Tulsa Junior College, Gloria Steinem Speech Video, c.1989

A video of Gloria Steinem speaking to an audience over feminism, patriarchy, and contemporary issues at then "Tulsa Junior College", circa 1989. This lecture took place during the Issues and Ideas Lecture Series.

Before introducing this evening’s speaker, I'm excited to inform you about the first lecture of the 1990-91 series. On Oct. 9th, Jean-Michel Cousteau, son of ocean explorer and environmentalist, Jacque Cousteau, and the founding director of the Cousteau society, will be here to share with us his insights on protecting and preserving the environment. Ticket information will become available in late September (applause). The name Gloria Steinem is synonymous with equality, liberation, and feminism. Over the past three decades, she has excelled in journalistic achievements as author, editor, and magazine cofounder. Ms. Steinem has achieved paramount credibility in the arena of politics as a campaigner, motivator, and organizer. She has earned the respect of world leaders as well as members of the general public. Her insights, dreams, and theories instigate progress and initiate the betterment of societal norms and political concepts. Ms. Steinem, through her drive, charisma, and fortitude, continues to be one of the most influential women in America. Our session tonight will consist of a one-hour lecture followed by a twenty-minute question and answer series discussing politics and feminism in the 1990s. Please help me welcome Ms. Gloria Steinem. (applause) Thanks to your generosity and waiting a month while I had the flu and your further generation-- generosity and waiting a little longer because Northwest Airlines had the flu. I've been through alot more airports than I thought today and you've been through alot, too. But somehow that makes our time together even more precious. So, here's my plan, if all goes well, each of us, me included, will leave this evening with one new idea, one new fact, one new feeling of support, one new way of making the world in general, and our specific lives a little better. Now, in order to make that happen, I need your help. During what is usually called the question and answer period, I hope that you will help me to overcome this structure we've got going here; it’s a hierarchical structure, you’re looking at each other's backs, I'm standing up here, hierarchy comes from patriarchy which doesn't work anywhere anymore. So, I hope that you will feel free not just to ask questions but to give us answers -- we could all use some -- to make any announcements of upcoming trouble making meetings you think this group should know about, to stand up and say where the bodies are buried locally. If you'd rather not say it, pass me a note. I'll read anything, I’m leaving very early in the morning, and generally to turn this into an organizing meeting. And I really do mean we can talk about anything. I'm sure that there are issues on your campuses and in your communities that need your attention. We can talk about anything from the Trump divorce to the Guam abortion bill. I'll be glad to tell you what's going on backstage at Ms. Magazine, if you’re interested. Maybe will find a new candidate for political office right here tonight and pledge our support to that person. I mean, you know, the last two presidents have certainly removed all sense of humility we might otherwise have felt. And that's especially true here because I know that you ‘ve got in this audience a lot of very courageous and effective organizers, people from the Campaign for Choice are here. (applause) And the best role of an outside agitator, or whatever it is I am, is to be an excuse for all of you to get together and discovery you didn't need an outside agitator in the first place. You have all the, you know, humor and outrageous ideas and smarts and energy that you need right here. And I'm sure too, I bet there are people here who are in their fifth stage of burnout already, um, but I hope very much that there might also be a few people who are coming to hear a feminist speaker for the very first time, out of curiosity, you know, it walks, it talks, it’s a feminist. Of course, the problem with the word feminist is normally that people don't always know what it means and if they just look in the dictionary and discover that it’s “somebody, male or female, who believes in the full social, economic, political, so on, equality of men and women,” then that's fine, and I say, “yes, indeed, they’re a feminist,” but of course, the other problem with the word is that people do know what it means and if you just say that you want equal pay for yourself that's a small comparatively easy reform, but if you say you're a feminist and you want equal distribution of power and money and so on for all women in this country that is indeed a revolution. But wherever we come from tonight, however different our backgrounds, we meet together at a very specific time in history. We are entering the third decade of the second wave of feminism in this country. It's important to remember that even in this very young country there was a first wave, only by looking at that first wave can we really pace ourselves now because, in fact, that first wave, which really was the suffragist and the abolitionist movement, as movements against sex and race always go together and must go together. That first wave took almost a hundred and fifty years to gain for men of color and women of all races a legal identity as human beings - no small victory, and we should remember how recently we were chattel, we were owned, and we were objects. We were not legally or socially human beings. Now in the second wave we are striving for legal and social equality. All the great social justice movements: the feminist movement, the Hispanic movement, the Native American movement, the gay movement - all these movements are struggling for an equality. Clearly, by historical precedent, movements last something like a century and were only about twenty years into this one so I don’t know how to break it to you but we have quite a long way to go. However, we have come a long distance and I think that because change progresses not so much in a straight line as in a spiral, we sometimes feel as if we were going in a circle and not progressing at all. Only by looking back do we discover that we've been going through similar circumstances on ever slightly changing ground and so when we looked behind us, we see what felt like a circle was in fact a spiral of progress and we have indeed come a very long distance. I would say in this way thus far we have completed the consciousness-raising stage, that is, there is now a majority support in this nation among women and men of all racial and religious groups, there is a majority support for the basic ideas of equality and that was not true fifteen or twenty years ago. Even equal pay for equal work, known now as the part I agree with, was not supported by the majority in this nation. It was thought very recently - until very recently - that women didn't “need” the money, that we worked for pen money and so on, yet now we have support not just for that issue but for the supposedly more controversial ones of women in high political office, shared parenthood, reproductive freedom, the right to safe and legal abortion, all those issues have a huge majority support but we are really just at the beginning of the second stage of any revolution and that is changing institutions to make new dreams concrete and possible in the lives of most people. We have support for equal pay we've moved forward toward it with breathtaking speed of tokenism so now we're up to sixty-some cents on the dollar instead of fifty-some cents on the dollar but clearly, we are not yet earning dollar for dollar. We have the revolutionary idea that children have two parents, I don’t know why it took so long to figure that out, but it's still extremely difficult for fathers who wish to be equal parents to have parental leave and be home when new babies arrive, to have a shared-- to have shared parenthood through a shorter workweek or shorter workdays so both parents of young children can be equally responsible for them. Wherever we look there is the idea of equality - the new hope, the new dream - that is almost universal in this country, but the structures of our lives have barely begun to budge. Now the other problem is that because we have a majority change in consciousness, we also have a backlash because now, people who lived in the previous more hierarchical, patriarchal way depending on structures of gender, of race and class, that they feel their way of life is endangered and no matter how much we say “but this is choice we are talking about, we just don't want to have laws that enforce those hierarchies,” not all of them are comforted by this for being authoritarian is being hierarchical by nature, they feel that their job is not legitimate, feel that their job is not just to decide for themselves but to decide for others as well, that a family that is not hierarchical and patriarchal is not really a family in their eyes and so on. So, they are in full backlash and they have- since the anti-equality groups register and vote far more than the rest of us, for instance the right to lifers claim at least that they register and vote ninety percent of their membership and since only half of the everyone votes their twenty five to thirty percent of the vote has been winning especially in the presidential races so we now have-- we have had the most anti equality administrations this nation has ever seen. I mean, we've had presidents before that didn't care about equality or who thought equality had gone far enough but Reagan and Bush have tried to turn the clock back and that is a first. So here we are, in interesting times. I think it is a Yiddish curse, “may you live in interesting times.” Because our-- our dreams and our hopes are greatly raised, our realities, the structures of our lives have only just begun to budge and on top of that we have a backlash, but I think they our real progress is measured not so much in numbers, in public opinion polls - although that is very important. When I used to lecture with Florence Kennedy – do you know who Florence Kennedy is? -- she's the leader of the black movement, the women’s movement, wonderful woman, and what we used to lecture together and um and she would-- she taught me not to use so many statistics. She took me aside afterwards and she said, “Listen you know, if you're lying in the ditch with a truck on your ankle you don't go send someone to the library to find out how much the truck weighs, you just get it off.” So, I think some of the distance we have come in this spiral of progress can be seen simply by the fact that we have names for things, I mean- there are phrases now like “battered women,” “displaced homemakers,” “sexual harassment.” That was just called “life” fifteen or twenty years ago, there weren’t words for these things. (applause) We have women's history, black history, Hispanic history, all those courses that might better be called remedial history. We have enormous change on the campus and especially on campuses like yours. So many women have come back for an education at a time later than the conventional age that the average age of the female undergraduate in this nation is something like twenty-seven years old and it has transformed and improved colleges and made it possible for men to come back later in life as well. We are beginning to make our schools what they always should have been, not an eighteen to twenty-two-year-old age ghetto with everybody knowing nothing together, but a resource throughout life and I can’t-- and because I've been lecturing on campuses both before this happened and after I can't tell you how much more exciting and alive campuses are now. The minute I was in the classroom and watched an eighteen-year-old man who was a pre-medical student arguing about health care delivery system with a thirty-five-year-old pregnant woman I knew that the education was definitely getting better. Now, the other impact that this has had especially among women but among men as well on campus is that it has helped to politicize and radicalized younger women because, you know, womens’ pattern of activism is the reverse of men’s, um, in general, obviously there are exceptions but men tend to get more conservative as they grow older except for all the men who were here this evening, obviously, and women tend to get more radical as they are grow older, which makes sense when you think about because an eighteen year old young woman has more power in the sense that women have power in patriarchies, that is, because they're young sexual child-bearers, energetic workers, and so on. She has more power in eighteen or twenty then she probably will at fifty but a man eighteen has less power than he probably will at fifty so it makes sense that he would grow more conservative and she would grow more radical. So, what that means is that older women come back to campuses and become friends with younger women and though the younger women may have been saying, “I'm not going to be anything like my mother,” and generally not listening, you know, to what their mothers have to say, when they have several close friends who are their mother's age who are saying these things, it really makes a profound difference. Well, wherever you look, I think whether it's in the language or on the campus or in the workplace you see a profound change which, I guess, I would summarize as saying that together we have redefined politics. Think up to about twenty years ago politics was defined in a way designed to keep us out of it. It was supposed to be only what was going on in the state capital or in Washington but in fact politics is any power relationship that we experience in our daily lives, so anytime one group of people or person is habitually dominant over another group or another person, not because of experience and not because of talent but just because of how they got born, whether that is race or sex or class, that is politics and we know that now. The scales have fallen from our eyes and we know that and when we walk into a department store and we see that women are selling men's underwear and man are selling kitchen ranges, we understand that that’s politics, it’s commission. When we look at a family and we see that both husband and wife work outside the home and yet the wife is still more responsible for the children and for getting dinner and taking care of the house than the husband is, so in fact she has two jobs and he has one, that's politics. When we see that a woman and children have the husband's name, a leftover from our status of chattel of the first wave of feminism, that’s politics. And it makes no sense. I mean, it’s not even in the age of computers, it’s not even helpful. And besides that, there are always people saying, “you know this is my child by my second marriage, and this is my child of my first marriage,” whereas as if children had the names of both parents we would know who their parents were and then when a child gets to be sixteen or eighteen and does his or her first adult thing like getting a social security card or getting a driver's license, they can choose either name or they can choose an entirely different name. We ought all have the power to name ourselves. So wherever we look we have redefined politics and begun to see it as the death of the power relationships in our daily lives and that is absolutely crucial because in the past what has happened to women has been called culture and what has happened to men has been called politics. There's a great black South African feminist name Bernadette Mosala who says that when men are oppressed it's a tragedy, when women are oppressed it’s tradition. If we accept it as tradition and culture it's a way of saying it cannot change, it goes so deep that it cannot be changed and may even be confused with human nature itself so perceiving these inequities as political and changeable is a huge leap forward. But now, in the nineties, I think that we need to begin not only to connect the political to the personal, not only to see in the microcosm the politics of our lives, but also to connect the other way and connect the personal to the political and I think finally in the nineties we may begin to understand in a very profound sense, it is simply not possible to have democracy without feminism. If the family is a microcosm of the state -- are they still telling you this in political science courses right? They always told us that the family is a microcosm of the state and afterwards I thought, so how come they didn’t realize that if you don't have a democratic family then you can’t have a democratic state? There was this false definition of public and private. So if we are all trained in our families to somehow profoundly believe that our mothers were not quite as important as our fathers, that it made sense that our brothers got a little bit more professional encouragement and money than we do, but somehow it was assumed that we were going to have two jobs if we indeed chose to work outside the home as well as in the home and men would only have one. These are the deepest kinds of training for birth-based inequities -- for profoundly believing that some people are not quite worth as much as other people and it is that groove that is worn into our emotions and our brain cells in families, into which we later fit differences of race and accept those as well and differences of class and accept those as well. It is that prototype that leads to -- that trains us in a very intimate way for the inequities to come. At a minimum it makes calluses in our emotions so that we no longer feel the inequities when we see them in the outside world. So what is necessary for us to finally have a democracy? Well I think first we need to realize that we haven't had it thus far and we need to be a little less unskeptical of the founding fathers who did indeed manage to leave out every black American male and female and every female American of every race. And it wasn't as in the case of slavery something that was regretted by members of the constitutional congress, it was almost never spoken of at all except to make clear that it was just and right that women should be excluded. Thomas Jefferson himself said that, “even in a perfect democracy women would be excluded to keep from interfering with public morals.” What they were stating was a democracy for everyone then-perceived as being fully human and a democracy for themselves and it was a great and contagious idea and ever since then we've been adding more and more groups to try to create a true democracy. But for women, especially of all races and classes, to become fully equal and for men to become full human beings, for men also have been deprived of their full human nature, I think we need some very basic kinds of changes which are already being worked upon, but might bear stating for their big broad trends. Now, I've numbered them five in an entirely arbitrary way because whenever I was sitting in a lecture audience, our classroom, and somebody said to me “there are five major points here,” I always said “oh thank God, I can write down five,” but it is arbitrary you can divide than any other way you like. First of all since women's bodies have been possessed legally as the most basic means of production, the means of reproduction, which is the origin of our problems, is the origin of patriarchy, the first and most fundamental necessity of democracy is reproductive freedom as a basic human rights like freedom of speech or freedom of assembly and it is -- it's a way of saying for both men and women and of course reproductive freedom as an issue impacts men as well, especially men of discriminated-against races or classes who have sometimes been subject to forced sterilization in this nation and others but it is a way of saying the power of the state stops at our skin. Now up to now we’ve had an entirely different trend of legal principles, a man's house was his castle but a woman's body was not her own, and there is still in the backlash that looks to the past this effort going on to essentially nationalize women's wombs by allowing the state to have a direct relationship to the fertilized egg. Um, so we see in the backlash what the past has been and even if we have not experienced ourselves the past but what we are declaring very simply is reproductive freedom as a basic human right. Now from that flows many many things -- for women from that flows the fact that we cannot control our lives from the skin out unless we can control our bodies from the skin in but it also has a profound impact on for instance the racial caste system in this and other nations because the reason why we see that race and sex cast go together is that in order to maintain racial “purity” of the so-called superior race you have to restrict the freedom of women from that “superior” group you have to make sure that they don't have children with a “wrong” men. Now in this country we should recognize this very easily because of the parallels of racism and sexism before all of our eyes but especially evident in the past in the South because, for instance, the most punished crime historically in this nation was not murder or arson or theft, it was miscegenation, that is, the taking over of the means of production of the white man, the body of the white woman, by a man of color, so to speak, even out of free will even in love in marriage freely chosen by both people it was still against the law and was the most consistently punished crime, historically. Of course miscegenation was a misnomer because it was quite ok for the white man to take over the body of a white woman-- of a woman of color even by force and cause her to bear his children. She was his possession anyway and those children were just more people marked on their skins by color as cheap labor. But the reverse was the most punished and most heinous crime so clearly when we declare the simple right to reproductive freedom we are taking away the weakening, the pillars of racial caste systems as well. We are weakening the state's ability to decide how many workers it needs, and how many soldiers, and what race and what class they should be. It goes very deep but in this sense it goes even deeper than that because we are also re defining what sexuality is. Patriarchal authoritarian cultures and religions have always tried to tell us that sexuality was only moral and ok if it took place inside the patriarchal family and was directed toward having children, but least that's what they told women, men always have a bit of a double standard. That has been the general teaching and that is a lie, I mean that is the politicization of sexuality, it’s not true at all. I remembered in a lecture like this just trying to explain what I meant by the politicization of sexuality and kind of being rescued by an older woman, you know- grey hair, little curls. I mean it really is a subversive outfit and she said, “well my dear,” she said, “human beings have always been the only animals who can experience sexual pleasure or death at times when they can't conceive, all other animals seem to have periods of heat, of estrus in which they are most likely to conceive and in which the sexual activity is more intense. So for human beings our sexuality is part of our uniqueness like your cerebral cortex or ability to reason and remember, part of what makes us human is the fact that sexuality for us is not just the way that we have children, if we choose to have children, it is also a way that we reach out to each other and we express love and closeness and caring, it’s a way we communicate with each other,” so she said to say that you have-- that sexuality is only approved of if it's inside marriage and directed having children, is like saying you have freedom of speech but only to say one thing. So in stating the right to our own physical selves and saying the power of the state stops with our skin and saying that women's wombs do not belong to the state we are also redefining sexuality and it's why we always see and must see that the women's movement and the gay movement have common cause and are very often opposed by the same people and working against the same adversaries. So just from one-- our first need in this struggle for democracy of reproductive freedom or perhaps men would feel more comfortable speaking of it as bodily integrity because that is and issue that you know it includes the phrase--a legal phrase that includes man as well but no one no one- if someone needs a kidney transplant and you happen to have the only match to save some illustrious person know the state can’t reach inside your body, can’t force you to have a blood transfusion or to have any kind of medical treatment- we are trying to establish this principle of reproductive freedom and bodily integrity. The second-grade principle I think we are chipping away at is for the democratization of work. Now the first task there is to redefine work or at least to end semantic slavery that comes with a phrase “women who don't work” That means homemakers, homemakers work harder than any other class of workers in the United States and even the Department of Labor-- homemakers and feminists always say women who work at home are women who don't work and we should just eliminate that phrase from our language. Women who work at home work longer hours for less pay indeed legally speaking in most states there is not even a guarantee of pay, its room and board, and “what’d you do with the fifty dollars I gave you yesterday?” They have more incidents of tension related diseases than all those much-wanted white male high level executives, more problems of drug addiction especially when including prescription drugs, more violence- the most dangerous place for an American woman is not in the street it’s in her own home. She is most likely to be beaten up and/or killed by a male member of her own household. More likelihood of being replaced by younger workers. So in industrial societies with homemakers whether it is here or in Japan or in Europe, feminist groups, women and men, are trying to give a social and economic value to the work that women have done at home. Now of course the best way men can do that is by doing it too, but we are trying to to also give it an economic value by making pension plans available, by establishing a principle of equal partnership in marriage with the equalize amendment will eventually go a long way towards establishing, ah, by making disability pay available and so on. But in third world and agricultural countries the same struggle is going on, there women often grow most or all of the food that their families eat and they grow it in the kitchen gardens and fields around the house and they are also called “women who don't work” and they are not included in the gross national product either and the people who work are the men who grow crops for cash for sale and for export. So together in every country in the world we are trying to end semantic slavery and recognize the huge amounts of work that have been simply rendered invisible in the past the second part of this struggle to democratize work is to pay up properly for the work that does-- is already perceived as having an economic value because right now in this country and every other patriarchal country and racist country work is valued more by the race and sex of the worker then it is by the importance of the job. In other words if you got a parking lot attendant who’s a man and he probably makes two or three times more money than the child care attendant who’s a woman. Our cars should not be more important than our children. This gender system is very much in place. I know that for this audience it's probably a whole too painful fact of life for many people in this audience that-- that nurses very often make less money than the garbage man that pick up the garbage at their houses. And there have been more picket lines of nurses in this wave of feminism than any other single occupational group and comparable worth has been pioneered by nurses because should should nurses not be compared to say, with a mostly male occupation, like pharmacist and move towards that in pay. In other words equal pay as a concept doesn't work within the pink collar ghetto because its equal to whom? To the waitresses they’re standing next to? I mean she's not getting paid either so comparable worth is the concept which is now in the lead of trying to democratize work by finding a mostly male profession that is indeed truly comparable and using that as a standard. There is a class part of this as well because clearly if one is a electronics repair person, a carpenter, all kinds of skills, even though the preparation for that maybe greater than the preparation for some white collar jobs the society looks on it in a different way. And this has been a problem for women because women are supposed to go into the white collar jobs and in fact women in white collar jobs make less money than women in blue collar jobs I mean in New York City you start in most basic blue collar jobs because they are unionized and so on, you start out at you know three or four hundred dollars a week you start out at a white collar job it's like a hundred and fifty something quite different so we are trying to rethink all of these categories that have made false hierarchies in work and trying to say “look let's pay for the job according to the skill it requires and its worth to the community and not according to the sex or race or class of the worker.” The third requisite I think for democracy is to make Democratic families in the home itself you know we used to say in the movement, you know ten years or something ago in the movement, people used to say that we women were becoming the men we wanted to marry and that has a certain truth to it because people used to tell us we should marry a doctor or whatever and now we're becoming whatever it was but in the nineties I think we're going-- what we really realize is that that's true but the problem is too few men are becoming the women they wanted to marry. And we've begun to look very seriously at the politics of the household all the more so because there's so many many many millions of women who were suffering from having two jobs, working outside the home and in and were saying wait a minute you know kids do have two parents um and other little revolutionary things like give them what eats could also cook. You know some of this requires that we change ourselves too because we also are accustomed to having control within the house because that was the only place we have control and we have to understand that if we don't make the bed it won’t get made the way we want but that's okay and to detach our identity from the house and to say well enough he leaves his shorts on the floor on Monday they're just gonna be there until he picks them up, you know? Because otherwise he won't-- we wouldn't pick them up either if somebody kept doing it for us but in order to do that we have to detach out identity from the house and shiny floors like on TV and candies and lamb chops and all of the, you know. But I think the most important thing here is that children really need to that fathers can be loving and nurturing just the way mothers can. Until men raise children as much as women do children will not know that and if they’re little girls they will grow up feeling that they can't be as assertive outside the home as their fathers and if they’re boys they will grow up feeling they can't be as loving and nurturing inside the home as their mothers, they will cut off parts of their humanity both little boys and girls and indeed, little girls who have experienced only the power of women-- or little boys and girls who experienced the power of women when they are very young when we are least-- when we can’t speak we’re overwhelmed by this power, will continue to associate female power with this early overwhelming visceral emotional impression and male power which they have seen only a little later in the outside world when they're older they can talk as being more rational, controllable, appropriate to the outside world. I think it's a lot of the reason why women are afraid of other women in power, the last time we saw a powerful woman was when we were small children and it still has that visceral emotional overwhelming feeling. Until all of us males and females are raised by men as well as women equally and we see women honored it in authority outside the home as much as men, we are all going to cut off part of ourselves as well as to give up our training and what a real democracy, a full whole people can be. The fourth requisite I think is a sort of democratization of culture, it's happening but it's happening very slowly and by culture I mean in the broadest sense of just the world we swim in every day. We turn on the television set and there are still four times more men on TV than women, this is not like life and the women are still on the average about twelve years younger than the men and we think we know why. We look at TV shows and we see that shows about black families, at least there are some now, which is a step forward up from invisibility, but the shows are all comedies and most of them are about the poor and at most middle class. The shows about white families are very often about the very rich and melodramas like Dallas and Dynasty and all that. What's the political message we’re getting here, you know, that it's a lot of laughs to live in the ghetto? That it's a lot of heartache to be rich? You know, you wouldn’t want to try it, I just feel sorry for these poor rich people. What are the politics there? We look at novels that we used to love and when we didn't see the politics in them and then we see what they’re really about sex or race and how much we absorbed that, it’s culture in every sense and including religion including religion very importantly. The whole effort to make spirituality a focus instead of organized religion or to bring spirituality into organized religion is a crucial part of all the great social justice movements because far too much of organized religion has been a way of making politics sacred. It's a way of putting your reward or your punishment in the afterlife and I don’t know how we ever-- it is an incredible con job when you stop to think about it, you know, that you can be made to go against your own self interest for reward after death. I mean even the-- even corporations only do it for life after retirement. And we’ve begun to ask some very basic questions like how come God is always white and male? I mean-- give me a break you know in the middle of the Middle East Jesus had long blond curls, I mean what's going on? How come women can't be priests, I mean you know. I was reading a book on church architecture-- well religious architecture and he pointed out something that I hadn't thought of but he said the religious structures whether they’re Hindu temples or a Catholic Church or whatever they are, are-- are in patriarchal cultures are built to resemble the body of a woman because the ceremony the central ceremony that takes place there is one of which in which usurp the power of giving birth and make it a patriarchal power. So the buildings are built like that, he pointed out, that there's almost always an outer entrance, an inner entrance, you know a labia majora, a vestibule-- the word is the same, labia minora, a vaginal aisle, two curved ovarian structures on either side and the altar which is the womb, where the miracle takes place that men give birth and sprinkle a little phony birth fluid over your head and give you another name and say basically, you know, if you're good you know you can be reborn through the Patriarchy. And I wonder if they don't want us at these altars, I mean they've been taking away our cartel now for five thousand years of giving birth. So we're beginning to clear away the politics and try to restore or perhaps to initiate the first time real spirituality that says there is an essence of God in each of us and I don't know if we have yet figured out how deep it goes that we have been brought up to believe that God looks like the ruling class that we are not godly whether it’s by race or religion or bisexuality or whatever it is. We’re just beginning to understand, I think, what has been repressed and punished in us. Well those are all certainly the requisites of reproductive freedom and bodily integrity of the democratization of work, the democratization of the family, the democratization of culture, and I think the last one is clearly participation because the truth is that no one can give you freedom, no one can liberate you, if we are given freedom we are too weak to use it. You only get strong enough to use it by taking it. We must participate at every level and take back the structures that have been taken away from us. We are not doing this, not even with the vote. If fifty percent of us are voting that shows you and that is the easiest part of the participation. I travel around looking at battered women's shelters and women centers and all kinds and there is an enormous culture of women's institutions now that are very very important and almost none of them asked people who come in their doors, “are you registered to vote?”, “where do you live?”, “let us help you register, let us help take care of your kids while you go to vote,” “let us tell you how the issues of this battered women's shelter and what you need here are related to what's going on in the state legislature,” “let us tell you about how much more education money you need in this state and that's related the bill--” In some ways women are an immigrant group, you know, we’re a psychic immigrant group and we must use the political structure of this country in the way that every immigrant group has done and pro-equality men must do this too otherwise we will continue to find ourselves in this agonizing and painful position of seeing the anti-equality minority win. You know, I saw a poll the other day that shows that between nine and twelve percent depending on the age thus the average of about ten percent of the entire population of the United States believes that abortion is a question that should not be decided by the government. Whatever it is we feel about it individually is up to us but it should not be decided by the government and yet we see what’s happening because we have not voted and frequently when we did vote we did not vote for ourselves. You know there was a book called “Men who hate women and the women who love them,” brilliant title. When I heard that title I though, “that's why Reagan and Bush won” If we are still living with men who through no fault of theirs, really, but, you know, feel maybe that we are not quite their equal, and we-- and that goes very deep, this kind of erosion of our confidence and self respect and so on. And we feel that our selves, how in that deepest sense how are we ever ever going to have the courage to vote for ourselves and to say that our issues are indeed human issues. Well as you can see we have a long way to go with all of these requisites for democracy yet to come. It's really-- what I always used to say that feminism was a revolution and not a reform and then I realized that I was really saying that to impress my old colleagues of the antiwar movement-- the men that took these words seriously, revolution, but actually, you know, what they meant was taking over the radio stations in the army stuff and like that I mean this is very small potatoes compared to what we’re talking about. So then I started to talk about an anthropological revolution to give an idea for its depth and then people thought-- it gave them a false ID of our patience, so now I find myself without a word but certainly is a transformation. But just to give you faith that, um, our ability to change and transform and take leaps light-years forward in our development as women and men [skip] how much more we can do, in fact you had Jaime Escalante here I understand and he certainly is somebody who understands that and gives that gift to his students. But out of a, uh, very very very tragic circumstance I’ve found something that inspires me and that is the tragic circumstance is, of course, that we know now how-- we're beginning to now how prevalent sexual abuse of children has been and continues to be, that as long as as the culture is a patriarchal culture tells tells men they have to be dominant to be sexual since that can't be done to other adults all the time, to adult women, then they will continue to be sexually turned on by children and by submissiveness and so on. I mean it is, you know, I don't have to tell you what proportions it’s in but when it is especially cruel and sadistic sometimes children survive by making up a person to whom this isn't happening so kind of self-hypnosis and developing other personalities. This is now called multiple personality disorder, at least now it's being recognized and it’s almost always as the function is the result of extreme sexual abuse and torture in childhood. Now in these-- out of this tragedy up comes the most incredible evidence of the strength of the mind because these women and they are about ninety percent women thought there are some little boys and grownup man who had experienced this too, that it comes- I mean, that the women in different personalities, they may have two, five, ten, and fifteen different people that they have made up and that they become with a host personality who doesn't know-- who experiences this usually just as memory loss, but in these different personalities of one individual, may have different response to medication, different allergies, a different digestive process, different blood pressure, different respiratory patterns, different eyeglass prescriptions, not because they think they have different eyeglass prescriptions but because their eye actually changes. Um, when going back to another personality, the child to experience the abuse, bruises may reappear. I mean, I saw one woman whose, you know, imprint of a hand came back right away and then, as it takes longer to disappear after her-- she goes back into another another persona. I mean, there’s just so-- so much power in our minds to transform ourselves, a power that has not even begun to be thought of, much less tapped. There's so much-- and incidentally, women have personalities who are male and males sometimes have personalities who are female with all the characteristics and it makes it very clear, you know, and when they switch two genders that sometimes the right brain - left brain pattern shifts which should eventually put and end to all this new form of biological determinism about right brains and left brains. If we all have within us all the human qualities and all the human capabilities and it’s so moving and exhilarating and unbelievable when you see new people being born just now from lifting of restrictions, imagine what we can do and what we could be if we were truly valued and truly encouraged, men and women, to be whole, complete, limitless selves. So no matter how long it takes and no matter how daunting these undone tasks may seem we look ahead and see what might be as we stand here on this edge of history with no maps to guide us and we realize that there can be no turning back. (applause) You have to sit down because I took up some of our organizing time because you’re such-- this is such a nice energy in this room, wish you could all stand up here and see-- hope you feel it. That I talked longer than I intended to so we have to organize fast. Um any organizing announcements? Any answers as well as questions? Or questions anything? If you want to stand up and say whatever it is-- there are no mics in the audience are there? Then I'll repeat it so everyone can hear. Yes? Oh, can you just wait one moment there’s a woman standing here and you can go second, okay. [audience chatter] Yes, thank you. In my speech tonight I mentioned all family structures, what about the democracy of the single parent? Yes thank you. We-- single parent families are complete families in fact are much more, you know, are functional and nurturing than many two parent families so they are indeed families should deserve all the support and the treatment of families. It makes it even more clear why we need, for instance, men working in early childhood education because a lot of kids from both single parent female-headed households and two parent households as they now are constituted are not going to see nurturing men except in a childcare center or except in the early childhood years it-- there are other things that we can do ourselves, you know, that we can find babysitters who-- young men as babysitters in order to give our children men and boys and girls the division of a nurturing male. We can try to draft chosen relatives, I think we're all making families and in in different ways really and there is a kind of wonderful chosen family um a way of taking friends who are not blood relatives and really transforming us into families but the point is to in childcare centers in the early years of school and in our families to do our best to allow our children to experience being taken care of by loving males as well and if if you're saying to yourself well how many men you know who know how to do this and so on and so on, that's all true but-- but we only learned from from taking care of children. They won’t learn until they do too and they will learn and they’ll enjoy it and not end up so separate from the children. I would like to offer my father's evidence because nobody could be less equipped to take care of children than my father, nobody! And so because my mother was an invalid and he had to look after me maybe this is why I have faith you know that that man can do this. Um, he didn't know what to do with me so he just included me in his life and I loved that, you know, I just did everything he did and helped him with his work and helped him, you know. You know, it’s -- it’s possible, it’s possible. Yes, the woman in the back. Who was standing up before? [audience chatter] Oh I'm sorry well why don’t we just keep moving back so you go first and then one. Can you figure it out between you who’s going to-- [audience chatter] [audience oohs] [audience applauds] You know, I think Phyllis Schlafly is actually an artificial creation of the fairness doctrine you know, because -- [laughter] Nobody knew her before the equal rights amendment but then they couldn't ever find a nationally known woman who was like, against the equal rights amendment, so there would be like, many many different people and then there would always be Phyllis Schlafly. Last I heard she was in favor of baby-selling so you should maybe show The Handmaid’s Tales just before the-- [laughter] Yes, in the back? [audience chatter] Yes as you probably know Ms. Magazine was sold almost three years ago to two terrific Australian feminists who have the money from their Australian publishing house so I haven’t been as much a part of that-- very little part of it for the last three years but they have the same problem we did which is why we in the and had to sell, uh, which was that because Ms. was the only women's magazine that didn't follow industry practice we couldn't get enough ads to break even, now let me explain what industry practice is. That if you don't have recipes and articles about it-- about entertaining you don't get food ads and if you don't have beauty copy-- see I don't think we know this exactly we think that somebody else must need those little diagrams of where to put your rouge, you know, somebody-- [laughter] if you don't have beauty copy you don't get beauty ads and if you don't have lots of flossy-glossy fashion spreads you don't get clothing ads and though we got a lot of people to advertise in a women's magazine who never had before, like uh, cars and financial services and so on, it was never enough to break even and we tried to get the best ads I'm sure that you know we get worn down because we were, you know, desperate and actually in the first issue of the ad-free Ms. we’re going to have a No Comment-- you remember how we used to have No Comment?-- we're going to have some of the worst ads that we got desperate and took for them. Um, anyway so when it was bought, when these two Australian women had to sell it because they didn't meet their projections for advertising either, the man who bought it, Dale Lang who also owns Working Woman and Working Mother was really buying more buying it to get readers for Working Woman and to have that may be sending out a newsletter to fulfill those subscriptions or something. But after he bought it he began to get all these letters, maybe some of you wrote some, I don’t know, saying “where is my magazine,” and then he realized that this really meant alot to people so so when we suggested to him that he might try something we always wanted to try but we've never had the money to get off the tiger and start over which is totally ad-free entirely reader supported Ms. he said he would be willing to try it so that's what we're doing and it will be --Robin Morgan is the full time editor you know her work from Sisterhood is Global, Sisterhood is Powerful, Demon Lover, poets-- poetry, she's wonderful and I ironically am, though I'm a consulting editor because I have my books to do, I’m not up there full time but I've already spent many times more time on the editorial content than I ever did in the past ‘cause in the past I was selling advertising, that's really what I was doing and begging for money to make up for the fact that we didn't quite break even, begging for foundation contribution. So we will be six times the year, a hundred pages minimum and forty dollars a year which hurts me cause I know women and many men don't have that much money but it’s the only way we can do it and I figure well six hundred pages in books would be more than forty dollars so it's not unfair and I-- thank goodness people are sending in contributions we just got a five thousand dollar check from one so that we can give a free subscriptions to battered women's shelters and hospitals and keep up our tradition of doing that. If you're already a subscriber however, to Ms. then you have fifteen dollar credit so it’s twenty five but anyway that's what's happening and it's so exciting I can't begin to tell you what it's like after seventeen fucking long years-- [laughter] if I never see another advertiser’s-- I mean, in the first issue I'm writing a piece called “Sex, Lies, and Advertising” and I'm just telling all-- I’ll tell you one story and then you’ll understand and this is like multiplied that-- by every day in seventeen years, we had a story, maybe some of you remember, about Soviet feminists who were publishing underground-- I mean, you know, this self published books and journals in the Soviet Union and there’s quite a big underground feminist movement there and they were very successful so they got-- they were given a choice of Siberia or Vienna and they chose Vienna so we as usual had no money, but we raised a little money and we sent Robin Morgan there too to interview these women and it was a wonderful cover story that had the first news of Glasnost, the first news of the anti Afghanistani peace movement inside the Soviet Union and a real bottom-up view of what Soviet women's lives were like. Won prizes, many prizes, lots of note. Ever-- great, we had the same time been trying to get Revlon to advertise for a long time and they would never come in because we didn't have the little diagrams of where your rouge went and our ad-sales women were like the unsung heroines as far as I’m concerned, had been plugging away for years trying to get Revlon, they were right on the verge of getting Revlon but they took one look at this cover and they said forget it because these Soviet feminists didn't have makeup on. I mean, it’s just terrible. But anyways there are going to be wonderful things in this issue that we're going to have in each issue, a well known writer, introducing a new writer. Alice Walker in this first issues is introducing a wonderful Zimbabwean novelist who’s just amazing and there's um a story about women in East Europe written by a very important Yugoslavian journalist who’s there interviewing women because the role of women in these democratic revolutions isn't-- doesn't get into the press. Really the major reason it was non violent was because there were so many women. And lots of funny funky things and more. Anyway so that’s what’s going on. Yeah? [audience chatter] Oh that’s wonderful. The Episcopalian Society of- anyway, the Episcopalian-- whatever it’s properly called-- Society of America is about to decide to use a new Eucharist text and they are here in- [audience chatter] Oh, in Fayetteville they're being tested and perhaps they are in Episcopalian churches here and and she’s saying they’re really wonderful, these new texts, these new inclusive texts are really wonderful and may well be-- hope will be voted to be accepted. Thank you. [audience member speaking] Oh, that’s wonderful. At the Unitarian Church here what’s it-- Hope Unitarian Church has a women's spirituality group that is studying women's spirituality, the history of the goddess and help women to find spirituality that's wonderful. Yes? Oh, okay. You, and then you. [audience chatter] The question is: what ideas do I have to help or to teach adolescent females who often come from single family homes and who still are subject to the Cinderella complex. [audience chatter] Can- can you hear? Okay, she's saying- no- well I wish you could hear can it’s exactly right, she’s saying that it’s exactly why these women have a Cinderella complex- young women- it’s because they- they so many of them have single moms who work two jobs basically, you know, who have very tough lives so they're looking for a rescue from from this um [audience speaker] And so, can I address the other end of this too? Which is how we raise the consciousness of young adolescent males to the nurturing possibilities and so on, well I think it means this is a big big subject and there is some wonderful things that have been written about it Growing Up Free is a book you might know that Letty Cottin Pogrebin wrote that has some-- is full of wonderful very practical suggestions but I think that primary among them is to- is to look at what- is to make sure that we are saying to these children in our lives to be said lessons in our lives that we love you as unique individuals and we we love you even if you do not -and in our case maybe even especially- anyway even if you don't play these gender role because the message that a lot of us got that went very deep was that somehow if we didn't play these gender roles we wouldn't be loved, we wouldn't be valued, and all the research that I know about shows that if you have-- it's like when Alice Miller says about violence, you know, you know Alice Miller’s work for your own good and so on if you have just one, at least one person in your life who validates you and recognizes your experience you have a chance of being ok no matter how terrible your childhood is but if you don't have that one person, you don’t. So we, you know, we can look at that for ourselves and we can also try to say we're a single mom with a- with a teenage daughter and a son. I mean the question is what our lives are compared to what you see that if the girls especially see a single mother's life as compared to the Hollywood ideal of what a married woman's life is like, let's look at the reality of a married woman's life who’s not in the paid labor force and who is dependent and who is, I mean, not to say that it's good or bad, just what is it really like as opposed to what the romance of it is like and- and to, to try to let both the male and female adolescents see something different, you know, to-- I wish we could have programs going around to high schools with all the women who are doing great in atypical nontraditional things as y’know talking to high school aged women so they can see that it's possible and and the same is true of men, men who are working with children or men who are artists, men who are, you know, somehow not playing the very stereotypical male role so that we can s-- because kids respond kids do what they see not what they’re told as we know and so they have to see that it is possible. Um, let’s see. [audience chatter] They’re supposed to, I see this is a case-- [audience chatter, laughter] I mean, the question is what do you do about a-- if you have an EEOC sued for discrimination and you can’t find--you go to Oklahoma City, you get permission to sue, from the EEOC which itself takes two years and they say now it's okay to sue but they don't do it for you and where do you get an attorney, and so on. [audience chatter] Once it’s filed, your employer already knows about it. Where do you get an attorney? Well it’s not easy, this Kafkaesque process, but there there are probably maybe easy-- all of you who live here and can address this-- there are probably law firms that have Pro Bono lawyers who are some of this there are probably women's- women's legal groups issued [audience chatter] We should advertise? I would also go to law schools and say “how would you like experience?” [laughter] “how would you like a little clinical experience and what it's like to s-” or you know. [audience chatter] She has advertised. [audience chatter] Is there anybody here who has ideas for this young woman? Yes? [audience reply, applause] You see? This is the joy of organizing. I mean, you actually see things happening. Yes, all the way in the back. [audience question] You mean, if both a brother and sister had-- oh well I don’t know that's pretty hard to answer generally but what does happen is that both boys and girls who grow up with only seeing a female in the early years and only seeing men in power then when-- if they follow their gender role then they follow those roles, I mean, men then perceive adulthood as the rejection of their mothers and the joining of a male society and- and it's very sad because it cuts off the mother son relationship and a daughter either accepts this traditional role or totally rejects it and frequently even, just as sadly, rejects her mother with it as if it were her mother's fault, that’s the, “I won’t be anything like my mother” phenomenon. [audience chatter] Now because, I mean, see what the Patriarchy is so good that, which is what we’re describing, is raising two different species in the same household, it’s quite amazing once you start to think about it, you know, that that that you can from the same house and the same genes, you know, raise one person who's speaking several pro and one person who’s, you know, speak- now the male-female cultures just get more and more polarized and of course the Freudian kind of thinking in which a young woman is adult if she accepts her father and a young man is adult if he rejects his mother. You know, you can’t- makes it even worse. Would any organizing announcements-- let’s give priority- yes? [audience chatter] That’s great, thank you. She’s- she’s saying it can you hear? She has a research document on abortion and will be standing out in the lobby if you want any research or you’re making speeches or you’re just arguing with somebody and you need whatever she’ll be glad to give you this- the literature. Um, any other organizing announcements? Yes- [audience chatter] That’s great, that’s wonderful. Any other announcements? [audience chatter, applause] I'm not going to embarrass you by asking how many people in this audience know who your state legislators are. You know, because, around the country you know people are infinitely more likely to know who your two senators are and who their congressmen is than to know who their states legislators are and that's exactly why our state legislatures have operated in a penalty free environment, you know, with a lot of special interests because-- pardon? [audience chatter, laughter] You’ve been paying them overtime? [Yeah] I’ll tell you one- you know, the Ms. foundation gave a grant to a group, can’t remember what state it was in, but they had an adopt a legislator program that was fabulous, they just took all the legislators who are problem and they parcel them out to different groups and those groups just did nothing but stay in touch with-- and totally supervise, they just focused on this one guy - really it was great because it was like all adoption it was much more personal and it really had a great impact. Any other announcements? [audience chatter] That’s great, did you hear her? She says she’s one of the few women here in nontraditional work and she's going to school now or has to learn TV repair, right? She's here to tell us that we can fix our televisions that- we shouldn’t have fear of technology. Okay, well we've done some organizing and I think just from his little bit you can see how much energy and talent and what there is going on here now, it is very important that we get together in rooms like this because otherwise we sit by ourselves and we read the newspaper and we think that Bush really represents the country and we don't yet have enough of our own institutions so we get to feeling isolated. We are not isolated, we are the majority, don't let them do this kind of mind game on us making us feel like were isolated and we just need more groups like this and permanent groups and ways to get in touch with each other and we are the majority and we can take over but since we haven't had that much organizing time I will end with my traditional organizers deal if that's ok with you. And here it is let's see - what day is it, ok - if in the twenty four hours that begins at nine o'clock tomorrow morning, each of you in this room, each of you, promises me that you will do at least one outrageous thing in the cause of simple justice-- [audience laughter, chatter] I'll try to do you justice, she said her outrageous thing is she's gonna stand up and say what she's thinking right now and what she’s thinking right now is that she’s mad at Hollywood because I was talking about television or what about just all the imagery of and the um situation comedies on television, for instance, and they just kind of lull you into La La Land and you don't think about the kind of issues that we're talking about tonight and what can we do about it. We can write to the sponsor, we can write to the station, I know this sounds corny but let me just tell you a story to cheer you up. Cagney & Lacey was a movie that had been written by two women and it took five years to get it on TV at all as a movie, we saw the script and we thought it was wonderful so we put it on the cover of the magazine as we said, you know, if you liked it, and we showed it to a lot of women police detectives first to see if it was okay, you know, I mean they liked it too, so you know we told our readers if you like this write to CBS maybe they will turn it from the movie into a series. It wasn't scheduled to be a series at all, so so many people wrote it became a series. The of course they put it opposite 9 to 5 which split the audience and they canceled it, if you remember, then all these readers wrote again to put it back and then they cancelled it again and it became a very important series, it's now all over Europe and in England. In England it has fan clubs, you know, like they think it’s like the Masterpiece Theater. They don't have you know this kind of-- it was the first show in which there wasn’t just one woman being a token or two women fighting with each other, there were two very different women working together as friends, so it is possible to- to have an impact and at a minimum we can turn it off and we can also-- ok I'll include that in the end of my deal anyway if each of you promises me that you will do this outrageous thing in the twenty-four beginning at nine o'clock tomorrow morning, I don't care what it is okay? It can be deciding to run for office yourself, can be getting ten people together and adopting a Senator-- State Senator, can be what-- can be saying “pick it up yourself” if you're a homemaker and a servant in your own household, very revolutionary act to say “pick it up yourself,” you can- if you’re working someplace you can tell each other your salaries. [audience laughter] I mean, isn't it amazing that employers can keep you from telling the one thing you actually know and if you compare with each other you might find out you know what’s going on. Might be saying for some- for a lot of in this room, might be saying “what what am I doing living in a white ghetto, I’m culturally deprived” this is true. I always thought that bussing would've gotten much farther in his country if we had to pay to have children bussed to make clear that it was a privilege not to grow up as crazy to think that the tiny white minority in this world is somehow not somehow, you know, the whole world. Umm what else well I mean this, of course, this thing you’re going to be doing tomorrow now this is in addition to ten percent of your salary to social justice. It's the best investment you'll ever make, the money’s not going to be work as much next year anyway. Voting, of course, absolutely. And writing five letters a week about television shows you hate or things that are good. We have to reward people, too. Anyway just writing five letters a week, not hard, you can do it while you're watching the late show and has a terrific impact. And one demonstration a month, just to keep your blood up. But if in addition to those sort of regular things that tomorrow you do this one outrageous thing, I promise you that I will do one outrageous thing too. And there will be two absolutely surefire results. The first one is that by Thursday the world will be better and the second one is, you’ll have such a good time that you will never again get up in the morning saying, “will I do an outrageous thing?” but just “which outrageous thing will I do?”