Consider these two images from recent news events: 20,000 monks marching past Burmese Nobel Laureate Aung Sun Suu Kyi's home to protest the democracy leader's 11-year house arrest and the country's military junta. Condoleeza Rice announcing plans for a peace conference at some unnamed future time.
Both these women wield a form of power. Who they are, how they use it, how they see the world and whom they're allied with make all the difference in our reaction to them.
At a conference last month called "Women, Power and Peace," at Omega Institute for Holistic Studies in Rhinebeck, New York, Nobel Laureate Jody Williams stated emphatically, "Shared anatomy is not shared values....I'm sorry but Condoleeza Rice is a man in a woman's suit." Williams, one of three U.S. women to win the Nobel Peace Prize, was honored in 1997 for her work against anti-personnel mines.
The word "power" became a lightening rod at the event. In a spirited dialogue between Williams and media professional Pat Mitchell (a Women's Media Center board member), Williams said she had problems with the word. "I didn't do what I did for power. I don't think of it in terms of power. When I started as an activist, I did it because I thought it was the right thing to do," she said, adding, "Maybe I just want to 'zoom under the radar.'" Pat Mitchell then noted many accomplishments resulting from Williams' "power" and prestige as a Nobel Laureate, arguing that "part of the reason that women aren't in the group where decisions are being made today is that we will still move away from power."
The need to define a new paradigm of power, especially in order to create peace, is critical for progressive women. "The only point of having power, it seems to me, is to empower others," said Eve Ensler, of the anti-violence organization V-Day, which sponsored the event along with the Nobel Women's Initiative and the Women's Institute at Omega. "Unfortunately," she continued, "we have now come to identify women and power not as the radicalization of the mechanism and definition of power, but instead women climbing to the top of the current patriarchy and bureaucratic hierarchy at any cost."
In a recent interview, Jane Fonda, who spoke at the conference, told me, "Women view power differently. It's not power over -- it's power with. It's about empowering others. Now, again -- there are some women who view power the way men do. But generally speaking, women do it differently. It's not hierarchical, it's circular." Fonda (also a WMC board member) added that women needed to "get over the feeling that the two words don't go together -- women and power. The fact is, if we don't put the two together, and don't understand how power changes complexion in the hands of women, then we're not going to make it."
Hillary Clinton loomed as a somewhat divisive specter over the event. On its second day, Omega co-founder Elizabeth Lesser informed the audience that members of the Clinton campaign were in the audience, and asked Nobel Laureate Betty Williams -- 1976 winner as co-founder of the Northern Ireland Peace Movement -- how these women might bring some of these messages back to their candidate in a way she could hear. Williams responded, "I'd love to see a woman in office in the United States of America. However, the term woman comes first. Not one of the boys. I think Hillary has to remove herself from being one of the boys. That's the message you're going to have to give her. To me, to stand for what's right -- it doesn't matter if she loses the election or not." (It's worth noting that a few days after the conference, Clinton finally released her comprehensive health care plan, exactly the kind of caring policies and bold position these speakers had been looking for.)
We were also reminded at the conference about the individual power we all have as women to shape the world, in our homes, our workplace, our communities. All of the conference speakers -- a number of whom came from conflict zones such as the Congo, Bosnia, Haiti and Afghanistan -- testified that they had begun as ordinary women and citizens who had witnessed injustice and turned their anger and outrage into tangible change in their communities. Pat Mitchell stressed, "There's nothing that feels better than tapping into the power that each of us has to make a difference. If you ever feel it, and you see a life changed or someone's situation improve or your community better, that's a power you want to feel again." Jody Williams advised, "Imagine if everybody of good will gave one hour a month to some issue they really cared about. The world would begin to be really
transformed."
What one came away with, whether you wanted to call it "power" or not, was the fact that women have an urgent role to play in addressing the critical problems facing our world. Betty Williams spelled out our responsibility. "Women will transform the world," she said. "The world will not change without us doing it."
This post first appeared on the Women's Media Center.
Follow Marianne Schnall on Twitter: www.twitter.com/marianneschnall
Women shouldn't shy away from traditional positions of power, but instead take the positions and transform them from power "over" to power "with." I think that's what we'd like to see Hill do.
Gotta be honest though, I wouldn't mind if Obama offered to do it.
Too bad really. Our country would benefit from a Congress filled with people interested in empowering others rather than circling the wagons inside the Beltway and leaving the citizens on the outside.
Hillary, Condi, Aung Sun Suu Kyi and You
HUMMMM
Blind Support for Clinton using Nobel Women - WEll let's
take a look ....
""For the Clinton administration, Myanmar is yet another spot
where its efforts to promote democracy and expand U.S.
commercial interests abroad have collided.""
~It will change not because of outside pressure, but
because of changes from within~
"Burma's situation is much like Thailand a couple of decades
ago. It will change not because of outside pressure, but
because of changes from within."
""Rigoberta Menchú was born on January 9, 1959 to a poor Indian peasant
family and raised in the Quiche branch of the Mayan culture.""
Clinto support for US-BACKED GOV against the MYAN people - Nobel prize winner
Rigoberta Menchú - By Clinton supporter's ...
Good-humored and defiant, Menchú, speaking through an interpreter,
charged that her critics had attacked her to strike at an indigenous
people for daring to add "to the official story our own story."
David Horowitz was born in 1939 to a Jewish family in Forest Hills. His parents,
Phil and Blanche Horowitz, were school-teachers in Sunnyside Gardens, in the borough
of Queens in New York City. Horowitz attended Columbia University and later the
University of California, Berkeley, where he received a master's degree in English
literature.
His parents were long-standing members of the Communist Party. While still identifying
as a Marxist, Horowitz, along with many other left wing figures of his generation,
sought to distance himself from the Soviet Union. Horowitz was employed during the
1960s as a political aide to Bertrand Russell.[1] Horowitz at this time was a close
friend and associate of Marxist historian Isaac Deutscher. Horowitz wrote a biography
of Deutscher in 1971.
After returning to the U.S. in 1968, he wrote several books that were influential in
New Left critiques of American society and particularly its foreign policy, including
The Free World Colossus: A Critique of American Foreign Policy in the Cold War. Horowitz
was an editor at the influential New Left magazine, Ramparts.