WHAT WOMEN KNOW...

and sometimes feel brave enough to say

Halfpoint Imgages

I’ve done a lot of international travel recently, not because I intended to do a global swing but because things simply turned out that way.

From Brazil I traveled to Argentina, England, the UAE, India, Australia, and now back to five cities in the United States. You never learn as much about yourself as you do in relationship with other people, and you never learn as much about your country as you do when you experience other places.

With the exception of the UAE of course, where such conversation is more than strongly discouraged, people were eager to talk about the same political dynamics we’re talking about in the United States. Having said that, by the way, I had a beautiful experience in Abu Dhabi. I had plenty of meaningful conversations, just not political ones.

Regarding other countries I visited, America is in no position to preach to anyone about anything right now, and I knew that. In England and Australia, I frequently pointed out that among free democratic nations, a star player on the team is clearly benched for a while. I promised that millions of us are doing everything we can to get our country back in the game, but that until then I hope they’ll all rise up, play their best, and pick up the slack so democracy can remain a winning team! It seems clear to everyone that there has been a big tree syndrome going on here for decades, the United States so overshadowing the “middle powers” that some of them didn’t grow as tall as they might have under the shade of that big tree. The recalibration occurring now – and they’re all aware that such recalibration is essential – will in the long run be good for everyone, I believe. But as most of us are aware, “in the long run” could be a long, long time.

My talk last weekend was in Chicago, for International Women’s Day. It was hosted by ALTAR, a place I highly recommend to you Chicagoans out there. I began with a brutally honest inventory of what’s gone wrong in the Women’s Movement in the U.S. over the last fifty years. How did we go from Gloria Steinem and Shirley Chisholm and what seemed like such a promise of new possibilities for women, to Donald Trump in the White House and a Phase 2 Project 2025 intent on rolling back whatever gains we’ve made?

I think such dissection is important, if we’re to course-correct on fundamental levels. I’m only taking on a few issues here but hopefully they can inspire further thought.

Among other things, over the years we seem to have lost a sense of sisterhood. In the early days, we were all aware that none of us would get there unless all of us got there. If we weren’t loyal to one another, the patriarchal status quo would divide and conquer us at every turn. And indeed it did. A woman who thinks female empowerment is simply about she herself getting ahead, is applying patriarchal values to her efforts to beat the patriarchy!

Also, while the Women’s Movement paved the way for extraordinary advances for millions of individual women – before 1974, a woman couldn’t even get an American Express card without her husband’s permission! - we didn’t address the deeper psychological roots of misogyny. In many cases, we ended up internalizing them. We didn’t realize how important it would be to avoid the temptation to be co-opted by the patriarchal institutions we were let into. There seemed to be this magical belief that once we got there, all would be well.

So yes, it was great that women got seats on boards, high corporate positions, and so forth. But for the most part, we weren’t invited to bring our feminine values with us. We were simply invited to parrot the patriarchal values already in play. We ended up fueling those values more than challenging them, adding our talents and resources to an already existing status quo.

If we were invited to the table when men were discussing the corporate bottom line, for instance, it wasn’t appreciated if we piped up to say we weren’t totally satisfied that the product we were selling had been tested enough for child safety. Our voice was then far less appreciated, with labels such as “not a team player” or “difficult” or “not supportive of the company” often written next to our name. Knowing this, and so grateful simply to be in the room, millions of women began to self-censor. We shrank so as not to offend, be called bitchy, or kooky, or whatever else.

None of this was or is men versus women by the way, as a system that favors men devours them too. The imbalance it causes does harm to both sexes psychologically, emotionally, and physically.

It’s painful to realize all the ways that we’ve ended up sliding backwards as a society over the last fifty years. But sometimes we have to recognize what went wrong before we can fundamentally make things right. It’s not as easy as simply saying, “Raise your voice!” For women (as for any formerly disempowered group), if you haven’t been able to say what you really felt in the public realm, and your mother hadn’t been able to, and her mother hadn’t been able to, then finding your voice can be hard. At first it comes out angry perhaps, or screechy. Then you find yourself on a constant seesaw, not knowing whether to eat your truth or to express it in a way that may or may not repel others. It can take a long time, even years, to get to the point where you own your "Yes” and you own your “No,” yet can do so with sophistication and without anger. Then you’re clear, you’re peaceful, and you’re heard.

Another trap we fell into was thinking that certain institutions were our friends, when in fact they saw us more in terms of what we could do for them than what they were willing to do for us - and what they were willing to do for our children. We were told to “be patient,” that we had to go for “what’s achievable,” that “we just need to help them win re-election” and then we would get what we thought was important. Meanwhile, no we did not get universal healthcare for us or for our children, we did not get better cultural or educational opportunities for our children, we did not get a healthier or more peaceful planet - and we did not demand it. More often than not, we didn’t support other women when they did stand for those things. If a woman is made to appear radioactive - a common punishment for challenging the status quo - then other women too often fear that supporting her would make them radioactive too! We continued to believe those who said, in essence, “Don’t worry your pretty little head about it, we got this,” when in fact they so did not. We had the strange belief that they were Wizards of Oz who somehow knew things that we didn’t know, when in fact what they desperately needed to know was the knowledge we carry in our hearts. And we ourselves are responsible for that. The Wizards of Oz were simply weak and broken men, hiding behind a curtain, and we should have pulled that curtain back long ago. It’s important to understand why we didn’t, and become the women who are more than ready to do so now. Having broken through so many external chains, it’s time to dissolve the internal ones. We were bound; now let’s be free.

Meanwhile the world just continued, and still continues, to burn. They say there’s no more money for our children, no more money for their education, no more money for our health, but goodness how money miraculously appears when it’s needed to wage more war! What could possibly be more urgent than for women to rise now, not only to use our voices but to grab more levers of power and to use them to change the world?

*I’ll be leading a Wise Women’s Retreat this coming weekend in Boone, North Carolina, for those of you looking to dig deeper into the spiritual in order to fly higher in the world. We’ll mine the intimate relationship between inner and outer change, releasing old wounds and embracing new strengths, activating our inherent power to be the woman we most long to be at this sacred and urgent hour.