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May 18, 2007
Steinem's words of wisdom
Ms magazine creator brings her warmth and humor to Montreal.
KAREN GINSBERG
It was like an evening spent with an old friend – one you
do not get to see often, but with whom there is an instant reconnection.
This is the friend you met years ago, who helped shape your ideas
then and who, today, still challenges your thinking and dares you
to dream big. This was the Evening of Wisdom with Gloria Steinem
at Montreal's Shaare Zion Synagogue.
At 73, Steinem, creator and former editor of Ms magazine,
noted lecturer, activist and writer, remains North America's most
influential and revered feminist. Using her considerable skills
as a communicator, Steinem addressed a large audience that included
women and men who are her contemporaries in age and life stage,
as well as some younger women, and infused them with a renewed sense
of energy and purpose.
Her key messages – or "bits of wisdom," as she referred
to them – at the synagogue's annual Betty and Bernard Shapiro
Family Endowment lecture May 7 were inextricably linked. To her,
feminism is simply the belief that women are full human beings.
Feminism challenges the assumption that one group has to dominate
the other, she said. Most of the Western world functions on hierarchical
notions that exclude or denigrate women and create inequalities
that compromise how fully we develop human talent as a society,
she argued, and we all must be equally prepared to "unlearn"
those assumptions, as well as open ourselves to lessons from other
cultures. The deepest division in society is the false one of dividing
human nature into feminine and masculine, she continued, and we
need to reject these divisions and begin to find our whole human
selves. We need to remember that the means we choose dictates the
ends we will get: "If we want humor and music and sex and poetry
at the end of the revolution, we have to have humor and music and
sex and poetry along the way," she said.
Drawing on references and research from many intellectual disciplines
– anthropology, psychology, business and physics, among them
– there was no shortage of ideas to consider.
To impart the importance of "unlearning" old gender myths,
Steinem referred to follow-up studies of high school valedictorians.
These studies show that, while valedictorians of both sexes left
high school with the same level of intellectual self-esteem, in
the case of women, their self-esteem went down with each additional
year of higher education. Steinem contends it is because they were
learning "about their own absence or sometimes their denigration."
She also referred to studies done on the empathy shown by Good Samaritans
of both genders to make the point that we are all still held captive
by old thinking. According to Steinem, these studies indicate that
the instinct to "tend and befriend" in stressful situations
is as much a legitimate response to stress or danger as is "the
fight or flight" response, which she said is perceived as masculine
and, therefore, superior.
To illustrate the arbitrariness of generally believed gender differences,
she cited research showing that those individuals who develop multi-personality
disorder as a way of coping with severely cruel treatment over an
extended period of time invariably invent an opposite gender persona
as one of their personalities. With new abilities to map the brain,
researchers can now tell that, when these people are in their opposite
gender persona, "many of the things that we have come to believe
are [biological] gender differences change instanteously in the
same person. The truth is that we do not know what might be possible,
do not know what kind of abilities we are suppressing. Perhaps our
tragedy is that these victims of childhood abuse have become prophets
of human possibilities."
Steinem asked us to consider the wisdom of ancient or "original
cultures." Many of these cultures were models for the suffragette
movements because, in her view, they appear to have treated women
as balanced equals. Some of these cultures believed that there should
always be more adults than children because children learn best
by example and by the supportive actions of the whole community,
she said, referring to Alfie Kohn's book No Contest: The Case
Against Competition, which shows that excellence comes from
co-operation more than from competition, as a modern-day reminder
of wisdom of earlier cultures.
Steinem said that patriarchy sees the masculine role as bigger and
better than the feminine role. "If we accept this hierarchy
in our families – if we accept this inequity among the people
we love the most ... then how easy is it to accept inequities in
class and race among people we do not know?" In her view, this
explains why the civil rights movement, the women's movement and
the gay and lesbian movement are, in fact, all part of the same
movement.
For the men in the audience, Steinem had a special invitation. She
noted that there is now about an eight-year difference in life expectancy
between men and women in most Western cultures. "If you take
out of the statistics," she said, "all of the deaths of
men that could reasonably be ascribed to masculine characteristics
– deaths from violence, deaths from speeding, from tension-related
diseases – the differences in life expectancies between women
and men ... would reduce to less than a year. So feminism, I would
say to all you men, has at least three to four years of life to
offer – this is not a bad offer."
For the women, there was another kind of challenge. Over the years,
she said, women have had the courage to raise their daughters with
the equal opportunities of their sons, but now, "we need to
raise our sons more like our daughters."
As the evening drew to a close, the sense of regret at parting from
this dear old friend was palpable, but Steinem made the transition
an easy one. With the warmth and good humor that she had shown throughout,
she suggested that everyone in the audience take the time in the
following 24 hours to commit one completely outrageous act –
and she would do likewise. She promised us that the world would
be a better place for it.
Karen Ginsberg, an Ottawa-based consultant and freelance
writer, has been inspired by Gloria Steinem for decades. She is
an equal opportunity mother.
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