(00:00:00) If all goes well, each of us will leave this room with one new subversive idea (00:00:08) one new one new organizing tactic (00:00:13) one new feeling of support of one just new idea A New Hope new dream. Now, this is especially important considering that this is the first anniversary of chart. Wed Co which I understand is going to have a new name but this is an extremely important organization and truly a national example. There are some organizations helping to get women equity and opportunity inside the existing job structure and there are others that are addressing child care and needs that are attendant upon those kinds of jobs and in recent years there have been a few that have And addressing the need for an economic base really jobs that from which women cannot be fired companies that we ourselves own and can transform therefore and try new kinds of economic structures, but I don't know of any other group that supplies all of these services and ones in one spot and also regards each Woman as a whole woman and understands the kinds of personal support that that woman needs as well. It's truly One Stop shopping here at chart. Would Co you really get all the kinds of support that you need that makes it unique and that makes it truly a national example, but I think we need to understand that we in this room and chart. Would Co especially as an organization are part of a international Trend as well Economic Development, or as I sometimes think of it economic empowerment because economic development is Taken for hydroelectric dams sometimes (00:02:03) and we're talking about (00:02:04) empowering women is very much the the the trend and the need internationally and indeed there are many ways in which women in third world countries are in advance of us in this country in the techniques of economic empowerment, but perhaps it would help us to consider that in a sense women are a third world wherever we are we're low on Capital low on technology and labor intensive and that defines a third world group even within a developed economy. We cannot always follow the same kinds of patterns that have been put down for other groups. We are not the classical capitalist the Horatio Alger the one person going off into the blue on his own. We must have different kinds of organizations. Techniques different kinds of communal accumulation of capital of communal ownership of business and in so doing we Forge other economic models that will be of enormous value to this country. I've been asked to say a few words about his magazine and I will though if you want to know more we can talk during the discussion period but it's interesting to me that in a way Miz has followed the same sorts of steps that women individually and collectively have done all of us at Miz individually were trying to make it through somebody else's structure. We were all editors or production people or circulation workers at someone else's magazine and found that that was simply impossible as so many women do to make it up through somebody else's structure It's Not Unusual that we have discovered this we are indeed as women a kind of psychic immigrant group and Grunts have very rarely been able to make it through someone else's structure. They have usually had to go out and start their own businesses. So that was what we did at Miz 16 years ago, but we were still following the form of economy that had been laid down for us, which was one that was largely supported by advertising in this country. Publications are more advertising-supported than in any other English speaking country for instance in Australia and in New Zealand and in many countries of Europe people pay three hundred percent more for their Publications than we do here. And because we pay so little it means we are far more subject to advertising influence than the publication's of other countries and that was especially a problem form is because and I will say this to you briefly but there's a an article that I have written with great relish. The first issue of the new no advertising Ms. Called Sex Lies and advertising. It's it's a special problem because women's magazines are not just a little bit controlled by advertising but I would say 80 or 90% controlled by advertising other Publications have a wall between advertising and editorial that sometimes crumbles women's magazines never built the wall. If you don't have recipes you do not get food ads. If you don't write nicely about Revlon Estee Lauder and so on you don't get their ads if you have controversy in the magazine, you don't get ads even if it's unrelated to the product being advertised people have been concerned about cigarette ads and their influence on editorial and we all should be concerned, but that's nothing compared to the influence of the You know female products of the food the makeup the clothing and so on you don't see critical coverage of the contents of Cosmetics, which after all are put on our skin and absorbed into our bloodstream through this at do you see critical coverage of this? No, do you see critical coverage of clothing on which we spend far more money than we do on Automotive on automobiles. Do we see critical coverage of who is using faulty Fabrics or which closed last longer or who has sweatshops and so on no and the reason you don't see this is because of the the because of the way the business runs. It just has always been this way. So because Ms. Didn't do recipes and we didn't do all those columns with little diagrams of where to put your ruzhin where to put your eyeshadow (00:06:56) and we (00:06:57) didn't credit the fragrance and the makeup (00:06:59) On (00:07:00) our cover the people who were photographed for our cover accrediting the fragrance on the cover always struck me as the (00:07:07) height of surrealism. We never had enough (00:07:14) ads. We got a lot of ads that had never advertised for women before and therefore had a higher standard didn't expect to control editorial in the same way. For instance. General Motors doesn't tell Newsweek that they have to write nicely about General Motors cars in order to get their ads if they did they would probably get indicted but this is the way the women's magazine world runs. So we never got quite enough ads to to break even I won't put you through The Saga of Misses being sold to a company run by two nice Australian feminist. I think you all know that and they also couldn't get enough ads so they were forced to sell and so but the end of this story is that yes indeed. We are going to try a new economic pattern in much this the way that that chart wet Co and women's economic empowerment groups around the country are trying new patterns, and that is an entirely Readers supported Magazine with no advertising and perhaps some of you got the letter that Robin Morgan who is the full-time editor and iom the part-time editor sent out and I wrote a little tribute. Remember Robin Morgan's goodbye to all that. You know that she wrote about the non feminist left. Well, we did a little I did a little tribute to that by saying, you know, goodbye to cigarette ads where poetry should be goodbye to Slick paper and Slick thinking goodbye to short articles whether you know, we are now at last going to be the magazine. They always warned you (00:08:48) about (00:08:52) So we are more than ever. I think your Magazine and there are going to be a number of features which we would like your particular input on. We're especially wanting to report on the new economic models that you are discovering and pursuing in organizations. Like these we are going to have a section on ecofeminism a section on spirituality. There will be well-known authors discovering new ones Alice Walker who was an unknown author before we published her for 14 years and is now a world author is has discovered a new Zimbabwe and novelist who were excerpting in the first issue and there are many more Such features and possibilities that really belong to you. Now, you have a little form on some forms on each of your table tables, but I should tell you that is not $40 for a subscription. It's $30 because we believe we're going to have enough subscribers so that we can cut the price. So it's 30 dollars for for a year and fifty dollars for two years. And if you've already paid $40 not to worry, we're totally honest we will just extend your subscription (00:10:10) that much further (00:10:15) but I think that that the the magazine is not only gone through a little ontogeny of what of what all of us in this room have gone through in terms of being in the structure outside of the structure, but still following the kind of predominant way of doing business then finding another way of business doing business, but also that we are in the same place in another way. And that is that we are beginning to address internal barriers as well as external ones. We have perhaps done that too little because we were so all of us so busy surviving that we directed our attention to the external barriers to equality without perhaps paying enough attention to our internal life and our internal feelings about ourselves. In fact, that's why I've been at home writing a book called the bedside book of self-esteem and so was suggested that I talk to you about that because I know that self-esteem is a main concern and a way in which chart would Co serves the whole woman not just her professional needs. I think that we all see around us every day. Women who are wonderful extraordinary women who do not believe that they are wonderful extraordinary women. They seem to have almost everything except belief in themselves. And we must remember that this is not not a personal fault. If we assume that the words she has a self-esteem problem is the fault of the individual woman, then we will only increase that problem. We must remember that 10,000 years of patriarchy and racism have gone into seeing to it that we have this problem that the adversary is within our own heads and hearts any system of Oppression worth its name is self-perpetuating and it becomes that way by being internalized in the hearts and Minds of those who are supposed to be somehow not quite equal or indeed not equal at all. If we are going to be paid like half people we have to believe we are have people If we are going to enter into a marriage structure, which was and sometimes still is legally designed for a person and a half knot for two whole people. That was the original Blackstone Ian principal, you know, the English common law that the married couple was one person and that person was the man then we have to believe that we are not quite whole people if we are going to give birth to others at the expense of giving birth to ourselves. Then we have to believe that we are not quite whole people. And this is true, even at the upper levels where mythology would tell us. It is not I have found a study for instance that points out what I as a college graduate of the 50s always knew but was alarmed to see still evident in this study which was of women in their 30s now, which is that self-esteem among women diminishes goes down with every additional year of Education. Because we learn that other people the higher up we get educationally the more likely we are to read about people who don't look like us who are making history making the world decisions making the world move and if we are women of color we are twice removed from those decision makers and the higher up we go in our Educational Systems the less likely we are to see people who look like us who are the decision makers on the campus or who are the experts in the classroom. So it makes sense that self-esteem is diminished even while we are getting excellent grades. We learn very well. What the others do But we come to believe that we cannot do it ourselves. And in addition to these to the economic to the marital to the educational reasons why we lack self-esteem many of us have very particular special and tragic reasons why we do one in three or four of us in this room has suffered sexual abuse from sexual abuse in childhood from someone with access to our own households. We have been used as objects before we were people we have not been allowed to fully believe in ourselves and our own humanity and our own importance for purposes other than being used as an object by others. And then there are all the problems of age and the belief that we diminish and importance or diminish in attractiveness with age one of the reasons. Of course, why women are the one group that grows more radical with age is precisely that is we begin to defy those boundaries of Age The Impossible standards of beauty which no one can meet which even the most beautiful women feel inferior in comparison to or worried about imagined flaws. They're all kinds of wonderful studies that I'm sure you've seen showing that women consider themselves to be unattractive or overweight even when they are not and men consider themselves to be attractive (00:16:39) and So as in all things we just we need to (00:16:57) we each need to travel in the direction. We have not been in order to complete the full circle of ourselves and we each need to become more realistic in our view of ourselves. So clearly there are many many reasons why women's self-esteem problem is carefully inculcated and we should not repeat not ever blame ourselves nor ever believe that it can be completely solved one person at a time. What we need is enough self-esteem to Rebel to be successful to Rebel even more and thus to change these structures so that they they themselves can never make another female human being feel insecure or like a half person again, there are many ways that we are attempting to do this. And I have just listed a few in the hope that one of them might be a right way or a spark of an idea for those of us who are struggling with self-esteem problems, as we all are I think that many of us especially those of us who suffered abuse or neglect or some or any kind of restriction in our childhood are discovering that we can go back to the broken place and re-parent ourselves. We can go back to the child. We used to be Literally by revisiting that child by thinking through meditation or whatever we whatever process we wish to call it of a time anytime that we remember when that child was in need going back to that place as an adult and sitting down next to the child and waiting for the child to talk to us. And beginning to have a dialogue with that child and beginning to become the parent the loving parent that that child needed at a certain point and did not have it is possible everything. I have seen with the most extreme child victims of violence tells me that it is possible. The unconscious is timeless one can enter the Timeless unconscious and go back to that place because only we know that child and only know we know what she or he needed and did not have We can also find our best selves by sitting in the same quiet way and doing perhaps for those of us who do meditation thinking of that kind of induction process and then imagining ourselves in a place that we find beautiful and comfortable and imagining that our future self is in front of us on a path leading us. We will imagine our best selves and to imagine that we are being led by that future self is very helpful in allowing us to know in what direction we could go and how big our dreams could really be. In fact, if it is too painful to go back to your child self to your inner child of the past as you now are because the pain of that child is just too great and you fear being caught up in it again, try sending your future self back to that child and then you will send back your greatest strengths. There's also role reversal which we do often. But which I think we need to do at one at much greater levels. I hope that we now do this so that when we hear a denigrating comment about female human beings we think to ourselves before we accept it so readily before we accept the sexist joke or the limitation or whatever it is how we ourselves would feel if the same comment were being made on the basis of race or religion. Would we accept it? So easily probably not. What does it say about our self esteem that we will accept comments about females that we would not accept about other groups. We think of it when we wander to ourselves if a woman a black woman or a woman of color experiencing a particular set of circumstances in the job in the workplace what she experienced those circumstances if she were a white male, we really need this reality check because right now we don't have enough self-esteem to stand up for ourselves without role reversal without transposing without looking for another category. I think of this often when I'm talking with women in the workplace who are very fearful and worried about asking for a new job that they are well qualified for or a advancement because they imagine the ideal person who should have that job or who should have that advancement and whenever I say to them well think of the think of Harry who A job (00:22:35) now. It's a whole different standard. Oh well in that (00:22:39) case. We are still in the place where we are comparing ourselves to the ideal because Society has compared us to the ideal in Beauty in job skills in whatever it maybe as a way of taking away our self-esteem. We must always compare ourselves to the real not to the ideal, but I think we need to do it at this role reversal at deeper levels as well. The first dance with parents. We are sometimes quite angry at our mothers and ways that we are not angry with our fathers and I think it would be quite interesting to try the exercise of saying well, what if my Mother had behaved like my father. And my father had behaved like my mother, how would I feel would I be as angry? What does this say about our different expectations Letty cotton pogrebin whose work, you know, I think as a child education expert is now writing A Treatise called the Teflon father and I think this role reversal tactic helps us when we consider our own guilt about not being the perfect mother when really we need only be the good enough mother. How would we why or how would we feel if we were to reverse the genders of parents and then judge the nurturing and the performance that is that is already there. We can try to see ourselves from the outside as if we were literally our own best friends suppose. We were are our closest woman friend and had the same talents and hopes and dreams and abilities and saw our woman friend doing what we are doing with those talents and dreams and abilities. What would we say to her and then we need to say that to ourselves. We need to question whether we are loving those who do not equally love us back. There is a brilliant book with a brilliant title. I think called men who hate women and the women who love them. When I heard that title, I understood completely why Reagan and Bush won. If we will live with men who through no fault of theirs, but have been raised to believe that we are somehow not quite as important and therefore it's fitting that they are loved more than they love back then how much more likely it is that we will vote for people who do not support us. Do we say what we want personally? I think that perhaps the most revolutionary sign that many of us could put up on our bulletin boards is but what do I want? It's a question. We forget to ask I forgot to ask it and we do it we repeat the same patterns over again even within our new lives. I mean, I certainly did this. I mean I have allowed external circumstances movement groups. I love you know to make my decisions for me instead of a because I'm so used to responding instead of two reacting rather than acting and I also forget to ask this revolutionary question, but what do I want? And then there is the question of the test of are we giving our votes to ourselves and are we giving our money to ourselves? No group, no no immigrant group and to be go back to our psychic immigrant model. No immigrant group has ever succeeded in this country without mobilizing its own vote women of all Races and groups uniquely have not we have waited for political parties and for the media to organize our vote for us. We have not learned how to deliver it block by block neighborhood by neighborhood regardless of party label if they if the politician doesn't support fundamentals of equality like getting us in the Constitution and letting us control our own physical selves. We will continue to regard these things as quote special issues. Believe me a special issue is only any issue not one's own and unless we vote for ourselves. There is no reason Why they should vote for US unless we give money to ourselves and a lot of us give money without pausing to wonder whether we are giving 50% of it to women. Perhaps Minnesota the birthplace of the five percent club for corporate giving could be the birthplace of the 50% club for all charitable giving and within that 50% to make sure that it is properly representative of women of color women of different ethnicities women of varying needs. We actually on the basis of reparation should ask for much more than 50% you understand (00:28:17) but but (00:28:22) perhaps perhaps it's a leftover at niceness, you know, we're still only asking we're still being overly fair, but the but frequently we are not even looking at our own giving to see whether we have the self-respect the self-esteem to give at least 50% of every charitable and political dollar to female human beings women like us I think there are ways that we can think about this for instance a woman sat me down and said look. Take a piece of paper and write down. Everything that you wish you had got from your family of birth that your family couldn't do for you write it all down. Now she said take another piece of paper and think what you would like from a husband or lover or partner write that down. And when I was all finished, she said now those two pieces of paper tell you what you should do for yourself. We have so rarely put our centers in ourselves. Our centers have such a magnetic subversive way of creeping into other people. We now have the twelve-step movement, which has finally I believe understood that a codependent is nothing but a well socialized woman and who is actually defining dysfunctional families as any family in which both partners are not feminist, which is the definition of a (00:30:09) dysfunctional family, but we frequently are still (00:30:20) not keeping this Center in ourselves. We can be no use to anyone unless we have that within ourselves and in-laws and we will only be controlling towards other people and classically codependent in the sense that we Our them to remain dependent on us if we don't if we continue to keep to let others dictate totally our happiness. It is impossible for others to dictate our happiness. If we believe that we will only dictate to others. Finally I think to to consider what great what possibilities we have in front of us were we really to believe in ourselves really to believe in ourselves and all of our human powers all of the powers given to each unique microcosm of the universe which each of us is you know, in a real sense. Each of us is a microcosm of the universe with all the same forces that exist in the universe. I was greatly helped by reading oddly enough and by interviewing and studying people who represent in fact a great tragedy and that is the most extreme cases of sexual abuse in childhood long-term cases of incredible torture and pain that have really been so So painful and over such a long term that the children involved have found refuge in creating people to whom this isn't happening and so have become what we now term multiple personalities, of course for a long time. These people were not believed. It was thought that they were just making up these other personalities just as for a long time. It was thought that sexual abuse was not real but had even been invited Freudian style or fantasized wished for imagined by the child. Now that we at least trust the stories of children somewhat more and the stories of adults who perhaps 20 or 40 or 50 years later only then remember the covered up abuse of their childhood. We are also beginning to find the the vast numbers. Of people who suffer from multiple personality disorder, perhaps covered up by alcoholism by just a memory lapse by, you know, many other things but who actually have become skilled at a form of self-hypnosis that allowed them to survive to live as children to literally imagine someone else that they were someone else to whom this wasn't happening and then through that disassociation invent different personalities to deal with different parts of their lives as I'm sure you know, people can have two or five or 10 or 12 or even more fully developed personalities with complete life histories with different names who change genders who change races who may speak. Languages, of course the host personality knows all of the all of this but but divides it off into different sections, but what has what I've learned from suffering that I think we could could learn how to use positively is just how powerful our minds can be over our bodies and just how many capabilities there really are within us for instance in different personalities. The same person may have different responses to medication different allergies different eyeglass prescriptions not because they think they have different eyeglass prescriptions, but because the curvature of the cornea actually measurably physically changes and this can happen in a matter of seconds as the person changes from one personality to the next when genders change frequently the Right brain left brain pattern changes in a matter of seconds so much for the biological determinants, which would have us believe that this is all established by hormones. So on. Sometimes marks a physical abuse return when the person returns to the Persona of the child who has experienced the abuse and welts and bruises reappear on the body. I mean you can you know the mark of a hand a hand slap will reappear quite quickly and then disappear much more gradually after the person has changed to another personality. I mean think of the powers that we have out of as are microcosms of the universe think of the powers that we could have out of belief out of believing in those Powers. All we need to do to have those Powers is to believe in them and to believe in ourselves. We haven't begun to even touch the Majority of the capacity of the human brain. We haven't even explored the mind-body connection, perhaps the 70s and the 80s were the era of outer space, but the 90s will be the era of Inner Space and if women and men but just to get to a state of wholeness especially women believed in ourselves and believed in each other there would be nothing nothing. Nothing we couldn't do. (00:36:51) Thank you. (00:37:05) The question is about real nice lers chalice in the blade. And is that a vision that is useful and could that occur in our lifetime? I thought I find it very useful because she talks about the partnership culture of the future and she's gone One Step Beyond the I think necessary reclaiming of pre patriarchal past that used to be dismissed as prehistory. I always thought it was sort of suspicious, you know prehistory. What does that mean? It actually meant free patriarchy and she you know, she has gone forward to to to posit a partnership future and I find it very useful as a paradigm. I think in a way it doesn't matter whether the I don't think we should argue about too much let the archaeologists and anthropologists argue about the past but as it as a as a paradigm for the future, I find it useful. Yes, she saying that I talked about about being physically sexually abused but all of us whether or not that's happened have been discounted throughout our lives and what are some of the ways that we can improve our self-esteem. I tried to just race through a few kind of devices for that. But but we can do it in every way. I mean sometimes when I when I am in a an audience, you know in a Auditorium. I just ask everybody to stand up. I mean in a mixed male female audience to just to stand up and then to look at how they are standing, you know, and usually the women are standing with their feet together taking up as little space as possible the men have their feet apart, you know taking up somewhat more space then I just asked them to trade, you know that the men stand like (00:38:55) this and that and the women stand like this and see how (00:38:58) what difference that makes. All right, but that's an extremely small thing, but it's Body sense that's very important. We can have our own names we can stop. I mean, you know, why? Why should we still have the naming system leftover from when women were owned in systems of marriage? Why do our children not have both names (00:39:20) instead of it certainly would be a lot more efficient. I mean, I'm (00:39:24) sure there are people right now in this town running around saying this is my child by my first marriage and this is my (00:39:29) child by my second, (00:39:31) you know kids had both last names then we would know who their parents were and then the kids could choose when they got to be grown-ups or take a third name, you know, we should all be able to name ourselves. We could stop introducing sentences by saying well, I'm not sure but this may be silly but I'm not something you (00:39:49) know and just say what we think. In fact a psychiatrist woman's like I just said to me she said that her (00:39:57) book about women was going to be called. It's only me. (00:40:02) It's probably only me but I think (00:40:08) I got another commitment. It seems to me one answer to the abortion Wars is the French morning-after pill. Is there some means by which women could get it in this country through a nonprofit corporation. Yes, there are there is a non-profit Court. There are several efforts. There's one in California. There's where there are a variety of efforts to do this. I think it is it is possible and a delegation has gone or is going to France to speak to its makers to try to get them to lift their ban on its export to other countries. I don't think however that it's a solution to the abortion Wars because what the abortion Wars are about is not abortion. Per se which which was you know until 1840 quite approved of by the Catholic Church, which was you know, I mean, it's not it's not about abortion per se it's about who decides so, you know, who does the government decide or does the individual woman decide and even with the morning-after pill we would have the question of who decides that you know, they can use the morning after pill. So I think we still have a we will always have a fundamental necessity for Reproductive Freedom as a basic human rights like freedom of speech or freedom of assembly so that we say that meant that it is up to the individual to decide that the government cannot either decide you should or should not have children and I think we're seeing an expansion of this right into what I would call bodily integrity and the District of Columbia Court just had a case of this sort so that the what were Right, we're establishing that affects men and women is that the power of the government stops at the individual skin? Well what the question is since most folks in this room are white middle-class. What should the enfranchise be doing for the disenfranchised? I would say. The most important thing is to ask, you know, I mean, I mean to ask what the individual woman wants and do that. It's like, you know cooperating politically is like giving a gift a gift is not a gift if the person who gives it says what will be done with it a gift is only a gift if the person who receives it gets to decide what to do with it. And and I would only add to that that until we Well, that social justice is the best best investment will ever make I mean this money is not going to be worth so much next year. Anyway, we're going to know so that you know, if we view it selfishly not that we're doing for somebody but selfishly that social justice is quite simply the best investment we can possibly make (00:43:11) and look at our checkbook (00:43:13) a some of you have heard my checkbook story. But anyway to look at your checkbook and see the values it reflects when you pay your bills every month and see if it really if that's the way you really feel and if it isn't fix it, you know and make sure that we give at least 50% of our dollars to women's groups and then within that the the racial and the class and the you know, the other priorities and the needs are really truly reflected. I'm always worried after we have a great meeting like this and there's all this energy in the room. What's going to happen tomorrow? Therefore I make this organizers deal, which is that if each of you promises me that in the 24 hours beginning at 9 a.m. Tomorrow morning. You will do at least one outrageous thing in the cause of simple Justice. I don't care what it is. Can be saying you know comparing salaries telling each other what you make where you work (00:44:16) can be challenging the corporate giving where you work (00:44:19) and saying is it really going 50 percent to two women can be deciding to run for political office can be as simple as saying pick it up yourself. (00:44:34) It's up to you you only you know what this outrageous things should be but if you do an (00:44:41) outrageous thing in that 24 hours beginning at 9:00 tomorrow morning, I promise you that I will do an outrageous thing too, (00:44:51) and I guarantee you (00:44:52) to absolutely sure fire results. The first one is that by the weekend the world will be better. And the second is you will have such a good time (00:45:04) that you will never again get up in the morning saying will I do an (00:45:07) outrageous thing? But only which outrageous thing while I (00:45:11) do today?