October 2, 2003
Awakened Woman's Circle is working for peace
The Gather the Women Congress: How do we build an effective women's movement?
An interview with Kathe Schaaf
by Stephanie Hiller
The Gather the Women Congress was conceived by one woman, Kathe Schaaf. It was in March, soon after the first Gather the Women event, where women in 60 different countries had linked their celebrations of International Women's Day through the Gather the Women web site.
"I was reading Carol Flinder's book, At The Root of This Longing, and I came on a paragraph about how the feminist movement, while it attracted powerful and brilliant women over the years, it had never coalesced into a movement for social reform.
"I started writing and 8 pages later I had all the info about how to bring together the groups that had participated in Gather the Women face to face -- how to begin to create a container for that meeting. But only how to begin!"
When Kathe shared her idea with Carol Hansen Grey, executive director of Women of Vision and Action (WOVA), Carol thought the idea was "amazing" but she did not have the time and resources to put it together. So Kathe took it on, and for the past nine years she has been working 60 hours a week on the project, as a volunteer.
I talked with Kathe last Sunday by phone, to clarify what is the intention of this new Congress and find out how spirituality and politics are being connected at the event.
"Since that moment the vision keeps on expanding exponentially. The image that comes to me is of dough that just keeps jumping outside the bowl. The trick has been to just hold the container for ideas to flow in."
Kathe speaks with the enthusiasm of a visionary and an energy that is contagious about "operating in a new paradigm using feminine principles based on grace."
At the core of this Congress is "a new kind of systems thinking. We are looking at the global culture as a complex adaptive system, and what do we know about how complex adaptive systems work. We live in a holographic universe, and each one of us holds within us all the information that we need to affect all of the other aspects of the hologram."
Myriam Laberge and Brenda Chaddock are two consultants in Vancouver who have volunteered their time to create the organizational design of the conference. Myriam framed this question for the proceedings: "How do we hospice what is no longer working? How do we nurture what is working well, and how to we midwife what is needed and wants to emerge." For Kathe, this language "is very powerful, because we all know that structures, whole structures, that have been in place for a long time now, that have created the overarching paradigms of our entire culture, one by one by one they're beginning to fall down around our ears. Our whole political structure is no longer working. Democracy, whether it ever did function, clearly is no longer functioning, and the nation had the opportunity to sleep walk through that together during the last presidential election. We are currently sleep walking through it in the California recall election and we'll have the opportunity on October 7 to see how many people work up.
"The whole structure is in its death throes. Some of these structures need to completely die and there are things we can do to hospice that -- to help it die -- so that the new can be birthed."
What does she hope will come out of this gathering?
"Well that's a very complicated question because I am only one of 330 women. In many ways your intuitions about what may come out of this are as valid as mine. That's what makes this a unique and in some ways a difficult paradigm to hold. Because when this information downloaded for me, it never once has downloaded the end result. It just keeps informing me how to keep the container open.
"One of the hopes that I have in my heart is that somehow this event can be the beginning of the beginning, or a new typee of effective coalition of women, the next step for feminism, to heal this world. To bring it into balance. That's the message of Gather the Women, it's been the message since Day One. This planet is out of balance -- it is out of balance in terms of masculine and feminine power, it is out of balance in terms of distribution of resources and wealth, it is out of balance in terms of mutuality and respect, it is out of balance. And the new balance -- the new balance is described as articulately as I've ever seen it described in Carol Flinders' book The Values of Belonging, the follow up to The Roots of this Longing. The subtitle is Rediscovering Balance, Mutuality, Intuition and Wholeness in a Competitive World.
"She looks at the last major tipping point for humanity, which she sees to have occurred about the 4th century, at the end of the hunter gather culture, when we tipped globally in a very short period of time in diverse cultures all over the world that at that time didn't have any way of communicating with each other, and made the transition to an agrarian culture, that was very much based on competition, on ownership, on who had more; and he who had more had, everything."
Can we call it patriarchy? I ask her.
"Yes, we can use that word."
But as soon as you bring up patriarchy, controversy is bound to enter the conversation. Kathe refers to something I wrote about relieving men of their privilege. She has amended that somewhat. "Part of what we need to accomplish is to relieve men of the burden of their privilege.
Kathe, 51, is married and raising two young boys, 10 and 14. "I work at my marriage every single day. And my husband is working every single day on not being entitled!
"I have these two amazing sons and I don't want them to be paralyzed by that burden, as so many men are.
"The reality is every time you use that word patriarchy, men contract. They contract in fear and there is nothing more dangerous on the planet than a fearful man."
That is so interesting! But we don't have time to go there right now. Men, anyway, will not be at Congress, and that, Kathe points out, was controversy enough. I wonder whether we will end up talking about men at the Congress.
For Kathe, the real question is, "How do we move ahead? How do we continue to hold that space where the conversation will keep evolving onto new levels at the same time that we recognize that it does not serve any of us if anyone contracts.
"We need to begin by allowing women to find their authentic voice and the truth is women don't find their authentic voice in the company of men. They're so damn conciliatory -- they just are. So we have to begin where we are. In order to bring this balance about, the voices of women need to be heard.
"Basically this is a call that we are sending out and the people that will be here are the people that are supposed to be here."
"These women are doing some of the most important work on the planet -- with compassion and wisdom and perseverence and in the true spirit of service -- and yet their contribution is not being valued by our culture. We're all so poor!! SCARCITY, that's part of the paradigm that we have to shift. We can begin to manifest abundance around what we're doing by requiring it, by beginning to function in a different way."
The trick is to hold a Congress where every woman is comfortable, including the woman who is knitting for Jesus. The image of the spiral holds all those possibilities. Along the outside ring are the women who came to nibble. Within that are the women who are ready to connect with other women who inspired them to grow and learn. In the core, are the women who want to know how they can be self sustaining in this new way of thinking. "only then do you get to the vortex," says Kathe, "which is action.
"All we want to do is take them to the next level."