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DULCIE LAWRENCE: There was a birthday party at Loring Park in Minneapolis last week. It was a party attended mostly by women, and children, a scattering of men, Minneapolis Mayor Al Hofstede, and Gloria Steinem, feminist and an editor of MS Magazine.

The DFL Feminist Caucus sponsored the picnic in honor of its first anniversary having completed a year in which the Caucus has worked for the Equal Rights Amendment, child care, birth control, economic injustice, and other forms of inequality toward women both in society and within its own political party.

[MUSIC PLAYING] I'm glad I have the courage

The courage to be strong and free

I'm not afraid to be who I am, who I am

I'm not afraid to be me

I trust my own voice

I sing my own song

This is what it means to be free

Not one woman is alone, is alone

Know that I'm behind you.

We can share our courage

We can share our strength

Nothing needs to bind you

I'm glad I'm a woman

DULCIE LAWRENCE: Gloria Steinem has been active in the National Women's Political Caucus since its founding three years ago and was in the Twin Cities last year to lend support to the fledgling Minnesota Women's Caucus, a bipartisan women's political movement. But today, she chose to talk about children of both sexes and their right to be free, to do what they wanted to do.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

GLORIA STEINEM: I didn't plan though today to talk about the issues because I know that everyone here is very much involved in working every day on those issues. There are women here who are going back to jobs where they are paid unequally after this lunch hour. They don't need to hear about that.

There are lots of children here who should have the right to child care that every child should have. We don't need to hear about that. We know about women's political power because we have three Caucuses here, Republican, Democratic, and the National Women's Political Caucus. All very active. And the most powerful, of course, giving the picnic here today.

So I thought maybe instead I'd say a few words about children. And by that, I include all the children who are in us-- in each of us. There was a woman who came in the office not long ago.

And she had done a study, in which she had asked children if-- she had first done the study on race, and she was then doing it on sex she asked children of three and four years old what they wanted to be and various other questions to try to determine how young children are socialized into sex roles.

The prime question was, what did they want to be? She would ask the child, what would you like to be when you grow up? And the little boys would answer all professions, or firemen, or so on.

And then she would say to them, all right, if you were a little girl, what would you like to be? And they were very upset by that question. It was as if-- I mean, they didn't even want to consider that they might be little girls. And they wouldn't answer or they would be very uncomfortable. And one little boy ended by saying, well, I guess if I were a girl, then I would have to be nothing.

The little girls, on the other hand, when they were asked, what would you like to be when you grow up? They would say something very realistic and practical, a mother, a wife, a nurse, a secretary. Mostly pretty practical.

And then when asked, but if you were a little boy, what would you like to be? A kind of smile would spread over their faces and they would say what they really wanted. Well, I would really like to be an astronaut, or a pilot, or a senator.

And one little girl said, oh, then I could-- then I would have wings and I could fly over the city. Well, we all have wings and we can all fly over the city. And we're just barely beginning to discover that that's true. Someplace inside of us is a whole person trying to get out, inside men, as well as women, a whole person with all the human qualities that each of us has.

We've tried in the magazine by doing stories every month, called Stories For Free children, to create some body of literature that tells children and the children inside all of us that we can be everything we want to be.

I brought the Free to Be book here today because I thought I would read to you from it. And then I found out that every child in the audience knows it by heart. Maybe we could read along. But it is so important that we set our yearnings and our ambitions free. I think women realize it more, but men realize it as well.

Women realize that sometimes in odd ways. If there is a group of us together, for instance, in the old days at least, and sometimes still, we may feel odd that we are women by ourselves. We may miss the kind of validating magical presence of a man.

But what we are really missing is not a man, but the rest of ourselves. We are missing all the strength, and courage, and aggression, and ambition, and all of the qualities that are in us, but we have never been able to develop.

It's very exciting and very frightening at the same time to try to figure out who we really are, but it's happening. There's no turning back. And we are free at last, perhaps a little bit, to consider who we are as individuals without those crippling stereotypes of sex and race.

There's an idea that what the movement wants to produce is uniformity, is unisex, is sameness. That's the very opposite of the truth because we want to lift up the roles that have made us into uniform conforming people and find out who we really are as individuals.

The politics of it are very difficult, and they really are politics. We've redefined that word long ago, I think, women. So we understand now that politics is not only the political system as we conventionally think of it, but it's every power relationship in our daily lives.

Every time a group of people or an individual is habitually dominant over another group or individual not because of real capabilities, but only because of the way they look, of sex or race. That's politics.

So every time we go into one of these buildings and we see dozens of women typing and a few men in the boardroom, every time we go into the high schools and grade schools of this city and we see who the teachers are and we see who the principal is, every time we look at the fields of this state and others and we see who owns them and who works on them, we understand that that's politics.

And every time we look at a family, in which both the husband and the wife work outside the home, I thought it was great that for the picnic today it said for women who work at home or in the labor force, I suppose that people will endlessly say that the movement is against housewives, but it's clearly not true on the contrary.

But every time we look at that kind of family and we see how much more responsible the woman is for the housework and for the kids than the man is, we understand that that's politics. Every time somebody puts her husband through graduate school and the favor isn't returned, every time the death of a relationship--

[APPLAUSE]

--that's politics. Every time we get their credit rating, their name, their legal residence along with the marriage decree, that's very, very much politics. Every time he moves for a new job and we are expected to move automatically, but there's very little discussion of whether the reverse will ever happen, that's politics.

And it happens with kids. It happens from the moment that they are born. Who gets the bank accounts and the savings for college, and who gets the better place to study with a desk lamp and so on, who gets the encouragement to go on to school, mostly the little boys of every class and race are much more likely to be encouraged. And that's very, very political. And it goes very, very deep.

There was a group in California, which-- called the California Institute of Gender Identity. I mean, where else could a place with that name exist? That figured out that it was easier to surgically change the sex of a child wrongly-- of a male child wrongly brought up as a female than it was to change the conditioning of that child. That's how deep it goes. And that's how deep politics are in our hearts and our minds.

But justice is a very contagious idea. And we have finally begun to realize how crazy it is, this caste system of how we look, of sex and race. And there-- there's really a lot of-- there's so much joy, and so much growth, and so much discovery per square inch today thanks to the great movements against caste, thanks to the women's movement, the Black movement, the Spanish-speaking movement, that we are really beginning to find out at last who we are.

I find that some of us get a little battered these days. I know there are lots of women who have been-- who are very active in this audience. I'm sure you know what I mean. Because not only do you do you get battered by male opposition all the time, but we batter each other because we don't like ourselves, we don't respect ourselves.

Therefore, we don't respect each other enough. We don't honor each other in authority. Sometimes if we are really damaged, then we feel we cannot show our worth in a positive way and we show it in a destructive way.

There is an enormous human toll that we pay for our activities every day. I don't-- I think it's hard for people who have grown up both white and male to understand how tough it is to stand up against the caste systems, but it is happening. And men are doing it as well.

Maybe if you can say that there's more virtue where there's more choice, those men who could have male and white skinned privileges and choose not to are more virtuous than the rest of us. And we understand that they exist, a few.

Great big groups of people don't give up their power voluntarily, but we understand that there are some people who understand that it is to their advantage to. And they are our allies and our brothers, and we hold out our hands to them as well.

I'd really-- I have a feeling that there is so much courage per square inch sitting here today that I would like instead of just going on to have you shout out anything you feel like shouting out, questions, announcements, meetings.

Announce meetings, announce all the trouble-making things you can think of. I mean, there has-- there has to be. That's what we're here for, right? This is secretly an organizing meeting. Yes, we're celebrating a birthday, but really we're plotting revolution. So thank you very much. And please say anything you feel like.

AUDIENCE: I'd like to go first. OK.

DULCIE LAWRENCE: The first questioner asked Gloria Steinem to comment on the treatment of the woman alcoholic and drug addict.

GLORIA STEINEM: It's very, very tough. And thank you because that topic almost never comes up. And there is a public image of the addict and the alcoholic as being a male always. There are almost no facilities for women unless, of course, you're pregnant. I wonder if they think the fetus might be a male. I mean, I wonder. But it's terribly important.

And it is so much tougher for women to come back out of that life, especially as in many, if not most, cases with drug addicts have been prostitutes. The man-- the male addict who comes back out of it is kind of a hero. The woman addict who comes back is an ex prostitute. It is so much more difficult for a woman to get out of that life. And we owe her so much support.

Furthermore, you get in those programs, and you get trained to be hairdressers and cooks. At least the guys are getting to be-- trained to be mechanics, and so TV repair people. It pays a little more. So it's almost a whole new territory.

Further-- but I think now that there's some feminist input, now that we at least understand that we have to stop being man addicts before we can stop being addicted to anything else, that we have to have our own identity, we can't get it from any other person or any chemical substance, that there really is hope because there really is much more sense of self-identity.

DULCIE LAWRENCE: Steinem was asked if she thought the Women's Liberation Movement had had an adverse effect on the family unit?

GLORIA STEINEM: Well, I mean, the family unit is per se in its classical sense patriarchal. I mean, it is-- Engels said it best, I mean, it's the model for capitalism. It's the-- the husband is the capitalist, the wife is the means of production, he owns her, and the kids are the workers, and so on. I mean, obviously that kind of family, we must have an adverse effect on. But that kind of family also has a very adverse effect on love, compassion, equality, human relations. And--

[APPLAUSE]

I don't think-- I mean, some people say-- people blame the movement for everything, as you know. I mean, the meat boycott. The meat prices going up was supposed to be because women work too much outside the home and bought expensive cuts of meat. And that drove the price. I mean, they blame us for everything. If we're raped, we're blamed because we invited it. If the man is impotent, we're blamed for that too.

And we're often blamed for the divorce rate, for instance. I mean, it isn't the movement, it's marriage that is at fault for the divorce rate. And when there is a system that allows equality, I think we will see much, much better relationships.

DULCIE LAWRENCE: The next questioner asks Steinem to comment on the woman's right to control her own body, not just the issue of abortion, but the commitment of 20 years of her life to the well-being of a child.

GLORIA STEINEM: I'm a little punchy because I stayed up for two nights trying to write an article before I came here. And the article was for a United Nations book anthology on the population problem.

And what I was trying to say there and what becomes so clear also-- more and more clear from the more research you do is that control of women as the means of production is it that is the definition of patriarchy. It is the central issue for women.

And we really only became patriarchal as a culture when women-- when women became controlled in that way and men continue to need to restrict the movements of women in order to determine paternity, in order to decide whether the population should go up or down.

We don't-- the control is the issue they will-- in Japan, for instance, they had a population pressure problem so they made contraception and abortion very easily available. The population plummeted. They suddenly got very alarmed. Who's going to produce the Sony radios? And then-- and so they retracted a lot of those liberalized policies.

That is not acceptable. It is up to us as individual, women as well as men, with no forced sterilization, with no abortion, with total control of our own bodies to make that decision and not governments. It is literally the central issue for women and the definition of a patriarchy.

DULCIE LAWRENCE: Steinem was asked whether she thought single women were discriminated against.

GLORIA STEINEM: Yes. I mean, you are always regarded as somehow not quite a complete person because you don't have a man standing there. It doesn't matter who he is, but he's just supposed to be standing there in order to give you a total identity.

Sometimes it depends how the question is couched. Sometimes when you get it with pity, I quote, "Why aren't you married?" I quote all the statistics about how among educated women, by which they mean two years of college or more, the surveys show that your sex life declines with marriage. Sex is something you do before you get married. And that sort of cools the question, I mean.

But it is a problem. And I think we owe it to each other, not as women, not to discriminate among ourselves. It's really academic whether we are married or not married. And we need to eliminate those distinctions among us. And that's obviously the function of the term MS.

DULCIE LAWRENCE: Gloria Steinem closed with a poem by Elaine Laron.

GLORIA STEINEM: "The sun is filled with shining light. It blazes far and wide. The moon reflects the sunlight back, but has no light inside. I think I'd rather be the sun that shines so bold and bright than be the moon that only glows with someone else's light." Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

DULCIE LAWRENCE: Gloria Steinem, feminist and editor of Ms. magazine, as she spoke last Friday on the occasion of the first anniversary of the DFL Feminist Caucus.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

(SINGING) I'm glad I have the courage

The courage to be strong and free

DULCIE LAWRENCE: The song was written by Phyllis [? McDuggal ?] from a poem by Carol Winther, and it's from the film Continuous Woman produced by the Twin Cities Women's Film Collective. I'm Dulcie Lawrence.

[MUSIC PLAYING]