and men of color an identity as human beings. It's useful to remember how recently most of the people in this country would have been literally property, like tables and chairs. It's perhaps not surprising that it's going to take us another century to gain legal and social equality. The first stage of resistance to change has passed - that feminism isn't necessary, that a woman's position is natural, that "my wife or employee isn't interested in this feminism stuff." But the second stage is with us, which is that it used to be necessary, but it isn't anymore. There is always an article somewhere saying that the movement is over, when in fact it has just begun.
We have moved forward in this first stage in huge leaps of consciousness. We've made great incursions into the professions and in giving greater value to the all-female professions, but we are moving a barrier.
The barrier I experienced as a student was that "We don't hire women," or that if you married you lost pretty much all of your civil rights: your name, your credit rating, your legal domicile. That's gone. But it's still true that when you have been in a job for 10 or 15 years, you hit the glass ceiling, or you hit the sticky floor of the pink-colored ghetto, which is still where most women are. Yes, you can make an equal marriage now and not lose your civil rights. But when the first child is born, it becomes unequal again because, to put it mildly, men in general - though there are exceptions - do not care for infants and little children as much as women do. Until there is equality in the home, there won't be equality outside the home.
As long as women have two jobs, one inside the home and one outside, there can't be equality outside. The struggles are in a different place but still very much present. If any young woman is still asking herself if she can combine a career and family, that's a symbol of the kind of change we need, because probably many fewer young men are worrying to the same degree about how they can combine career and family. We don't have the structural changes in the system that we need so that all parents of small children can have a shorter work day, a shorter work week and can adjust their schedules to parenthood. We're the only industrialized democracy in the world without some national system of childcare, without some national system of health care, which women need 30 percent more than men do because of childbearing.
Some of the symbols and signals of the 21st century are with us in the stories of our individual lives. I get to hear a lot of them, because I'm instantly recognizable as a symbol of this change. Young women of my generation said, "I'm not going to be anything like my mother," which was a way of denying that we could and might well have the same fate, because if we could blame her we didn't have to admit that it could happen to us unless we changed the structure. But instead, young women now sometimes say to me that they hope they can have as interesting a life as their mothers. They come up to me after talks or in book lines and say, "This is my mom. She's my best friend. I so admire what she's done. I see how hard her life has been."
There are ways in which our expectations and, to some extent, our realities have changed. V-Day is a great symbol of 21st century feminism. It has turned into an event on 600 campuses every year, in more than 20 countries. It's contributed $6.5 million to efforts against violence against women, starting out the way all social justice movements start out: by telling the truth about our own lives.
Eve Ensler interviewed women about their own bodies; inviting them to talk about their own sexual and physical selves yielded these immensely diverse, entertaining, tragic, amazing monologues that include everything from early date experiences in Queens to rape camps in Bosnia. Because she recorded women's real words and told the truth and reenacted them and did it as if everyone mattered, it has continued and grown from a theater the size of a teacup in downtown Manhattan to Madison Square Garden. Initially, The New York Times would not publish the word "vagina" and Ensler could not publicize the play; even book publishers wouldn't put the word on the cover - which is why I ended up writing the introduction. It's the kind of event where you're not quite the same kind of person when you leave as when you arrived. That's symbolic to me both of where we are at the beginning of 21st century feminism and how far we have to go. We are still standing on the bank of the river, rescuing people who are drowning. We have not gone to the head of the river to keep them from falling in. That is the 21st century task.
We know what the causes of violence are and how deeply they are rooted in gender roles. The normalization of object-subject, conquered-conqueror, winner-loser, by gender roles convince the male half of the population - especially men of an upper class or so-called superior racial groups - that their sense of identity and masculinity depend on control and even dominance and violence. That is the root cause. But I don't see it much commented on that serial killers and senseless killers - people who go into some public space and kill people they don't know, not for robbery or any reason except to kill people - are all male, white and not poor. They have been raised to believe that they have a right to be in control. When that is flouted with other elements, other things come into play and murderers are produced.
As we read our newspapers, we discover who the hijackers and suicide bombers were on September 11 and indeed who the leadership of al Qaeda was: They are not poor. They are all male. They are from the groups in their own countries who have been led to expect a certain amount of control. It's quite amazing that they are not women, not poor, not the most despised racial groups in their own settings. Yet, do we see this remarked upon? No. I'm not trying to do a single-factor analysis of violence; there are many different factors. But this is the least remarked upon, and yet it is the most obvious.
The television commentators, after a senseless killing, ask what's wrong with our children. It is not our children. It is a very particular subset of our children. How can we humanize the gender roles so that young men are raised to understand that they have all human qualities? We've had the courage to raise our daughters more like our sons, but fewer of us have had the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters. Those so-called feminine qualities are only the qualities you need to raise children: empathy, patience, flexibility, compassion. They're present in every man just as they are in every woman.
If we were to examine the implications of these clear things that we need to do in the future, it would mean that we are overthrowing or humanizing five to eight thousand years of patriarchy, racism and nationalism. We weren't always organized by nationalism, and we don't have to be. We need to consider monotheism, too, because when God looks like the ruling class, we're all in trouble. It's a big job. But if we look back and see how far we've come, just in our lifetimes, and project that onto the future, we can understand just how much further we can see ourselves go. We lose heart sometimes, but if you ever get discouraged and feel disempowered - and certainly the minority forces that are still in control in much of our lives try to make us feel disempowered - just remember that even the toughest-minded physicist now admits that the flap of a butterfly's wing here can change the weather hundreds of miles away.
Answers to Written Questions from the Floor:
Q: Is there a country that you feel is more receptive than the United States to your concerns, or one that we can look to as a model?
A: There's no un-patriarchy, but there are certainly many countries that are far ahead of us, such as the Scandinavian countries and Iceland. Perhaps unexpected places, too, like Eritrea, because women were fully part of their 30-year revolution. They were 30 percent of the fighting forces. They were the generals. Female equality was a very conscious part of their revolution. We have a lot to learn from almost every other country about sex education, contraception, child care, worker safety. We can learn tactically. The women's movement in this country has learned a great deal from women's groups in India and Africa that do economic development: micro-lendings, job-creating small groups. Women are a third world wherever we are. We're low on technology, low on finance, and labor-intensive.
Q: Is there one issue, maybe something that the Bush administration has done recently, that we could focus on to best further the cause of equality?
A: We can't choose for each other. If your issue is child care in your life right now, that's the most important issue. If you're not being treated properly at your job, that's the most important issue. That's the strength of the movement. Then we can focus on things that are obvious, like voting. Talking about learning from other countries: In India, 70 percent of women vote. Here, we make it physically more difficult to vote than in any democracy in the world. We ought to concentrate on fixing that. Since we are such a powerful country, there is an opportunity. The women's movement here has been trying to focus attention for 23 years on the status of women in Afghanistan, but it's now in the public eye. There is an opportunity in understanding that gender roles are key. The more polarized your gender roles are, the more violent the society is, because they're conning men into being violent. Support for women there, who have had their previous, more equal status taken away from them, would be key - all the more so because the Bush administration is using them as a photo opportunity. Sima Samar, the minister of women in Afghanistan, has no phone, no office and has not received one penny of support from this country or this administration. Yet, she was placed as window dressing - she had no choice - in the audience of the State of the Union address that Bush gave.
Q: What books are you currently reading and who are the thinkers that you look to for inspiration?
A: I recommend The Demon Lover: The Roots of Terrorism, by Robin Morgan. It was written in the 1980s and remained very popular in other countries, but was only recently reissued here. It's a deep look at the "why" of terrorism. I also recommend Exterminate All the Brutes, by Sven Lindqvist (a line from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness), a slender, beautifully written journey through the Middle East and Africa, explaining the roots of racism. It makes utterly clear that racism was a total, artificial invention to justify takeover of land.
Q: How has marriage changed you?
A: The great testimony to our partnership, as we refer to it, is that it hasn't changed it. We started out calling it a partnership because marriage still isn't open to everyone. Two men and two women still can't marry. "Partners" seemed to be a more democratic word. I don't think it's changed us, but it's enlarged the people we already were, because we are able to see through each other's lives more things than we saw before.
Q: Whom do you look to as leaders in the feminist movement?
A: There are so many. Alice Walker: Anybody who reads anything she's written emerges a better person than they were when they started and with more sense of possibilities and more determination to become the change we wish to see in the world. I also admire Wilma Mankiller, for a number of years the chief of the Cherokee Nation. I always tell her we should enroll as Cherokees and make her president. Given the fact that the entertainment industry is the source of our political leadership, either because they start there or they pass through there, and that focus groups suggest that the single most trusted person is Oprah, why not run Oprah for president? She'll have a lot of experienced people around her. She has a good, populous, democratic, compassionate instinct that says there doesn't just need to be a winner and a loser, but that there's some other way to solve this problem.
Q: When do you think we'll have the first female president?
A: I don't know the time frame, but we're desperate right now. We got female leadership earlier in other places, as with Indira Gandhi in India and Thatcher in England, because they have a stronger caste or class system than we do. They didn't represent the majority of women or the majority of people; they represented certain caste or class interests. If Indira Gandhi had had a brother, it would have been all over, and he would have been prime minister. But because the family was so powerful, it was okay, even though she was a woman. So, I think it takes us longer, but when we finally get somebody, it's more likely to be somebody who actually represents the majority interests of women, and therefore the majority of the country. Thatcher destroyed the women's movement. The first thing she did was to cut off the milk supply for children. It's not helpful to have somebody who looks like you and behaves like them. It hasn't helped African Americans to have Justice Thomas on the Supreme Court.
Q: How do you understand all the recent flag waving?
A: There are a lot of different motivations for the flag waving, so I'm not sure we can judge that easily. A young, gay man I know in New York - very smart, liberal, compassionate - said he thought this had allowed us to take the flag back. Flag waving does worry me, because it is jingoistic, nationalistic. It doesn't make any sense, since many of the terrorists are in Florida or New Jersey. It's about being against violence as a means of solving anything, it seems to me. That's the point, not drawing a line in the sand as to where your nation is and becoming even more violent.
Q: Do you feel that religion in general is a hindrance to the feminist movement?
A: Yes. I should qualify that, because I'm using religion in an institutional sense. I'm not talking about spirituality, which is a sense of the spiritual value of each person and every living thing, and is often the motivation for many people who go to church or synagogue. To the extent that it's been almost exclusively monotheistic and invested god in one kind of person and has declared other groups, races and females as lesser - as in the Mormon religion - it's part of the problem, not the solution.
One edifying thing that happened to me was a trip on the Nile, from the most African, Nubian, oldest parts of the Nile to Cairo. You could see in the oldest structures and sculptures that god was everything: men, women, flowers and animals. Then you traveled another few miles, it was a thousand years later, and god had been withdrawn from a lot of nature. Suddenly, the goddess was there and she had a son and no daughter. Then you got on the boat and you're a few thousand years later, and the son is getting bigger and becoming a consort. There's hardly any nature. By the time you get to mosques and the most recent structures, there's no representation of women and nature allowed. So I think religion has mainly been a political process of withdrawing god from women and nature in order to justify the conquering of women and nature.
Q: What has been the greatest accomplishment of your career?
A: I don't know. All kinds of frivolous things cross my mind when you say that, like getting out of Toledo. I guess it's all the ways in which we posit what could be and move toward it, even though it never has been. Much as I love and value Ms. magazine and all the groups I'm involved with, it's the daily acts that make the difference to me. I remember sitting in a room with Carol Gilligan, whom I did not then know, and with two Gandhian people who were lecturing, and the Gandhian man was describing a situation. Gandhi's son was anemic and needed a source of protein, and the doctor recommended beef broth. Of course, that's against his vegetarianism from which sprang his philosophy of nonviolence. So the Gandhian was saying to the group, Here's a dilemma: Does he aid his son or listen to his own morals? There was this woman I didn't know on the other side of the room. Finally, we both said, "Get another doctor. There isn't just one source of protein. There is not just one side to any question." In the face of the way things are, the bipartheid divisions, there's this voice that says, "But…." That's the proudest part.
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