Feminist Family Values Forum



Miliani Trask, Gloria Steinem, Angela Davis, María Jiménez

Foundation for a Compassionate Society

Sally Jacques

Dancer, Choreographer Foundation for a Compassionate Society

Words cannot express the excitement, pride, joy and honor the organizing committee feels bringing together this amazing group of people, the speakers, and you, the audience, who are all part of an historical moment.

The speakers tonight are pioneers committed to the issues that move them. They do so in the face of a national backlash against women, and sometimes under threat to their personal safety. Their legacy and courage affect all of our lives. The purpose for our gathering is not scde/elop a homogenized feminist position, but rather to expand feminist discourse. Before it grows a leaf, a tree sends out an energy matrix. The inspiration, motivation, and greatest wish for this evening is to provide a forum for the kinds of issues and perspectives that are not represented fully in the media.

This forum, coupled with the resource each of us presents in our collective intelligence, passion and commitment to advance the struggle for peace and liberation for all peoples can then move forward the process of clarification of our vision.

This vision, by definition, must be multifaceted and informed by a of our various experiences. We are all trees developing our energy matrices, envisioning our lives as we wish them to be. As we put ourselves in the center of our powerful lives, we effect change all around us to the benefit of everyone and every living thing on the planet.

So thank you for being here, and now I would like to introduce Lourdes Perez, a jewel Austin inherited from the nation of Puerto Rico.

In November, when Lourdes opened for Mercedes Sosa, she brought the house down with her own passion and commitment to liberation struggles. Welcome!

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Genevieve Vaughan

Founder, Foundation for a Compassionate Society

It's wonderful to see you all here. This event is really a great thing. In celebration of Mother's Day, let me say that we need to invent or find within ourselves a mother-based economic system, that is based on caring for needs, instead of on stimulating greed.

I believe that women are socialized into caring and therefore that we already have an alternative value system within ourselves, which many men also have. I created the Foundation for a Compassionate Society in an attempt to try to put caring values into reality. The Foundation is not a society of particularly compassionate people, rather we are trying to make the society itself compassionate. This momentous task has been made more difficult by right-wing messages and interpretations which are broadcast towards us from all sides, discouraging women from taking the initiative. Yet, most of us know in our hearts that something is terribly wrong, and we welcome the possibility of contributing to social change.

Working together in the Foundation has allowed a diverse group of women to support each other for a vision of a better world. We have been made stronger by the women who have come before us and those who are still contributing their unflagging energy to social change. Now I want to welcome our keynote speakers. I am glad that these almost mythological women have come to share their thinking with us.

I hope we will be inspired by them to think deeply and to act courageously, as all of them have done in their different ways. The staff members of the Foundation have done an excellent job in pulling this conference together. All of them do wonderful work in their various projects. I would like to ask the Foundation staff to stand so that you can applaud them and to give a special thanks to the women who have worked on this event. Foundation staff, stand up please.

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The women who worked on this event particularly are Pat Cuney, Sally Jacques, Suze Kemper, Maria Limon, Sue MacNicholls, Patty Salas, Erin Rogers, Ana Sisnett, a special hand to all of them-and to Freida Werden and Beth Wichterich who are in charge of the audio and video components for this evening.

I would also like to thank the volunteers for their important help during the preparation and tonight, and thank you all for coming. My hope is that this evening will stimulate a wide scale discussion of values which will liberate all of us from the stereotypical thinking and ideological control of the right wing.

For many years I have been working on a theory of values. Even economists do not know what "value" is, and yet it influences our lives every day. So when the right wing started talking about "family values," I suspected they didn't know what they were talking about, and I knew I wanted to bring women together to discuss our common take on them.

I believe feminists have the first collective philosophy, and that we are putting it together from all our different points of view. By uniting with each other across all the boundaries patriarchy creates, we can finally step back from the brink of human and planetary disaster. We need to create widespread social change. We think too much within our own system, and not outside of it. The personal and the political are one, but taking personal power without taking political power leaves the system unscathed and allows it to adapt superficially without creating those large scale, systemic changes which are necessary for the survival of the planet.

For example, as Rosalie Bertell says, we may stop using underarm deodorant, but if we do not stop the Air Force jet nights, the hole in the ozone will continue to grow, because the jets are many times more damaging than the all the spray cans on earth. Our government keeps us ignorant of the damage done by Air Force jets. We mistakenly believe that by changing only our individual lives (stopping using spray cans for instance), we are making the difference. We have to liberate ourselves from our ignorance and take our power to make the changes in a system which is dispowering our hearts and creating a context of scarcity which makes caring impractical and even self-sacrificial.

Taking political power without recognizing women's values, our

values, as specifically different, also leaves the system unscathed. Margaret Thatcher is the example that is usually given for this kind of success. Our capitalist system espouses the values of hierarchy and competition, which are usually considered the values of patriarchy. Individualism, when it is seen as the philosophy of every man for himself, is also a position of capitalism.

In other words, patriarchal capitalism has the ego-oriented values that feminists oppose in the individual men and in our lives. Behind the mask of fair and free market, in the big picture, the system itself has a perpetrator's face. Patriarchy is a collective psychosis; it functions on many different levels, like a fractal self-similar image. It hurts men and women, and creates dominant classes and races. In the big picture, the countries of the North practice the patriarchal family values of domination and submission on the countries of the South, making those of us in the so-called "First World" accomplices of our country's policies, whether or not we reap the benefits directly.

There is no improvement in our individual situations as feminists in the First World that can change our belonging to this perpetrators' society. We have to take our efforts and energy, our alternative values, outside of our homes and private lives, into the arena in which large scale policies are decided. The patriarchal values only recreate the problems again and again, at different levels.

Structurally, my own position as a wealthy woman who has many advantages, is similar to the position of the U.S. with regard to Third World countries. Unless I, or unless all of us think and act beyond the boundaries of privileged categories, class or race, or nation or sex, we are parts of the perpetrator system, causing the suffering of millions of people and the devastation of the planet. We have to pose the problem to ourselves and act to change this system from within, and there is no way out of it, no space on the planet where we can be inactive and innocent.

I believe that the macho ego, whether it belongs to an individual or to a nation, is a social product which is an aberration, not the norm, and that the values of care which are still being practiced mostly by women in this society, are the normal way of behaving for

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all. The values of care are not incorporated into the social structures. Look, for example, at aid to Third World countries, which is said to be a gift, but is actually a hidden exchange. This travesty disqualifies caring and makes it seem unrealistic. Reality itself is made to be patriarchal. Values motivate systems; women's values could motivate a completely different kind of system from the one we have now. The right wing, patriarchal values have never solved the problems they and their system have created. We have to think and act together quickly to create a new system and a new reality now. Thank you.

Photo © Jane Steig Parsons, Prints Charming Photography

Marsha Gómez

Director, Alma de Mujer

I am a mother, and one of the co-founding mothers and board members of the Indigenous Women's Network, director of Alma de Mujer Center for Social Change, which has been a project of the Foundation for a Compassionate Society for the past eight years, and which has recently been transferred and made a gift from Genevieve to the Indigenous Women's Network.

It is my honor tonight to introduce to you one of my heroes, comadre, and sister board member of the Indigenous Women's Network. Mililani Trask is "Kia'aina" of her Nation. "Kia'aina" is the head of the state of KaLahui, which is the sovereign native Hawai'ian nation, which has a citizenry of approximately twenty-five thousand native Hawai'ian people.

Attorney at Law, Mililani has dedicated her skills and her practice, literally, her heart, body and soul to the self-determination of her people and the protection of the land base there. She has litigated endlessly, tirelessly, head'on with corporate, multi-national adversaries. She has protected sacred sites, has won back homelands for her people. Her work has led her to international commissions, initiatives and conferences where she has served a major leadership role with indigenous nations and people of color. She has recently worked on the indigenous peace initiative with Rigoberta Menchu-Tum and the U.N.P.O., the Unrecognized Nations and Peoples Organizations, founded by the Dalai Lama in 1991. She returned from D.C. yesterday, where she sits on a board with the environmental and economic justice globalization think-tank.

It is with utmost respect and honor I introduce Mililani Trask.

Mililani trask

Kanaka, Nation of Ka Lahui Hawai'i

It's a great honor and pleasure for me to participate in this most distinguished panel on behalf of the Nation of Ka Lahui Hawai'i, as a member of the Indigenous Women's Network, as an ambassador in the Indigenous Initiative for Peace, and (for) our sister, Rigoberta Menchu-Tum, and also on behalf of the Unrepresented Nations and People's Organization founded in 1991 by His Holiness the Dalai

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Lama for those nations who are not recognized or given a seat in the United Nations,

Several months ago, I was busy at my desk and received a telephone call. At the time I wasn't taking calls, so my secretary Renee came in and said, "Mililani, there's someone on the phone, and I know you'll want to speak with her; it's Genevieve Vaughan." I told her I always have time for Gen and got on the phone.

"Mililani," Gen said, "we're putting together something that's going to be a watershed event for the women's agenda in the coming decade. It will be in Austin, Texas." She explained what her goals were, and why the Foundation for a Compassionate Society had committed itself to this great undertaking. She honored me and invited me to come. I told her I'd be there and promptly forgot about it. Several weeks later, Renee came into my office and showed me the faxes that had come regarding my speaking engagement on Feminist Family Values. I told Renee that it must be a mistake, because I would never agree to speak at a gathering on Feminist Family Values.

Looking at the papers, I thought this could mean two things: either that feminists are coming together to talk about family values, values for their children, their daughters and sons, values to use in their families with their husbands, or, that the feminist family is coming together to talk about their values as feminists. In either case, I knew I wasn't supposed to be speaking, since I don't have a husband and never have; I don't have children that I've given birth to, so in the dominant social sense I don't have a nuclear family.

Furthermore, I'm not a feminist. I've never considered myself to be a feminist. I've always believed that feminists were white women with positions of stature and money, and other such things, which clearly I am not. So I looked at the papers and listened to Renee saying, "No, you confirmed this, this is what Gen called you about," and I thought, "Darn that Gen! Is she throwing me another curve ball?" Taking a closer look, I saw that in the typical Gen Vaughan style, she had given us a title that is controversial, and in so doing, invited us to accept the challenge of change.

So I've traveled a great distance to address women's political agendas for the coming decade, to discuss women's empowerment,

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and to present for your consideration and review two things: The first is the Beijing Declaration of the Indigenous Women who gathered in August of 1995 to prepare their own agenda for the coming decade; the second is to bring forward the Beijing Challenge that was issued from Beijing, a challenge to expand feminist thought on the issue of gender equity.

I believe we are prepared for this debate. I want to begin by reviewing the great products, of which I am still proud, which came out of the indigenous women's tent in Beijing. Beijing was a great, great undertaking, and was possibly one of the most important events in my life. Logistically, it was a mess. 35,000 women came, and we were only the ones who made it! Nearly 20,000 more women did not make it to Beijing because the oppressive government of China would not issue them visas.

When we arrived in Beijing, the oppressive, paternalistic government of China had girded its loins for thousands of women, coming from all over the world, to burn their bras. I'm not joking. In the taxicabs of Huairou and Beijing were folded up old military blankets to be thrown on us the moment we bared our breasts and burned our bras. I was laughing with Gen about this, and speaking with Gloria Steinem about this impression placed in the minds of these Chinese leaders, that women were coming there to burn their bras. Then I got to wondering whether that ever actually happened. Thanks to Gen and Gloria, I now know the true story. There never were any bras burned at the Miss America pageant so many years ago because they couldn't get a fire permit.

So while we corrected a great misunderstanding in the minds of the male leaders of China, we also struck a blow for what was really women's empowerment. I don't like the label feminism; I've always felt that it had certain racial and socio-economic connotations, as Gen Vaughan has pointed out. Yet as I criticize this term and challenge us all to stop using it, and to start speaking in terms of women's empowerment and women's agendas, I also want to acknowledge that we have all been victimized by negative connotations which have been cultivated by the white male-dominated media of the West.

Many women from all over the world met in Beijing. There were

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so many events that it was impossible to participate in everything. It was a great blessing for all of us that the Cordillero women from the Philippines had the foresight and resources to put together an indigenous women's tent, and there for twelve days and nights, indigenous women of the world came. We overcame racial barriers, cultural divisions, and economic gaps, to write a joint global statement that has subsequently been printed in many different languages.

In talking about this statement, I encourage you all to take the time to read and reflect upon it, because it contains the "mana," the thought of the indigenous women's global movement. Since our gathering has occurred on Mother's Day, it begins appropriately:

"The earth is our mother; from her we receive our life and our ability to live. It is our responsibility to care for our mother, and in caring for our mother, we care for ourselves. Women, all females, are a manifestation of Mother Earth in human form. We stand in unity behind this 1995 'Beijing Declaration of Indigenous Women,' which is the fruit of our collective efforts to understand the world and our situation as indigenous women, to critique the draft platform for action, and articulate our demands to the international community, the governments of the world, and the NGOs. The new world order, which is engineered by those who have abused and raped Mother Earth, colonized, marginalized and discriminated against us, is being imposed upon us viciously. This is re-colonization coming under the name of globalization and trade liberalization. The forces behind this are the rich industrialized nation states, the transnational corporations, and the financial institutions which they control, like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organizations. They will cooperate and compete among themselves to the last frontiers of the earth's natural resources, located on our traditional land."

That is the beginning statement of the Indigenous Women's Global Declaration that issued from Beijing. I'd like to discuss some of the more important parts of this Declaration, and begin by sharing a bit of the history of my people.

I am Kanaka Maoli; I am native Hawai'ian. Hawai'i is the north easternmost area of the archipelagos of the Pacific Basin. The Pacific Basin is the largest region in the world, which few people realize. This is not taught in the schools, because we are island

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people, and what dominates our education is Western continental thought. Many people also don't know that, until 1893, Hawai'i was an independent nation. We are considered to be the oldest indigenous nation in the world that was able to come abreast of more enlightened Western colonization.

In 1778 Hawai'i was allegedly discovered by Captain James Cook, the imperializing Britisher, who sailed from Europe and declared that he discovered Hawai'i for the Europeans, and for the English, specifically. When he landed upon our shores there were one million people living in a matrilineal society; yet he promptly declared that we belonged to Britain. The British sphere of influence ended when American sugar planters came with their own economic plan. In 1893, United States Marine gunboats sailed into Honolulu Harbor, dispersed their implements of death and destruction, the cannon and the musket, and overthrew our queen. At the time of the United States overthrow, we had in place twenty-two international covenants and conventions of friendship and recognition with all of the enlightened Western nations of the world. We had treaties of friendship and peace with France and Britain, Germany, Switzerland, Imperial Japan and others; and several treaties with the United States, but we now see, historically, the emptiness of those words.

Thus we were colonized and imperialized in 1893; our kingdom overthrown. A puppet government, installed for five years, was run by a man named Stanford B. Dole. While few may know him, I'm sure everyone, in one way or another, has consumed his products: Dole pineapple. He was the man whom the President of the United States put in power over our independent nation. When Cook arrived there were one million Kanaka Maoli; a generation and a half later, at the time of the United States overthrow, 39,000 of us remained. Today we are 200,000 Kanaka Maoli. You see that our population is increasing, because we love each other.

There is a saying in the Hawai'ian culture that you can marry whomever you wish, but mate with your own kind. In this way, we regenerate our numbers. We had a matrilineal society, which does not mean that men were marginalized or oppressed, but that women played essential roles, not only in governing and land tenure, but also in the spiritual realm. In matrilineal societies, such as Hawai'i,

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it is my brothers who would teach my sons the ways of fishing and gathering and hunting. In matrilineal societies, women are not marginalized, nor are we given easy outs in difficult times. For instance, during times of war in most societies, women would take the children and the elders and flee to the mountains, while in Hawai'i, the elders took the children to the mountains and the women took their spears to the battlefield with the men.

When we gathered in Beijing, it was heartening to see representatives from matrilineal societies, because there are very few of us remaining, most of whom, in my estimation, are indigenous cultures. After looking at the global agenda, struggling with it day and night for twelve days, we divided our statement into six areas, the first being a critique of the Beijing platform of action.

I don't want to diminish the work that the United Nations has accomplished in Beijing. Many of the points on the Beijing platform of action, adopted by the United Nations, are important. There were, however, significant omissions and deficiencies. Primarily, the Beijing platform was not critical of, nor did it analyze, what is now known as the New World Order. It failed to examine the impact of transnational corporations and their international financiers. It did not consider the root causes of poverty among women. It did not address, with any integrity, the economic basis for the poverty of women globally, because it could not: because the creators of the platform were blinded by the agendas of the American and European transnational corporations and their international financiers.

It is for this reason that addressing and analyzing the New World Order, also known as globalization—the expansion of transnationals, and their voracious appetite for consuming the natural and human resources of the world—is the primary agenda of the global indigenous women's community, who comprise the majority of the women of the world.

The majority of the women of the world are women of color and indigenous women. We are the ones who live under poverty; we are the ones who suffer at the hands of militarism, and from violence in all forms, and our suffering is at a greater rate than others. 70% of the world peoples who live in tragic situations of poverty today are women. Women are viewed by transnational corporations not as

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human beings, but as cheap sources of labor. We need to understand this; we need to confront this; we need to enunciate this. We need to stand up to this pattern of globalization and realize that when we see it with our women's eye, this is a manifestation of paternalism, of colonization, and imperialism. Globalization and the New World Order is the natural consequence of capitalist, paternalistic societies. We need to see this. We need to name it and call it by its rightful name. We need to see that poverty is the result of this, and not the result of anything else. We need to clear the agenda, and be clear in our minds about this.

One of the major issues that we addressed in our Declaration was the expansion of militarism. Militarism is a tool of oppression, a tool that is used against women, and there is a relationship that we see in the global arena with our indigenous eye, between militarism and rape and sexual slavery—the sexual trafficking of indigenous women. Military regimes have used rape as a mechanism to subvert indigenous cultures. Rape is not only a crime that occurs on the streets of the United States; rape is a vehicle of militarism. We must also understand and appreciate the relationship between militarism and the dramatic increase in AIDS and HIV, which is occurring globally in indigenous communities. This is because military forces, whether Americans in Okinawa or others elsewhere in the world, are usually males whose needs to satisfy their sexual drive are indiscriminate. We need to know how this impacts the spread of AIDS and HIV in our world communities. While many express concern about AIDS and HIV in the context of personal health and prevention, few seem to address with any integrity the relationship between militarism and the spread of AIDS globally. We must address this issue if we are going to stop the AIDS-HIV epidemic.

Because of these failures by the program of action issued by the United Nations, the Indigenous Women's global Declaration further set forth their own platform of demands.

The first is to recognize and respect our right to self-determination as women; we are not just the mothers of children, we are also the mothers of nations. We need to enunciate our agenda by asserting our right to self-determination. Our rights are defined in the "International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights" as follows:

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"The right of self-determination is the right of all peoples, not just men, but all peoples, to determine our political status, and by virtue of this right, to structure our own political futures; to determine and define how we wish to develop our economies, how we wish to utilize our land, and how we wish to create economic programs in our community and structure health care programs. This is the right of self-determination. It is an international human right, and it is time that we enunciate our right as women in terms of international legal standards that for too long have only been applied to white males from the dominant society."

Secondly, we demanded that the nations of the world recognize and respect our right to our territories, lands, and natural resources, and our right for self-development, education and health, in ways that are culturally appropriate to our people. Because we are vitally concerned with developing community-based economic programs and addressing critical health needs, we acknowledge and understand, as women from indigenous societies, that these programs must be culturally appropriate. You cannot take health programs that have been developed in New York down to Haiti, impose them upon the community, then wonder why the programs fail. In order to address the health needs of the women from South Africa, or women from the Philippines, you must first acknowledge those cultures by putting the health program in the appropriate cultural context, if such programs are going to be effective.

The third area we examined was environmental toxicity, and the other side of that ugly little coin— environmental racism. A bad habit of the transnational and G-7 nations is consuming our resources, creating toxic byproducts, then bringing those toxic byproducts back to the lands of indigenous peoples.

The women of Hawai'i have the highest rate of breast cancer in the world because in Hawai'i, for years, there was toxic dumping of DDT, long after America outlawed the use of DDT on the continent. It was prohibited only in the continental United States. Why? To make sure that American companies would have open markets in Cuba, the Philippines, and Hawai'i, to dump it on our lands. So DDT is in our water system. You might think that the highest rate of breast cancer would be somewhere else in the Third World, but it's not. It's in Hawai'i. Toxic dumping, the mining of uranium, and other such demonic practices have a necessary

consequence, and that is environmental racism. Where are toxic dumps and nuclear rods being stored? Why are they only on American Indian land, or in the communities of black people and Spanish-speaking Americans? There is a new term we need to learn: "environmental racism." It is one facet of racism.

A fourth area that we debated in Beijing had to do with our rights to cultural and intellectual property, and our rights to control the biological diversity of our territories. The Creator has given us a great blessing, the diversity of the earth, and the diversity of all of the life forms of the earth. This is our cultural heritage. All indigenous women know that we're placed here to be guardians of the sacred Earth, our mother. We are her daughters; that is our calling, that is our place. We know this from the time of our birth, and even before, in our mother's womb. We are indigenous. When we are born, that is when we are called American. Nationality is only a sign based on the geography of where we are born, but before that time, in our mother's womb, we are indigenous women.

Now, however, American and European pharmaceutical companies have embarked upon the copyrighting of life forms. They are taking leaves and trees; they are taking animals; they are registering them. They are saying, "We own this, and because we, as a pharmaceutical, own this leaf, you cannot use it for healing. You cannot make medicine from it, you cannot cure cancer with it, unless you pay us." The Bio-diversity Convention was passed in Rio. Many of us wept at that time. They said that we should celebrate, because now there were finally going to be international laws and rules in place to protect the rights of indigenous peoples, to insure that we would benefit from the great wealth of bio-diversity given to us by the Creator, our Mother. I was one of those who wept, because life forms shouldn't be owned by American pharmaceuticals. There is something demonic about that.

If you think that this is the most outrageous and insidious thing you've ever heard, this is only the first step. American pharmaceuticals and scientific communities, and their supporters at the United Nations, have also determined that within the next fifty to one hundred years, there will be certain cultures of indigenous peoples that will pass away as a result of the scientific communities' own ethnicidal and genocidal practices. Seven hundred indigenous

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cultures are slated for extinction in the coming hundred years. These pharmaceutical companies are very worried, because they now realize that incorporated in our genetic material are traits that they do not have in the dominant society. So they have created a new program called the Human Genome Project. The Human Genome Project is gathering the hair, skin and blood of the seven hundred indigenous cultures of the world who are set for extinction and putting these genetic materials in the deep freeze. They want the blood and the hair of the Eskimos, because Eskimos can survive extreme low temperatures, and are healthy and strong without eating vegetables. This would be a powerful factor for a nation's military, having this trait. So before the Eskimos vanish, the pharmaceuticals think, we had better get their blood and hair.

Who's on the list? Indigenous peoples in the Pacific Basin are; we from Hawai'i are on the list. So, indigenous peoples in Central and South America, Africa, and Asia had better check the list, find out about the Human Genome Project, and join your indigenous sisters in stopping this little diabolical plan.

There in Beijing, we were so outraged, we marched over to the World Health Organization and shut down the funding plan for the Human Genome Project, right then and there! "Gentlemen," I told them, " you may be surprised to learn that your plan for genocide of my people will not work. That's what you thought when you sent the military gunboats in 1893, you got us close to extinction at 39,000. But in the last hundred or so years, our numbers are coming back, and we don't intend to let them fall any further."

Among the work that came out of Beijing is the challenge issued by indigenous women and women of color to the feminist global community to expand feminist thinking regarding the issue of gender equity. One of the agendas, which the indigenous women of the world objected to surfaced in Cairo when we got bogged down on this issue of gender equity, which was articulated in terms of abortion.

What ultimately happened in Cairo was that all of the women of the Arab world lined up behind the mullahs, all of the women of the Christian world, Catholic and Protestant, lined up behind the Vatican; and all of the women of the feminist world lined up behind Bill Clinton, and thus were the issues of abortion and gender equity addressed.

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The women of the world cannot align themselves with the dominant patriarchies of the world. We cannot do that. This is the challenge, then, to feminist thought: the indigenous women and women of color that gathered in Beijing do not think that the issue of gender equity should be enunciated as the primary issue.

When we introduced this issue at the beginning of our dialogue, we broke it out according to the perspectives of women of color and indigenous women, and the perspectives of dominant culture, white feminist movements. Many women asked me, "Why make a distinction between women of color and indigenous women?" The answer is that women of color and indigenous women are not the same. Women of color are women of color. They're black women, brown women, red women, they're our sisters from Asia. Indigenous women, however, are not just women of color, but are white women too. Twenty years ago the indigenous women's global movement took on the issue of our own racism and struggled through it. If we can do it, so can everyone else.

Let me tell you a story, lest you think that an indigenous woman leader and a woman who works with Rigoberta menchu-tum is somehow immune from racism. I am not. As an indigenous woman I've always believed that indigenous women were women of color. Then, in 1989, I received an invitation to go to Norway, for a global indigenous women's gathering where I was invited to chair the global plenary. It took me days to get there and when I arrived I was suffering from jet lag. I had been told I would be picked up at the airport and when I got off the plane, there were about a hundred people at the airport, but little by little, people got their bags and left. Pretty soon, the only people left at the airport were me and a group of white women, who were wearing beautiful costumes. We looked at each other and they asked me, "Are you Mililani trask, the Kanaka of KaLahui,of Hawai'i?" I said I was and they said, "We're the Sami Women's Delegation—the indigenous women who are hosting the conference." I looked at them, and said, "You're white!" These women had blonde hair, blue eyes, green eyes, and skin so pale it looked like marble.

We struggled and worked together, and by the time I left Norway, I had learned a great lesson about my own racism; that indigenous cultures are not just cultures of color. Indigenous cultures are also

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white, and I am proud to say, I now have many indigenous sisters who are white sisters. I embrace them; they strengthen me.

What we're saying about the gender equity issue then, is that it's time to stop enunciating gender equity as the primary issue and speak in terms of the empowerment of women and the right of women to self-determination. The gender equity issue is too narrow because it fails to address the issue of racism, economic disparity, and cultural difference. We need to move beyond this, because gender equity supports the dominant culture s paternalistic values.

In Beijing, I got into a debate with several white feminists from America and Canada who still insisted, "Gender equity is the way we have to look at it. You folks say we haven't made any progress, but we have." They proceeded to show me a paper, of which they had made thirty thousand copies, which listed corporate, transnational boards. On this list they noted, since the 1960s, how many seats on these corporate boards had been won by women. My reply to them was, "It is not our goal to have an equal share of chairs in the corporate board rooms of America. It is our goal to change the underlying basis of those corporations." One of the problems that gender equity perpetuates is that it preserves the dominant patrilineal paradigms, which are exactly what we need to change.

The final problem that gender equity presents is that it marginalizes our sisters who are not heterosexual. I'm pleased to say that issue was clarified thanks to the two-spirit sisters in Beijing who called the heterosexual sisters on the line, "Excuse me, sisters," they said, " but you have missed one of the fundamental criticisms of the gender equity issue, and that is, the gender equity analysis is heterosexual, and does not address our two-spirit issue." Tiro-spirit is a Native American Indian term for those who have different sexual orientation; the Pacific Basin term is Mahu. We took a good look at the statement and said, "Thank you, our sisters, for correcting us." Let's admit that, and work on that.

I encourage everyone to examine the indigenous women's statement from Beijing in detail, for it is much more comprehensive than what I have presented here. I invite you to engage in this debate, in this dialogue. I've spoken with many women of color, indigenous women, who doubt that we are ready for this debate,

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who worry that it could fractionalize the women's movement. The good news, my sisters, is the debate is already happening, and on the forefront are organizations such as the Foundation for Compassionate Society, Bella Abzug and the women in New York who have worked with us many years on the road to Beijing. If you have any trepidation in your heart, you have only to see in this gathering that we have already begun this dialogue. We are capable of this. It is time to move beyond the male media stereotype of feminism and transform this movement into a global movement. There's only one way to do that, and that is by being inclusive on all issues—economic, racial, environmental—that impact the lives of women of color and indigenous women of the world.

We all have a common goal; we know this in our hearts—to make a more compassionate society, for our children, for our sons and daughters, for future generations; a more compassionate society for the earth. This work is a great undertaking. I consider it to be a sacred calling. This work for the earth cannot proceed unless we, each and every one of us, support it.

Photo © Danna Byrom, 1996.

Patricia Salas

Foundation for a Compassionate Society Board Member, People Organized in Defense of Earth and Her Resources (PODER)

In 1991 after studying in El Paso to become a midwife, I returned to Austin. At that time, Genevieve Vaughan brought me into the Foundation for a Compassionate Society and asked me to work in Brownsville, to develop a project

called Casa de Colores, located on the banks of the Rio Grande River, downstream from Brownsville and Matamoros. About a month after I arrived, I received a visit from two agents of the Border Patrol. Curiously enough, these agents did not come during regular hours. It was well after dark when they knocked on our door. Under the pretense of a "friendly visit," they tried to instill in me a fear of my own people. They told us that when the men on the other side found out that there were two women in this house so close to the river, they would come here and rape us. I immediately thought, however, that it was those two agents who might rape us, and make it look as though it were the work of the men from the other side.

In less than six months of living and working at Casa de Colores, I witnessed many horrors—the dead bodies of Mexican people from the other side—being pulled from the Rio Grande. At any hour of the day or night, agents from the Immigration Service and Drug Enforcement, or local law enforcement officers would arrive and swarm the property to investigate reports of drug crossings, of people crossings, or to pull out murder victims buried on the river's banks. The only person I knew in Texas during this difficult time, to whom I could to reach out for support, was Maria Jimenez.

I am a documented Mexican, I was born in Texas. The heartache and the harassment that I have experienced in my lifetime—the verbal humiliation, strip-searching—are nothing to the terror suffered by my undocumented, native people: torture and murder at the hands of United States Border Patrol agents.

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For her tireless work on behalf of our people, which is helping to stop that terror, I am personally grateful to Maria Jimenez. Her continuing efforts on behalf of human dignity and equality make her work important to us all.

Maria de los Angeles Jimenez has been the director of the Immigration Law Enforcement Monitoring Project of the American Friends Service Committee for nearly ten years. A working mother, she has been a labor organizer, a human rights activist and has worked for rural development in Mexico. She is currently a member of the Women's Committee of the National Commission for Democracy in Mexico, the official U.S. representative organization for Mexico's Ejercito apatista de Liberacion Nacional(EZLN), founded in Chiapas in 1994, to advocate the rights of indigenous peoples.

Photo © Jane Steig Parsons, Prints Charming Photography

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Maria de los Angeles Jimenez

American Friends Service Committee National Commission for Democracy in Mexico, Women's Committee

When I was invited to contribute to this forum, I wa     genuinely surprised, because of all the participants, I am probably the least known. I also realize, however, that I have been asked to participate precisely because what I have to share are the experiences of "unknown" women like myself—women who are faceless, women who struggle, and in their struggle claim dignity not only for themselves, but also for their families and communities.

For many of us who are of Mexican origin, it is very meaningful that this forum on Feminist Family Values occurs on May 10, "Dia

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de las Madres," Mexican Mother's Day. Mother's Day, of course, is the day we recognize the significance of the women who have given us life, nurtured us, taught us, castigated us, reassured us, motivated us and fully impressed upon us our concept of who we are, or who we are not.

The concept of motherhood has long defined us as women in the Mexican culture, although with ambivalence. The concept of motherhood in Mexican culture has symbolically been characterized by two opposites, a duality often expressed by two symbols - the Virgin of Guadalupe on one extreme and the Llorona on the other. First, by the symbol of the Virgin of Guadalupe, "un madre pura," a pure mother through whom God is represented, and second, by "La Llorona," the mother who kills her children as an act of vengeance for having been wronged by the man she loves. Either way, we are defined as mothers.

Mexican culture looks upon the mother as a creator of life, not only biologically, but socially, who, by nurturing and building her family, builds the life of the community around her. For most Latinas, a woman and her activities play a central role in developing the family. Likewise, as people of Mexican descent, our lives are shaped by that concept of family, la familia, and the central role that mothers play. Consequently, for Latinos in particular, the issue of culture brings many contradictions. In the context of our cultural traditions, fighting for women's rights, for personal independence and dignity is a definitive challenge to the patriarchal system that has bound us.

I remember being about nineteen years old, when I wrote my first article enunciating the right of women to participate fully as citizens, politically and socially. I remember, too, the reaction of my fellow activists - Chicano males - who criticized me. They told me that the abandonment of the family and the traditions we were fighting for was Gringo culture, that I was being brainwashed by white ideology.

Growing up in the United States as I did, as a Mexican immigrant in the sixties, meant surviving discrimination against Mexicans, and confronting anti-Mexican attitudes that both segregated and institutionalized segregation for my compatriots and

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me. We saw clearly that the only way we would overcome such discrimination, and the second-class citizenship that came with it in Texas and elsewhere in the Southwest, was through our collective actions: actions that would bring an end to this discrimination, and at the same time, transform the society around us.

We became part of a broad civil rights movement called the Chicano Movement, made up of many generations of Mexican Americans who felt that the rest of America had continually questioned our right to be here, and with it our right to belong, to actively participate in the workings of this country. In thinking about the issue of feminism and family values, of "traditional" culture, and the conflicts and tensions that we face as women struggling to integrate these areas, I recall the early years of that Chicano Movement.

My response was to look back—back to the history of Mexico. To remember, as a child, learning about "Sor" (Sister) Juana Inez de la Cruz, the nun who, in 1691, was the first to advocate, in writing, women's right to education, to participate fully in society and develop their human potential. I remember Josefa Ortiz de Dominguez,"La Corregldora," the Mexican equivalent of Paul Revere, who, when the Mexican insurgents were discovered by the Spanish, rode on her horse to alert the people that it was time to rise up against the conquerors.

I remember reading about the women activists of the 1850s, who campaigned for women's education and parity with males in Mexico, particularly in the urban areas of Guadalajara and Mexico City. There was the unforgettable Carmen Dominguez of the family Aquiles de Serdan, who died as a conspirator in the early years of the Mexican Revolution, and the women of Yucatan, who held several feminist congresses to adopt women's equality as part of the new Constitution of 1917. I also remember those who fought for Mexican women's right to vote, which became law in 1953.

These are the facts I rattled off to my fellow Chicano activists nearly three decades ago, telling them finally, "I don't know where your history comes from, but my history, the history of the people of Mexico, is the history of women fighting for their right to participate equally in the economic, political, and social systems of our country. That is my history."

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These contradictions between the position of women culturally and the social movements to transform those aspects of gender roles into ones of equality are ever present for Latinas. I remember that one of the earliest obstacles I faced upon my return to Mexico to live in the mid-1970s, was a linguistic one. I had grown accustomed to the feminization of many English words, such as the use of "Congress Person," for "Congressman" and to the ideology behind those early changes. The reality of the Spanish language, however, is such that similar changes in Spanish were not possible because they would alter the basic structure of the language. In accepting the limitations inherent in our language, I began to understand more fully the extent of the struggle faced by Latin American women.

It is striking, for instance, that "Sor"Juana Inez de la Cruz, a woman of such intelligence, was questioned by the wisest of men to prove her inferiority, but instead she proved her superiority. It is also significant that when she failed to learn a lesson, she would punish herself by cutting her hair, because the hair was one of the most significant cultural symbols for women during that time. These examples depict the same dilemma faced by Latina feminists: how do we express ourselves with dignity, and at the same time, attempt to rescue and reconnect to our culture and our community?

In looking at the feminist movements in Mexico and the U.S. overall, there is not much difference between them in substance. Both movements work toward women's equality and dignity. In the United States, many Mexican women too have fought for women's equality historically. In this half century like in other periods, the American feminist movement is not monolithic, but is composed of women from diverse backgrounds and groups who work for this single goal, in local communities or nationally, wherever they have landed in the struggle. Thus, the differences are manifested in the form these struggles take. Their expression is confined in spaces defined mostly by the historical moments and socio-economic positions of the women involved. In the Latino experience, women's fight for equality and respect has been profoundly based on the relationship to the family or "la familia.""La familia" is understood, not only as blood relationship, but as the extended community carved from the cultural concepts of the "compadres" and "comadres"

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or co-parents. In that sense, family relationships are valued as essential to our connectedness to community, and our individual well-being to the well-being of our community.

One of the most poignant and moving struggles that illustrate this paradigm in Latin American history is the struggle of the Mothers of the Disappeared which sprang up in the late 1960s to the present. Groups like the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, COMADRES in El Salvador, the Mutual Support Group of Guatemala, and EUREKA in Mexico were formed in response to the government's secret execution of relatives targeted for their political opposition and activism. They did so, not to assert their prominence in the male power structure, but to assert their moral right as life-givers, as mothers.

To my mind, this movement of the Mothers of the Disappeared was the forerunner of all modern movements seeking democracy throughout Latin America. More significantly, it is this movement that redefined for me the essence of the women's movement. While this is the common vision of women throughout Latin America, for me, a Mexican American living in the United States, this was a new perspective: this courageous campaign against totalitarianism broadened my vision of how women could achieve equality.

In the words of Guadalupe, a member of CONVIGUA (National Coordinator of the Widows of Guatemala): "We did not know what to do after the massacre of 1982. We didn't cook, we didn't eat; our children cried from hunger and pain, but we came to realize that we were left to carry the full responsibility of our family, to feed our children, apart from the great burden of suffering, which we carry around in our hearts." A woman named Teresa, from the Federation of Popular Neighborhoods in Guadalajara, said, "For the woman, the house is hers, and things such as no light and no water are part of the home. So it is her fight."

In this movement, women assert their moral authority as mothers and raise their voices for the the political systems they want and against oppression. Their reproductive and nurturing roles were transformed from the private to the public, the biological to the political. Said a widow in Guatemala: "The first thing we had to conquer was our own fear."

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These groups challenged totalitarian regimes and the use of state-initiated violence to suppress the political freedoms of expression and association. These movements became the precursors of current movements to challenge undemocratic practices of governments and to defend and protect human rights.

Moreover, when they confronted repressive governments, seeking to defend individual children and relatives, they were subjected to harassment, persecution and violence. Many became victimized by private and public security forces—suffering torture and rape. Ultimately, seeking justice for their family members, the mothers and women relatives of the disappeared confronted their situation as women—political rape created an understanding of gender abuse and gender inequality in power relations.

In the end, the movement of Mothers of the Disappeared opened an alternative space for political participation that mobilized people in forms other than those established by traditional political systems. The issue is no longer whether the movement is feminist or not feminist, but that it changed the lives of women and the way in which gender is perceived in traditional politics, leading to a questioning of power relations as they move from the individual, personal, and familial to the broader society.

Historically then, it becomes clear that for many Latin American women, the struggle to assert their rights and dignity as women is an integral part of the liberation movement of all peoples. We cannot liberate people without liberating women, and we cannot liberate women until we liberate all people.

Alicia, one of El Salvador's COMADRES, underscored this when she commented, "In the beginning of our struggle, it was an individual problem. But once we began to discover that there were others in the same situation, we realized we couldn't be isolated;

that our struggle was collective." In other words, as Latinas, our struggle for equal rights is a struggle to create equality for women and men; to walk together on equal terms, and to create the conditions for the development of our collective potential as human beings.

This collective agenda is perhaps best expressed by the women of Chiapas who, at the invitation of the Zapatista Army of National

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Liberation, attended a round of dialogues on indigenous affairs in November 1995. In a joint document, the women stated:

"We firmly state to all, that in our analysis of indigenous women, we conclude that the struggle is not against our men, but against a political and social and economic system, unjust and vertical, that permeates the attitudes of those who govern and are governed, and that break the equilibrium of social relations.

"We recognize that we are the basis of our culture and the givers of life, and that this role is given little value. Marginalization and poverty have been with us native people for over 503 years, and especially with women. We native people have long lived a history of colonialism and dependence that today is reproduced and heightened by the politics of neo-liberalism, the one-party system, the external debt, and a free trade agreement negotiated behind our backs and in conditions that disintegrate the national sovereignty. Pillage and the sale of our wealth by small groups that decided for all of us, men and women, in a society divided by classes, for a patriarchal and sexist ideology, that create unequal relations between men and women—these are also the characteristics of the current system.

"We women have decided to raise our voices to rescue our dignity and defend our rights. It is our view that our conditions as indigenous women will not improve if there is no improvement in the situation of the nation as a whole, our peoples, our communities."

In their statement, the women of Chiapas describe the essence of the Latina's struggle throughout history to the present day. It is this contradiction which the words of the women of Chiapas so eloquently address. The Zapatista women are also important because they articulate their positions both as women, and as members of the community and the nation.

Women in non-traditional polities like these confront head-on the issues of gender, class, and racial inequality. A campesina (a peasant woman) in Brazil said: "Yes, we women have been born with politics (in other words, integral to our being). When we are born, immediately we shout, we demand things, don't we? For this reason, we women have been born with politics."

As mentioned earlier, women as mothers are empowered to assert

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their moral authority in changing the nation and reclaiming what is crucial: human rights and dignity, including the right to participate in the decisions that affect their lives. By raising their voices before the political systems in power, these groups of women both in Latin America and the United States, challenge regimes and systems by taking the private domain—the family—and raising it to the level of public discourse.

Many women within these movements have become, and continue to be, victims of the particular social system they seek to change. In seeking justice for family members, women who have challenged state repression and violence have themselves endured personal suffering. Ultimately, movements such as the Mothers of the Disappeared open up an alternative forum for political participation that mobilizes people, which is perhaps the important aspect from a feminist viewpoint. This not only changes the lives of women, but also changes the way in which gender is perceived, which leads to a questioning of power relationships on both an individual and social level.

Women's political mobility and activism bring yet another challenge: as more women become activist, the violence against women increases, in both the family and society. According to a recent report of Amnesty International, violence against women in Mexico has increased, with an escalating pattern of torture, sexual abuse, political assassinations, and disappearances. Of the thirty-three cases of violence against Mexican women documented by Amnesty International, twenty-eight were victims of abuse for being activists in an opposition or civic group.

We cannot discuss violence against women without acknowledging the use of rape as state-imposed violence generated by conditions of war. Chiapas presents a vivid example. Under an ongoing siege described as low-intensity warfare, 60% of the Mexican Army surrounds the state. It is supported and financed by the United States Government. The use of rape in Chiapas is a deliberate strategy of war: over fifty-five rape cases against women have been documented. In a particular town in Chiapas recently, the private army, or White Guards, entered, and after setting aside the men, raped all the women in the village.

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Our women's bodies have become the battlefield of this new type of genocide. Enclosed by the army, community life in Chiapas has been interrupted; hunger and disease prevail. As an invisible tactic, the slow death of the civilian population simultaneously and deliberately drives down civilian resistance and support for the Zapatistas. Ironically, it is the concentration of indigenous women in this struggle for justice that gives us lessons in dignity and commitment for family and nation.

In a letter which appeared in the Mexican newspaper La Jornada on January 26, 1994, Subcomandante Marcos of the "Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nociona!"(Zapatista Army of National Liberation) related how the real uprising began: how in the process of consulting with the communities, which is the practice of the Zapatistas, many members traveled to surrounding communities to consider the various laws to be proposed in this revolutionary struggle. Susana, a member of the "Comite C(<atnde5tmo Revolucionario Indigena" (Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee), which is the highest level of decision-making within the Zapatista army, consulted with the women in different communities to listen to their proposals. When the CCRI met again, the women were very clear about what they wanted: "We don't want to be forced to marry someone we do not want to marry. We want to have the number of children we want and can care for. We want the right to have leadership positions in the community. We want the right to have our say, and that it be respected. We want the right to study, and even to become drivers."

As similar petitions were heard from other women of the indigenous communities, the men from the CCRI grew silent. When the discourse ended, there was a long silence, after which one indigenous man said: "Well, I'm glad that my wife, iny woman, doesn't know Spanish." A "comandante," an indigenous woman, looked at him and responded, "vete a la chingada!" (screw you). We are going to translate the Women's Petition into all languages."

Marcos, in the same letter, reiterates the significance of the women's uprising in Chiapas: "But it is true," writes Marcos, "that the first rising of the EZLN was not January 1, 1994, but in March 1993, and this revolution was led by the Zapatista women."

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I agree with the Zapatista women, the women from Chiapas, in their analysis, that in the world today all women face a particularly difficult challenge. The restructuring of economies and integration of economic blocks, as we know, is the work of transnational corporations. These corporations have skewed power structures and have redefined patterns of employment and degraded the quality of life throughout the world. What the Zapatistas call neo-liberalism— the impact of the global economy—is the challenge women face worldwide. It is against this siege of corporate globalization that women must now unite, not only to create life, but to create the conditions that sustain life and help it grow.

In this specific struggle, women are committed to building communities that will sustain a quality of life and maintain the dignity of all peoples within that community. This task is not our choice, but has been thrust upon us by the conditions generated by global integration and restructuring. The greatest challenge to the needs of the family is shaped by trends affecting the everyday lives of women resulting from globalization, economic restructuring and economic integration.

Worldwide women constitute 50% of the world's population yet own 1% of the world's property. One out of five families is headed by a single parent; 80% of these are women. The poverty rate of women heads-of-households is six times that of men heads-of-households. Women and their children work from 60 to 80 hours between job and household chores and tasks. Women earn 62 cents to a man's dollar; black women, 56 cents; Latinas 53 cents, Asian women 44, and disabled women, 24 cents.

An important trend in this globalization and economic restructuring is the gender subordination visible in the outcomes; both rely on and exacerbate the exploitation of women's time, energy, labor and sexuality. Women workers dominate some employment sectors which are seeing dramatic business restructuring: clerical, retail, finance, communications and light manufacturing. Corporate measures to reduce production costs, notably by cutting labor costs, have led to labor displacements, diminished the bargaining power of unions, increased risks to workers' health and safety and, in many instances, translate to

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downward economic slides for workers and their families.

Women are a growing and significant part of the labor force as work outside the home helps to sustain their families basic standard of living. Further still, many women already working outside the home have taken on a second job as a solution to a decline in family income. In the United States, three quarters of women between the 24 and 50 years of age are in the labor force and an estimated 3.3 million have more than one income-producing job. There is gender bias in corporate strategies to change employment patterns. A primary one is the increased use of part-time, seasonal, temporary or contract work. The majority affected are female and in certain industries are racial-ethnic minorities. Paid on an hourly basis, this female work force lacks benefits and union protection. One special part of this contingent work is done at home and therefore hidden, unregulated, unprotected and underpaid. In addition, women are represented disproportionately in the public service labor force where cuts are being made and privatization moves are occurring.

The consequences of these changes are enormous for women who make up a large proportion of the long-term unemployed, poorly qualified members of the work force in their roles as single parents, part-time workers in unskilled jobs, elderly workers, refugees and spouses of immigrant workers. According to the Bureau of the Census, the reality for women in the United States is as follows:

* Two-thirds of the official poor adults are female.

* The poverty rate for women of color is higher than for whites: African-American women have a 32 % poverty rate; Hispanic women, 29% and white women, 12%.

* 40% of official poor are children; it is especially acute for children of color, 46% for black, 41% for Hispanic children and 18% for white.

* The number of households headed by women has more than doubled since 1970. By 1992, women maintained 12 million families on their own.

Even where women and men share family responsibility, their lives are impacted by the restructuring of employment patterns

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which results in making temporary service jobs abundant, while services are being privatized. Men and women lose jobs and benefits. The burden of sustaining the family, of lessening tensions, of attempting to sustain adequate living conditions for all members of the family, becomes the burden of women. Women are the primary caregivers in families and caretakers of communities: the task is not only to birth new life but to take primary responsibility for nurturing families and communities so that life may flourish; to build social relationships so communities will cohere; and to raise future human beings so the world can prosper for the benefit of all its inhabitants.

As the global economy integrates and communities disintegrate, under the pressures of unemployment and under-employment, diminished social services, increased costs of private service, lack of adequate housing and growing violence in community and family, women are called on to sustain communities in stress. In response to these crises, women have developed and maintained social safety nets, such as domestic violence centers, shelters for runaway youth, soup kitchens for young and old, and youth oriented facilities. Women's time and energy are exploited as they become buffers to sustain families and communities in the midst of current policies of economic restructuring, integration and globalization.

This is precisely the challenge that the Zapatista women took on, and thus provide us with the most striking example of women whose lives have been impacted dramatically by these global changes. The communities where globalization has flourished were communities in which the global managers, despite the wealth of natural resources, had decided that the populations were expendable. The global managers themselves noted that at the time of the uprising, 50,000 people in Chiapas died of preventable diseases. A third of the children had received education, and very few of the women could read.

I recall once again the women of the Zapatista Army. When we traveled to Chiapas in August 1994 as part of the delegation of the National Commission, what impressed me most was the composition of the army itself. At least 35 to 40 % of the rank and file soldiers of the Zapatista Army were young, indigenous women. We had heard about Commanders Ramona, Anna Maria, Irma,

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Elisa, and many others mentioned in the press. It was surprising, however, to see so many tiny young women of Mayan descent dressed in their uniforms, each carrying an M-16 covering half her body.

It saddened me that women, the givers of life, had to take up arms and be prepared to kill. I wondered about this decision that these young women had faced, and the conditions that drove them to kill, in order to give life to future generations. Perhaps the best answer to my question is the following letter from Subcomandante Marcos to the U.S. Representative of the Zapatistas,Cecilia Rodriguez, who in October 1995, was raped in Chiapas:

"The indigenous Zapatista women, who do not belong to us, but march at our side, those women, so far from the Conference of Beijing, those women, in a struggle against everything and against everyone (and this includes us, the Zapatista men), those Zapatista women have decided to stop being women in order to have the right to be a woman."

These are women who decided to stop reproducing generations that would live in poverty and humiliation, women who decided to change the traditional cultural definition of how they would be defined as women, women who ultimately will join the many who made a decision to die to give life, and yet these masked, faceless women facing death in the highlands of Chiapas, took time on March 8 of this year, to pay tribute to all of us, to all the women with dignity, the ones who struggle.

And I would like to close with those words from a communique, from these women to us, on March 8, International Women's Day:

"Today we want to salute our sisters who have fallen in the two years of the military encirclement, to our dead.

"Today we want to salute also all the women who have helped us so that our voice is heard.

"Today we want to salute all of the women who have seen in the Zapatistas, a mirror of their own dignity and rebellion.

"Today we want to salute all the women who struggle everywhere, so that nowhere is being a woman a shame, a nightmare, an adornment.

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"Today, we want to salute all women who have dignity and who struggle.

"Salud, women in struggle.
Health, women with dignity. "

Photo © Danna byrom, 1996.

Pat Cuney

Foundation for a Compassionate Society Stonehaven Goddess Program

As I move into the more formal parts of this presentation, I also want to stop and thank Genevieve Vaughan for her commitment to women and feminist values and to global and local feminist activism. We've said it a number of times tonight, and I don't think it can be said too often, this entire conference is her gift to international feminism.

Like the other women who work at the Foundation, I consider it an honor and a privilege to work for an organization that was founded to demonstrate women's values in the context of modeling the gift economy, of which Genevieve Vaughan is a primary theoretician.

The woman I am introducing tonight can stand on her record any time, anywhere. We honor her both for who she is and what she has done. She travels in this and other countries as a lecturer and feminist organizer, and is a frequent spokesperson on issues of equality. Currently she is a writer and consulting editor for Ms. Magazine, the international feminist bi-monthly that she co-founded in 1972, a periodical that changed a generation.

Among her books are "Moving Beyond Words," "Revolution from Within: a Book of Self Esteem;" "Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions," and "Marilyn/Norma Jeane," about Marilyn Monroe.

She helped found the Women's Action Alliance, a national center for information and advocacy in such areas as non-sexist, multi-racial children's education, and communication among women's groups; the National Women's Political Caucus, and the Coalition of Labor Union Women.

She is president of Voters for Choice and the founding president of the Ms. Foundation for Women, which is a national multi-racial women's fund that supports grass-roots projects to empower women

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and girls. She has raised funds for many campaigns, especially those of women and candidates of color. She worked for Caesar Chavez, the United Farm Workers, and other civil rights groups.

In 1993 she was inducted in the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York. While history may record her most significant achievement as the founder of Ms. Magazine, for myself, I am especially grateful for her consistent willingness to cross race and class barriers, something the women's movements of the 1800's and 1920's were never able to successfully address, something we are struggling with today.

And I am also grateful to her for her willingness in her books and in her articles to share with us the truth about her own life, because when one woman tells the truth about her life, the rest of us realize that we are not alone.

For me, it is a lifetime achievement just to have the honor of introducing her to you. Let us welcome GLORIA STEINEM.

Photo © Danna byrom, 1996.

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Gloria Steinem

Writer, Consulting Editor. Ms. Magazine, Voters for Choice, Women's Action Alliance

I've always wanted to live to be a hundred. Now I know why. I have to - in order to live up to this introduction. But when one woman shows emotion, then we also know that none of us is alone.

Did you meet each other during the intermission? I hope you did, but if not, here is your assignment: Look around you before you leave the room or on your way out, see three or four people you don't know, introduce yourselves, say what you care about, what you're doing. If you've come here today, you probably share a lot of interests and values, so you can skip right past the first six weeks of lunches, and say what's in your heart. Then see if you don't leave here with a new friend, a new subversive organizing tactic, a new job, a new love affair—anything could happen! During the question and answer period, I also hope we can overturn the hierarchy of us up here as speakers and you down there, so we can have a powerful organizing meeting.

I would like to start by telling you about my trip last summer to the Kalahari desert with Rebecca Adamson, a Native American activist who is head of the First Nations Development Institute. She had been asked by the Kwei or San people of the Kalahari— indigenous people also known as the Bush People—to consult about land rights and economic development projects. She invited me and a few other activists to come along. So we flew to Johannesburg, then got another plane to a small town in Botswana, and then another little plane, and then rode hours in a Land Rover—until we were in the middle of the Kalahari Desert.

And there we were, literally thousands of miles from the nearest settlement, under an enormous sky, with a group of about twelve Bush people, women, men and children. Over those few days, I learned a little bit, just a little bit, about the subtlety, concerns, and sophistication of this indigenous group that is such a resource of great wisdom and knowledge for all of us—as indeed all the indigenous groups on every continent are. Yet the Bush People are thought by many in Botswana itself to be underdeveloped, unsophisticated, undesirable. They aren't even allowed a designation as a tribal group. Until the 1960s, there were hunting licenses—we were told it was legal, you could get a license to kill a Bush person.

These gentle people showed us a little of their way of life. The women took us out into what appeared to be empty desert with straggly bushes dotting the sands, and they showed us how they dig

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with their digging sticks for roots that are excellent to eat. They also showed us the root that is used for migraine headaches, another root for contraception, and another root that women use to render themselves sterile when they decide they have enough children. In general, a woman has two or three children spaced several years apart.

They showed us their games, very joyous games, the goals of which were not competition, but cooperation. They did a trance dance for us, which lasted most of the night, and was about spirituality, and also healing. They explained to us that both men and women are responsible for children, and I believed them, because the only child who cried was one whose father had been forced off the land in order to get a job. The little boy missed his father, just as he would his mother.

For Bush People, there are some sex-differentiated roles, but in general both men and women hunt—though the men hunt for large animals, and the women catch smaller animals, as well as gather food. There is no value put on virginity. In girls or in boys, children are encouraged to play together, sexually or otherwise.

When they are old enough to be self-sufficient, children build their own huts and live together. It's all right to have sex between boys and girls, between girls and girls, or between boys and boys, as part of experimentation, part of learning what grown-up life is like. Children become sexual in the same integrated way that they learn about hunting, weaving, trance-dances, stories and all the enormously sophisticated cultural knowledge that is their way of life.

I tell you this partly because I can't not tell you. Because these are an endangered people. They are being persecuted and pushed off their land. The last three thousand people living in the Kalahari are being pushed out of their way of life, and with them goes an immense source of human knowledge about how to live in balance with each other and nature, a kind of human rain forest of wisdom. I also tell you this because it is hard for us to imagine different family forms, different kinds of values, unless we know they existed somewhere. But, in fact, each of us, no matter what continent or culture we come from, can find a basis for alternative family values in what is so suspiciously called "pre-history"—which just means pre-patriarchy,pre-racism,pre-nationalism. That's why they don't

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teach us about it, right? Yet these ancient ways are part of our heritage. I think it's comforting to know that life in various forms and with certain shared values—a connection to nature, a sense of balance, a lack of ownership and cooperative forms of human organization—this "alternative" way of life went on for 95% of human history. The last eight to ten thousand years about which our patriarchal culture teaches us—and it's usually much less than that—is less than 5% of human history.

So I suggest that we just declare the last five-to-ten thousand years an experiment that failed. Let's declare this the first meeting of the post-patriarchal, post-racist, post-nationalist age. I think Native American poet and novelist Paula Gunn Alien is right when she says, in "The Sacred Hoop," that "the root of oppression is the loss of memory."

I also agree with Cherokee scholar and writer Rayna Green, who says that true feminism—women's liberation, womanism, self-government, autonomy, self-authority, self-determination, whatever we want to call it—is really memory on this continent. Because many of our ideas about individual human dignity and democracy within families—about non-hierarchical forms of organization and balance with nature—came from cultures that were already on this continent millennia before Europeans arrived. That's where they were learned, not from some idea of democracy in Greece that actually had a very limited idea of democracy and kept slaves. Yet Native groups have been so de-humanized by history in order to justify their persecution and genocide that we ourselves don't understand how much our ancestors learned from them.

We must remember that what now is called "Women's History," "Native American History," "African American History," or "Asian American History" really ought to be called "Remedial History." I don't know about you, but I didn't learn about the female plus people-of-color part of history when I was going to school. So I am continually amazed and angered when I learn that, for example, the entire state of Florida was governed by a coalition of Seminole Indians and freed or runaway slaves. For many years, they fought off the entire U.S. government. Or when I learn that Mozart had an older sister, Nanneri, whom he considered "the really talented one." She was sent home to marry, but some musicologists think

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compositions attributed to him might really be hers.

Somebody gave me a button once that said, "The truth will make you free, but first it will piss you off."

I also didn't learn in school that our form of government and constitution were inspired in part by the Iroquois Confederacy. Of course, our forefathers still didn't get it right; they left out women, who declared war and peace, and chose the male chief in the Iroquois Nations. 1 didn't know until a few years ago that the women of the abolitionist and suffragist movements—like Sojourner Truth, Matilda Gage, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others—knew, visited with, learned from, and wrote about women in those Native American cultures, and held such cultures up as examples of the kind of society they were striving to create.

In a way, early American feminists were talking about feminism as theory. But indigenous women were often living it as practice. Moreover, when Engels wrote his essay on "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State," he based much of it on the work of anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan and his published studies of the Iroquois Confederacy.

So indigenous cultures were and are among the roots of feminism, socialism, the idea of communalism, communal ownership, a different relationship with nature, and so on. They still exist in some form on every continent—embattled, almost annihilated, subject to genocide. But they still exist.

I think that gives us some hope. It isn't that we can go back to the past. We can't. Nor should we romanticize the past. But we need to know that changes we're now told are impossible—living with feminist values, changed forms of organization, our insistence that violence is never an acceptable way of solving conflict but only for self-defense—all these have existed in some form. When they tell us, "You can't change that; it's human nature," we need to have the knowledge that for 95% of human time on earth, there existed a very different vision of human nature.

I think the first thing we need to re-consider about "family values" is saying "family" in the singular. That is a right wing trip altogether. The minute you say "family" in the singular, it defines one kind of family as normal and renders all other forms peripheral or wrong. The truth is there have always been many, many different

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kinds of families—extended families, communal families, families in which, in the African tradition, children were raised by the grandparents, because it was thought that someone young enough to have a child was not wise enough to raise it.

There have always been committed, nurturing relationships between men, between women and also chosen relationships, adopted relationships. Certainly, native cultures on this continent often adopted people who were of different nations, different races into their extended families. The patriarchal, nuclear family that we are supposed to think is the normal and only one, that kind of family is really only about one-hundred-and-fifty-years-old, and is almost entirely the function of industrialization and capitalism. It was a form invented to make people portable, so they could be shipped about at the will of their employers, something that could not be done with big, extended, communal families.

Even in recent agricultural communities, women in patriarchal families still played important economic roles. It was industrialization that took fathers out of the home and made them the only wage earners for the first time—causing women and children to be entirely dependent on men.

The idea that there is only one family form is really pure bullshit. Nonetheless, we have to get a grip on what the right wing means when it says "family values," because otherwise, we will be in a continual state of shock and surprise. It may seem illogical to us; it is not illogical. It has logic of its own. As family, they are talking about the male-headed, patriarchal nuclear household. That is precisely what they mean and that is all they mean. That is why they call "anti-family" any guarantee of rights for women or children, because such rights interfere with the patriarchal authority of the male head of household.

So to them, the Equal Rights Amendment was "anti-family," because it was a guarantee of rights to women. Laws against child abuse are also "anti-family," which is why they are trying to de-fund such programs. Battered women's shelters—which they call "runaway wives" shelters—are absolutely "anti-family." Once you get a grip on what they mean by "family," they are actually logical.

For instance, their "family values" say that abortion is murder, but capital punishment and war are fine. This at first would seem rather

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odd, but their point is not what is done, but who does it. So long as the state or the church or the corporation or the multi-national does it, it's okay. But if the individual does it, if we have the power, it's subversion and it's not okay. The state can take any number of lives through capital punishment, and multi-nationals can pollute and destroy in the name of profit. But a woman can't decide whether or not to bear a child.

Among their values is the idea—and this seems like another sort of illogic—that both birth control and lesbianism are wrong. You have to get a grip on what they mean. What they mean is that women's bodies—which are the most basic means of production, the means of reproduction—have to be under patriarchal control, and dedicated to having children, who are then patriarchally owned. Therefore, any form of sexual expression that doesn't end in conception inside patriarchal marriage—so that the children arc properly owned—is wrong. Therefore, both lesbianism and birth control are wrong. They are not illogical. But I think there is something else here that is deeper than logic. What we are talking about is content; what they are talking about is form. They are talking about who has the power to do something; we are talking about what that something is. We are trying to give each other the power to control our own lives. They are trying to control the lives of others. We say the power to make our own decision matters more than the decisions we choose to make. They say that disobedient decisions are wrong per se.

We are really redefining power. We no longer mean that power is the ability to make other people do something. We mean that power is the ability to control our own destiny, to control our own lives, and to be in a community of others with equal power.

If we do away with "family" in the singular and say "families," if we de-emphasize form and emphasize content, we will go a long way towards creating and living feminist family values.

There is, however, an insight we share with the ultra right wing. As feminists, women's liberationists, whatever it is we wish to call ourselves—we understand something liberals often miss: There is a direct line between the kind of families we have and the kind of society we create. If you look at democracies, you will find that they have all rested on some degree of democracy in the household, in the way

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people were raised. If you look at authoritarian and totalitarian states, you will find that they all spring from the training ground of the hierarchical, dictatorial family.

But in the same way that no one studies the 95 % of human history that preceded patriarchal hierarchy, families and households as the training ground of democracy are a vast unstudied part of human experience—and certainly a subject unstudied by political scientists.

If you read the papers, for example, you might think that the sole reason that democracy has emerged in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union had to do with economic deterioration under communist rule. Actually, economic conditions in the past 25 years were better than they had been in previous years. Or you might assume that our arms build-up had something to do with what was happening, that the Soviet Union responded to Ronald Reagan and his right wing friends marching around calling it "evil" and "godless."

Of course, there are always many factors at work, but one important and usually ignored factor is the relationship between the way children are raised and the political forms that result. Before the Russian Revolution, religious fervor combined with feudal society to create forms of child rearing that were quite authoritarian and abusive. For one thing, religion suppressed contraception, and people had too many children. Because they couldn't care for all these babies while they went out to the fields, they often left children swaddled—tied to boards with rags—and left immobilized in these urine-soaked rages for the entire day. Children were also beaten as discipline', an abuse justified by a religious theory of child-rearing—one we recognize in this country, too—which treated children as little animals whose spirits had to be broken.

Can you imagine any better way to induce cultural passivity than being tied to a board as an infant? Can you imagine any deeper way of learning that nothing you do matters? Can you imagine any training in violence more effective than imbedding it in your earliest relationship to the world?

As you know, when bad things happen to kids, they come to think they are bad people. They grow up believing they need authoritarian leaders to discipline them, that whatever goes wrong is

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their fault and that their only hope of change is to grow up and impose their will on others.

If you look at the background of despots in all parts of the world, you will find that they themselves were often sadistically abused kids. They grew up believing there were only two choices: either be the victim or the victimizer. For instance, Stalin was a sadistically abused kid. I am not a childhood determinist, mind you. I believe violent childhoods can be healed, and patterns can change, but when they do not change, the violence keeps being acted out. It has the deep power of feeling like home.

In the Soviet Union, patterns gradually changed after the revolution. As society became more secular and the birthrate went down, children were raised with a little more humanity and individual attention, so you got people like Gorbachev, who was a gently-bred child. Because his will and self-authority were more respected by his elders, he could imagine that other people could also make decisions for themselves. Thus, a Russian leader emerged who could begin to imagine the possibility of self-government and democracy. So did a large number of people who could make their own decisions instead of being passive.

The good—the bad—people experience in families is writ large in the world of politics, culture and foreign policy. For instance, there are studies of good Samaritans during World War II, people who helped Jews even though they themselves were not Jewish, and even though they were risking their own lives. I find it fascinating that their single, most often shared characteristic seems to be that they were not severely abused as children. Without abuse, there is no fear and trauma to cut off the natural leap of empathy for other human beings. If you see someone else in trouble, you empathize instead of trying to disassociate. But abuse, violence, neglect, ridicule, humiliation, sexual abuse—all these things interrupt the natural flow of empathy. They close us down emotionally. They make us feel that we must either conquer or be conquered.

So nothing, nothing, nothing could be more important than the kinds of families we create, whether they are chosen families, biological families, extended families, whatever forms they take, nothing could be more important than the content of respect, democracy, nurturing and compassion, because it will be writ large

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in the world.

Personally I agree with Mililani about gender, because it is culturally created. Gender roles are not the same from one culture to the next. They are not about biology; they are about culture. Hopefully, one day there will be no gender; there will be humanity instead. Because the truth is that each of us contains the full circle of human qualities. Each is also a unique miracle that could never have happened before and could never happen again, because our unique blend of millennia of particular heredity and particular environment could never happen again. In male-dominant cultures, however, 75% of human qualities are arbitrarily called "masculine," leaving about 25% which are called "feminine." If you list them and ask people which qualities are masculine and which are feminine, that's the way it turns out. So naturally, women are on the forefront of revolution, because we have more to gain. We've lost 75% of ourselves. But men have a lot to gain, too. They've lost 25% of themselves.

We're all trying to become whole people. I think the chance to develop the full circle of human qualities is always with us, but it's easier the younger we are, and the less damaged we are. Even in concept, however, I think we're only half-way there—even in our imaginations.

We have imagined that women can do what men can do, and so we've convinced most of the country. But most of us haven't convinced ourselves that men can do what women can do, and so we haven't convinced the country. Many of us have had the courage to raise our daughters more like our sons, which is great, because they are more whole people. But few of us have had the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters—and so there are fewer men raising children than there are women achieving outside the home.

Until, as in Kwei culture, boys are raised to raise children, until men raise and nurture babies and little children as much as women do, both males and females are going to be cursed with the prison of gender. Kids are going to grow up thinking that, if they are boys, they can't be loving and nurturing. Girls are going to grow up thinking they must be loving and nurturing and can't be daring in the world outside the home, just because they are girls. Masculinity

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will continue to be culturally emphasized in unbalanced ways. Gender status will have to be earned through violent or controlling behavior to be "a man," and through passive and submissive behavior to be "a woman." And this will continue to be the deepest model for racial roles and class roles.

Often, we are overwhelmed by the enormity of the work there is to do. After all, we have to overthrow or humanize—you can pick your verb depending on how patient you feel today—patriarchy, racism, nationalism, multi-national corporations, hierarchy itself;

just a few little things like that. That's why I think it's helpful to think about who lived on this land 20,000 years ago, 50,000 years ago.

We also need to look at our own personal history and see how far we have come. And we have to realize that, in fact, everything we do matters. The art of behaving morally, ethically, is behaving as if everything we do matters—because it does. Marx got a lot of things right, but one thing he didn't get right was his idea that the end justifies the means. In fact, the means is the end. The means we choose dictate the ends we achieve. We must always remember that as we pursue feminist family values.

If we feel discouraged, we can take heart in the new physics, which tells us that the world itself is not hierarchical, but a kind of orderly chaos in which everything is both independent—and interdependent. We can remember that the flap of a butterfly's wings here can change the weather hundreds of miles away.

Everything we do matters. Everything we do has enormous power. We are a continuum of the past. Together, all of us in this room— and the world could be a lot more like this room—make one hell of a butterfly,

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Maria Limon

Poet and Writer Foundation for a Compassionate Society

My name is Maria Limon, and I'd like to thank everyone who came from so far away and welcome them to Occupied Mexico. Some of us still remember!

I've been hard-pressed to introduce a woman who needs no introduction, a woman who is history. So I've been walking around for the last few days asking people what they think of when they her the name Angela Davis.

Ana Sisnett spoke of possibilities and presence. The simple knowledge that Angela was a professor of philosophy at UCLA opened the possibilities of being in ways that Ana had never seen before.

Lillian Stevens thinks of traffic tickets. She spoke of how her introduction to the revolution was to have her driver's license revoked because of all the traffic tickets she got when she refused to remove her 'Free Angela Davis and All Political Prisoners' bumper sticker from her car. Police, she said, would drop out of the sky to give her tickets.

Erin Rogers spoke of how Angela's last presentation at UT changed not only her life but the entire political context on campus. Erin said the presentation helped get Toni Luckett, a black lesbian,

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elected as student body president.

And for this chicanita from Aztlán, Angela Davis represents vast and open possibilities.

Angela Davis is a woman who maintains the integrity required of anyone who holds their commitment to struggle against all forms of oppression. And this Ms. Davis has done for decades throughout this country's contemporary political history, at great personal risk. My life has been changed by her words, challenged by her example, and enriched by her presence on this planet.

Today Angela Davis is a tenured professor in the History of Consciousness program at U.C. Santa Cruz. She received the distinguished honor of an appointment to the University of California Presidential Chair in African American and Feminist Studies.

As Patti Salas put it, Angela Davis is the most chingona professor on the planet. Roughly translated, it means that she's one powerful woman. She talks the talk and walks the walk in some of the most difficult places among the most challenging situations.

Ms. Davis continues her work advocating for prisoner's rights. She conducted a series of interviews with incarcerated women for a research project that seeks to develop ideas for new progressive legislation around the penal system.

And Angela Davis the writer and thinker continues to provoke, inspire, and urge others to keep thinking and working right alongside her with essays, articles, and a forthcoming book with the working title of "Gertrude 'Ma' Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday: Black Women's Music and Social Consciousness."

Please help me welcome professor Angela Davis.

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Angela Davis

Activist, Professor, History of Consciousness Department University of California, Santa Cruz

It is an honor to be able to address you after having listened to the wonderful, inspiring words of Mililani Trask and Maria Jimenez and Gloria Steinem. I was sitting there, thinking to myself—what is there left to say?

I want to begin by suggesting that particularly at this time in the history of our country and the history of the globe, radical activism is needed more than ever before. I also want to suggest that women and women's issues need to be at the forefront in this radical activism. Some of you might think it's archaic to talk about radical activism. After all, activism is generally associated with a generation that is approximately the age of your parents.

Something else began to bother me somewhat as I listened to

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these powerful words. I asked myself—who is the youngest among us? I think our panel should have included a few women who are much younger. One of the issues that we really need to address is intergenerational communication and particularly the importance of accepting young women as leaders. As a matter of fact, I don't think we can move forward if young women and young people are not at the forefront of our struggles. You have to be a little young and crazy to get out there and do the things that are necessary in order to try to change the world.

Consider that everyone sitting on the stage this evening became involved in social movements at a very young age. So where are you who are presently the age we were at the beginning of our social involvements? The next time there's an enormous gathering like this, some of you will need to be up here as well.

There are so many challenges facing us, challenges which require us to think in feminist, anti-racist, anti-homophobic, anti-capitalist ways. As a matter of fact, this evening's theme revolves around new values, feminist values. Those values have to be anti-racist and anti-capitalist values. And the challenge of the women's movement today is to figure out how to turn back this terrible tide of reaction that threatens to overcome all of us. These are dangerous times, very dangerous times.

How can we prevent the attempt to dismantle affirmative action programs all over the country for people of color and for women of all racial and ethnic backgrounds. What can we do to stop the rise of immigrant bashing?

I come here from California, I'm sad to say. California is the state where immigrants from Mexico—people from Central America who are called immigrants—are under attack. However, I don't think there is anyone in this country who has the right not to call herself or himself an immigrant, except indigenous people. In California, people from Mexico and Central America are cruelly beaten by the police, such as in the Riverside incident. California has passed Proposition 187, which denies education and health care to undocumented immigrants.

How can we prevent the criminalization and demonization of people who are called non-citizens? How can we prevent the

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incarceration of ever-increasing numbers of men and of women as well? The rate of increase in the arrest of women is about twice that of the rate of increase in the arrest and incarceration of men. So if you look at the historical trajectory down the line, across the millennium, vast numbers of women—most of them will be women of color—will populate the jails and prisons. We will be facing an exploding punishment industry that will claim large numbers of women as its victims.

How can we prevent the overruling of the educational system by the prison system? How can we bring an end to sexual violence, and how can we integrate a challenge to homophobia into all of the work that we do? I have just listed some of the urgent questions facing us. This is the most complicated historical moment we have ever experienced.

Young, emerging activists, tend to romanticize the 60s. We must totally dismiss the notion that radicalism is a uniquely 60s phenomena. Oftentimes people who moved into social-political activism during the 60s tend to respond nostalgically to the challenges that I've listed, and tend to assume that, "Well, if only we could organize now like we organized back then things would be different."

But during that period, when the student movement swept the country, when the civil rights movement and movements in Latino, Black, Asian American, Native American communities began to develop and become widespread, when the Women's Movement emerged, our notions of struggle were rather simple. We embraced a rather simplistic notion of who counted as the enemy and who counted as a friend. As a matter of fact, we could draw a line and argue that everyone on the other side of the line was the enemy. Sometimes that line was a racial line, sometimes that line was a gender line, sometimes that line was a class line, but we knew who the enemy was! No doubt about it!

In those days, what we have come to call "interlocking oppressions" or a "matrix of domination" or "intersecting oppressions" were unheard of. This notion of a complicated interaction of categories of gender and class and sexuality and race mutually determining one another, had not even been

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conceptualized. As a matter of fact, if you think back to the Civil Rights period, gender, as we know it, hadn't been seriously considered. Gloria was talking about the ultimate withering away of gender, but during the Civil Rights period we didn't even have the word "gender," within our political vocabularies.

As a matter of fact, as the Women's Movement emerged, we tended to use the word "sex." Sexuality wasn't in the picture; the word "homophobia" hadn't even been invented. But at the same time it is really important for us to understand today that those movements, however simplistic they may have been from the historical perspective of those of us who are situated in the late 1990s, changed many of our common sense notions. They changed the common sense of the entire country—our common sense notions of race, gender; of race and racism, of gender and misogyny.

Since the Reagan-Bush era, what we have witnessed is the rise of a conservative movement that has managed by now to reverse those common sense notions which we transformed through movement and struggle. They have been successful to the extent that today many people assume racism no longer exists. When something like the beating of a black man in Los Angeles takes place, it is interpreted as a horrible hold-over from an era that has long been transcended.

If you look at the assumption on which the arguments against affirmative action are made, it is that racism no longer exists because many of the laws, according to which discrimination was legally authorized, have been changed. However, today racism is more profoundly inscribed in the political economy of the United States than ever before. Racism is more strongly entangled with misogyny than ever before.

It's true that black people may not be told today where to sit on buses and trains or where to eat or where to go to school, or where to live, but racism is still very much at work in determining who goes to prison and who doesn't, who is destined to rely on the welfare system, and who isn't; who is considered an immigrant and scapegoated in multiple ways, and who isn't. One of the things we need to think very deeply about is the extent to which we tend to conceive of issues of race in black/white terms. We need to move

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beyond the black/white binary in the way we think about issues of race. That, of course, is especially important in this part of the country, where there are large numbers of Chicanes, Latinos and Native Americans.

Many people have pointed out that affirmative action isn't as new as it appears to be. It is assumed that it came about as a result of the Civil Rights struggle. Affirmative action models were developed as far back as the New Deal. As a matter of fact, Karen Brodkin Sachs has written an article which is entitled, "How Jews Became White Folks." She points out that the New Deal benefits (the GI Bill, for example,) created an economic base for Jews and ethnic Europeans. It wasn't so much by their own bootstraps that they pulled themselves up. They were helped by the government. And the fact is, large numbers of GIs of color received dishonorable discharges, and therefore were not eligible for the GI Bill. So that's something to think about as we debate the merits of affirmative action for people of color and women of all racial backgrounds.

I want to join with all my sisters who emphasize the importance of looking at our local struggles within a global context. It is essential to think about transnational capitalism these days—and to think deeply about the extent to which people equate "democratic values" with "capitalist values." This is a point that Handrail Mohanty has eloquently made.

It is feminists' responsibility to contest that equation, and to legitimize open critiques of capitalism. We can't be satisfied with this system. Many people assume that socialism didn't work. It didn't work in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, because of the lack of economic and political democracy. That might be true, but we need to emphasize that those specific socialist experiments didn't work. That does not mean that there is no possibility of envisioning a social system beyond capitalism. We cannot be content with this system.

And I think I have the right to say, at my age, (and I have entered my second half-century), that I have struggled too long and too hard to give up at this point. Let's just talk for a moment about the ways in which transnational capital migrates all over the world, at will. It does not recognize national borders, and often the very

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routes that are carved out by transnational corporations fleeing organized labor and seeking cheap labor pools, are the circuits that are used by people who then come from those countries to the United States.

But we don't hear criticisms of immigrant corporations, do we? These corporations are fleeing organized labor. At the present time only 12% of the labor force in this country is organized. That is even less than when the great organizing drives began in the 1930s. Communities literally die as a result of the fact that these corporations close down shop. They leave an economic vacuum; people lose their jobs, the tax base for education disappears, and then, of course, new economies move.

And what are those new economies? (Response from audience: "WalMart!") No. If people in a community don't have a job and therefore don't have money, WalMart is not going to move into that community because nobody will be able to shop there—not even at WalMart. These alternate economies are drug economies, economies in sexual services. And that, in turn, leads people directly into the punishment industry. These are the people who are then criminalized; these are the people who are identified as "the enemy."

At the same time, so-called anti-crime ideologies flourish. Evoke the notion of crime and people are willing to do anything, the most cruel things imaginable, like putting six-year old kids in Juvenile Hall. Granted, the six-year-old boy in the San Francisco Bay Area did a horrible thing when he beat up an infant. But since when do you put children that age in jail, or convict parents whose son committed a crime for not sufficiently supervising the son? You see where "family" values will take you; they will take you toward fascism.

The criminal is usually figured as a young black man. As a matter of fact, 32.5 % of all young black men between 20 and 29 are now in prison. In California, 40 % of all young black men are in prison. In California, 75 % of all young black men have been arrested at one time or another.

And of course, when you look at those people who are in prison, the majority are there for non-assaultive crimes. But when we think about convicts, who do we think about? Most often people associate

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criminals with child-molesters, murderers, ect. That is the basis on which fear is generated, which then makes it impossible for people to think critically about the punishment industry which is creating an increasingly incarcerated society.

Then we have the ideological figure of the immigrant which strikes fear into the hearts of many people in this country. This is a racism which is embraced by people of color as well in this anti-immigrant campaign.

I want to conclude by making some suggestions regarding organizing strategies. In order to meet the very complicated challenges we face as we move toward the next millennium, our consciousness needs to reflect the complexity of the way our lives are structured. Bemice Reagan has pointed out, and many of you have probably read her essay, that coalitional work needs to be a central strategy in late 20th century organizing practices.

We have to start thinking in political terms. We have to begin to politicize our identities; to consider our identities not fixed, but flexible identities, that can be established in accordance with the political projects we do and political goals that we posit. In the work that we are doing, we need to do unlikely coalitional work. We need to create formations that are based on the notion of unlikely coalitions.

What I've been thinking about are coalitions between students and prisoners, for example. Students and prisoners can work together, because that's the only way to save the educational system. Otherwise, the punishment industry is going to devour all of the funds that ought to be directed toward the educational system.

Another coalition that should be encouraged is one that would bring together the welfare rights activists and gay and lesbian activists, because both welfare mothers and gays and lesbians are directly targeted by the racialized and sexualized conservative emphasis on "family values." Maybe we need to have more marches. What would a march look like with welfare mothers and gays and lesbians? Not that the two are mutually exclusive, but that would be a very powerful demonstration.

We also need to think about coalitional work that brings together both documented and undocumented immigrants on the

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one hand, and young African American, Asian American, Latino, Native American youth who are all targeted by this devious criminalization process that replaces the legitimate need for jobs, education and health care with a very effective demonization of all these groups.

In this context it is certainly time to revise the demand for a reconsideration of the 8-hour day. We need a shorter work day. Gloria was talking about history and memory. The 8-hour day hasn't been around forever. Workers fought for an 8-hour day because they had a 10-hour day. Before that, they fought for the 10-hour day because they were working 12 hours a day. And certainly with this crisis that we're facing, one of the ways that we could envision jobs for undocumented immigrants, as well for vast numbers of unemployed youths in communities of color, would be a shorter work day.

These are a few of my own ideas. I know that there are young people in the audience who can come up with some ideas that are far more radical, and far more appealing, because you have a sense of what people, young women and men of your generation, are prepared to do.

I want to conclude by thanking the Foundation for Compassionate Society, Genevieve Vaughan, and all of the wonderful women whom you've seen and heard from today for giving us the opportunity to come together, to hold hands with each other, and to think creatively and radically about the possibilities of the future.

Thank you very much.

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Dialogue

Question: A lot of the laws that are placed on us aren't really created by us. A lot of them are patriarchal, made to keep us down, I'm wondering how you feel about activism that breaks the law.

Angela: Civil disobedience is great.

Question cont: So go out there, and if you don't agree with the law, do you let them know that?

Angela: Civil disobedience is a proven tactic of struggle. It has a long history, but it needs to be organized.

Question: I'm 27, I'm trying to go back and get my Master's Degree. I'm working, I'm making in the low twenties, and I want to know how everybody gets the energy and the time—with my over eight-hour-a-day job and I have no children—I still can't seem to find enough time. By the time I'm done, in bed, it's eleven or twelve at night, and I'm tired, and I haven't even done anything that you have done, I haven't even read the books that I want to read—

Gloria: I think that we need to think of social revolution as something that is just part of our lives. If we think it has to be a big thing, we put it off. Then we never do it. But if we just say to ourselves: I'm going to write five outrageous letters every week. I'm going to give 10% of my salary to social justice of some kind, whatever it is you think you want to give it to, I mean, it's the best investment you'll ever make. The money isn't going to be worth anything next year anyway. I'm going to go to one demonstration a month just to keep my blood tingling, whatever.

I think also that women are without a country or a neighborhood, so I find it very helpful to have a group of women I

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can meet with once a week and be encouraged by them. You can think of outrageous things to do together.

Question: How did you all know this was want you wanted to do?

Mililani: One of the things about human rights and social justice work is that it is exhausting, and burn-out is something that we all suffer from, and what we have to remember is that part of being a woman is sustaining yourself. One of the things that we have to guard against is our tendency to give so much that we bankrupt our own spirit.

Also you have to set priorities for yourself, and you have to remember, that spiritual balance is the wellspring of our energy. If you're to lead your nation, you have to have a spiritual balance. Sometimes, I have to w