June 3, 2004
Women at the Center
How about creating a women's political party?
by Vicki Nobel
In response to e-news commentary, Women at Abu Ghraib
"the process of entering into the "legitimate"
mainstream requires that you compromise one
value after another in the hope of attaining a certain
goal"
Dear Stephanie,
With so much bad news, thank you for your calm lucid vision of effective feminist activism -- from the female-center, rather than trying to change the way the men do it. How profound, your statement that we haven't even been able to change marriage, let alone the military. It gave me pause.
The thing we have been doing somewhat successfully for thirty years is conceiving, birthing, and sustaining new forms and structures, new ways of being. This is creative and life-affirming, we can take it with us into the next lifetime (as merit and knowledge), and we won't have wasted ourselves on some futile attempt at "having influence" inside the men's culture. (Just think how the natural birthing movement was derailed by being brought into the hospital setting.) The men who want to be part of the world we are creating have to enter into it and accept the values inherent in the daily life lived here. Education happens through assimilation -- transformation happens when they enter in and open to a new reality created by and with women.
The women I see who actually "make it" inside male mainstream structures always seem to forget where they came from. They tend to forget their female origins and female center of being. This is the nature of "tokenism." Probably they get caught up in the glamour and celebrity of it all. I don't know how it could be otherwise, since the step-by-step process of entering into the "legitimate" mainstream requires that you compromise one value after another in the hope of attaining a certain goal or succeeding in a particular strategy. By the time you have compromised as much as you need to in order to actually be accepted on the inside and allowed to exercise a modicum of power and authority in that system, you have assimilated their culture and become like everybody else in there.
More than ever now we women need to hold our center. We need to gather together and collaborate on ways of being that express our values. I have thought recently that we need to have a "Women's Party" or a women's ticket, rather than putting so much energy into hoping that somehow Kerry will turn out to be tolerable enough to represent our meagre wishes in the election. Why not a women's ticket? Things are such a mess, and the corruption so blatant, right now it is possible more women would see the logic in this. If it were possible to galvanize women as a group, we would have a certain kind of clout which we otherwise always lack. We would be coming from a center. It would be like the original vision of the feminist movement which was one of "all women, everywhere, regardless of age, race, class, or sexual preference."
I have always taught mainly to groups of exclusively women, because I believe that at the root (at the center) we are joined in our common interests as a female expression of the planet. It's our "religion" this earth-based, nature-based way of being present and responding to what is needed from our instincts. And I've always noticed that when one man is in the room, the women change. It doesn't matter if he's a "good" man bringing something valuable to the discussion, or a troublemaker trying to destroy our work, it's the WOMEN who change and act different regardless -- and this is a problem. It seems we need time and space to deal with "women's business" as the Australian Aboriginal women have named their ritual, council, and ceremonial activities. We need to develop and come from our own collective agendas as women in order to effect the whole in a positive, transformative way.
The feminist movement -- especially radical feminism -- was a force to be reckoned with, and that's why the culture mounted such an unequivocal backlash to it. The backlash has been quite effective in many ways, keeping women's agendas watered down and selecting celebrity women to be tokens so that it appears that women have made gains, while the structural and legal ground we won disappears daily. Feminism has been absorbed and spit back out at us as "the right to choose," translated as the right to choose which channel to watch, the right to choose which anasthetic to use during your managed birth in the hospital, the right to wear high heels, show your belly button, have plastic surgery, and practice s&m if you wish. Now we can join the mainstream and exercise our right to choose from two candidates who have almost nothing to differentiate them from each other, in hopes that we can "get out the vote" and get rid of George Bush. (But we didn't elect George Bush in the first place, so what do we think? If we get enough votes, he's going to roll over and submit to the wishes of the people? I don't think so.)
Maybe a women's party would only attract a few of us, I don't really know. But my sense is that there are profound undercurrents right now, revolutionary and rebellious energies wanting to emerge into expression, some way to give voice to the outrage we feel about the war on women and children, extended to the war on organic foods, the war on social services and education and health care -- all the issues that touch our daily lives. An organized women's party could be an interesting, fresh, and vital alternative to business as usual. Maybe we could mount an actual "women's strike." Instead of supporting the structures that oppress us, we might finally have the gumption to withdraw our energies from them. We love novelty in America. Let's run two awesome women on a ticket for president. I know I'm naive and this is an unsophisticated political strategy, but you know what -- that is SO often how women do things. From the gut. From the heart. Spontaneously and without a detailed plan. We just do it.
So Stephanie, that's what I thought when I read your newsletter this week! Thanks for the inspiration and keep it coming.
Blessings to you and all of us, Vicki Noble