March 4, 2004
Building Bases for peace
A talk delivered in Bari, Italy, on February 14, 2004
by Stephanie Hiller
It's a great pleasure to be here with you today and have this opportunity to meet you. I want to thank the organizers of this conference, especially Maria di Rienzi and Imma Barbarossa, for inviting us to come here to speak. And I also want to thank Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum who traveled here with me. Her books, liberazione della donna, black madonnas, and dark mother have told me so much about what you have been doing in Italy all these years. I -- and my friends in America -- have much to learn from you.
I should tell you a little bit about myself. I was born in New York City during the second world war. My family was Jewish, and some of our relatives disappeared during that war. When I was a teenager, the Governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller, was building bomb shelters in case of nuclear war. I remember feeling deeply threatened by this policy, believing that building bomb shelters would lead to nuclear war, and I became an advocate for unilateral disarmament.
Now I live in California, north of San Francisco where redwood trees still grow, and now, many years later, I'm still trying to figure out how to prevent nuclear war. A few years ago, I had an experience that led to the creation of my online women's magazine, Awakened Woman. It began one spring afternoon when I was walking along the small country lane where I was then living. Looking into the stream beside the road, I discovered what looked to be a little fairy well, carved like a blue bowl in the rock. I sat by the stream staring into that pool, and mysteriously I felt a powerful connection there, as if in my body, in the belly, there was an opening that connected my little life with the whole of nature. I went dancing home, and during the next few years, I became immersed in the lore of the goddess. And in time I conceived the idea of creating a women's magazine dedicated to the goddess as she manifests herself through women. After lots of meditation and prayer, that magazine came into being in 1999. Doing the magazine these past five years, I have become acquainted with some inspired women leaders, and have had the opportunity to observe the progress of the women's movement, doing my part to spur it along.
The women's movement in the United States today is struggling to reshape itself. Since 9-11 women have felt called to respond to the heightened state of crisis we now live in. Patricia Melton Smith woke up one morning in Washington DC with the sense that a circle of powerful women must come together, and that it was her job to call it. The result of that circle was a documentary film about women's actions in several countries, a new organization, Peacexpeace, and a global network linking women's circles in the developed world with women in war-stricken countries.
Another great woman is Heidi Kuhn. Heidi Kuhn had been a correspondent for CNN. She stopped working after she contracted uterine cancer. The mother of three children, she prayed that if she recovered she would do all she could to preserve the life of the world. She got well, but she was told she would not be able to carry another child. Miraculously, she did become pregnant with her fourth child. When he was born, she named him Christian.
When Princess Diana died two years later, Heidi decided to continue her work to clear the world of land mines. During the next five years, her nonprofit organization Roots of Peace has collected hundreds of thousands of dollars to demine war zones in the Balkans and then in Afghanistan. When the mines are removed, the land is seeded with grapes. Vines to mines.
She told me, "I feel very passionate that it's up to the women. We have not only the intellectual capital but the resources of heart. We're the life bearers, we deliver children, we know about seeds. We're literally creating the roots of peace."
Heidi's mission will not be done until every single land mine is gone.
It's incredible what women are doing. When the United Nations showed its lack of interest in holding another International Women's Conference ten years after Beijing as promised, Jean Shinoda Bolen took up the charge. Working tirelessly while continuing to see patients (she is a Jungian psychaitrist) and doing her book tour, she has brought together women from many organizations to collect signatures insisting this conference take place. Very soon you can go to the website at 5WWC.org and add your name to the petition that was organized at last year's Gather the Women Congress just four months ago. All this has been accomplished without creating a hierarchical structure or even a budget. The grassroots women's network wastes no time!
Thanks to the dangerous situation that has prevailed in our world since 9-11, we've just been compelled to find ways to voice our demand for peace. On the eve of the war in Iraq, dozens of women all across the country took off their clothes to bare witness with their bodies in protest of a war that has now been proved to have been completely unnecessary. Millions more all around the world joined the peace marches. And last fall 300 women came together in San Francisco for the first Gather the Women Congress. So it seems that the women's movement is bursting into bloom.
What's not clear is whether it is still a feminist movement.
The image of the feminist in our society is not a flattering one. Feminists are still seen as male-bashing, emasculated women with loud voices, who don't shave our legs or cook dinner, viciously destroy "family values," and threaten the structure of male privilege that holds our society together. Feminism is associated with anarchy and the left, with sexual license, self indulgence and permissiveness, and even with terrorism. As you probably know, rightwinger Pat Robertson blamed the attack on the World Trade Center on feminists! He had to retract that statement but the sting lingers. Many American women -- especially white, married and middle class women -- don't want to be known as feminists.
Young women seem to feel that feminism has accomplished its goals. We've won the right to go to school and to work, and even though women's right to choose is under attack in the US today, we still have Roe vs Wade. Most women expect to have careers. Although we don't receive equal pay -- much less compensation for unpaid work -- women's right to an independent income is now taken for granted. In fact, most women have to work in today's economy, a situation that many of us regret and for which feminists are sometimes blamed.
You know how it goes -- when you need someone to blame, blame a woman…
The big Gather the Women Congress held last October in San Francisco, was conceived on the premise that feminism has failed to create an effective social movement, as organizer Kathe Schaaf told me in an interview. The keynote speaker, Carol Lee Flinders, in her recent book, The Values of Belonging, has attributed the peacefulness of neolithic cultures not to women's leadership but to values men and women shared before the development of agriculture gave rise to private property. Flinders set the tone for a conference that was enthusiastic, positive -- and mild. The Congress sought a "new paradigm using feminine principles based on grace" to replace a social system seen to be in collapse. That system was not identified as patriarchy.
We still have Ms. Magazine, the Feminist Majority and Eve Ensler's V-Day which today is in Mexico protesting the disappearance of more than 300 women in Ciudad Juarez. Code Pink another active feminist political organization is there with them. Lysistrata was performed hundreds of times as a protest against the war in Iraq. Feminism hasn't gone away -- we just don't talk about it.
More crucial than the silence about feminism, though, is the silence about patriarchy. Without naming the system of male privilege that still prevails, we cannot identify its assumptions, nor address the illnesses -- sexual violence and war, racism, widespread depression among women, anorexia and bulemia among young women -- that are its result. In an article in Awakened Woman, Leslene della Madre dissects the unidentified assumptions that prevail in reality TV, where women pander and flirt in pursuit of the dreamboat guy. Without naming patriarchy, without speaking of male privilege, women may accept these weird dating games as normal. Yuck!
Patriarchy is something that is not female and is indeed toxic to females (and men too). But when we name it, then we have to look at femaleness as something distinguished in its own right. The argument from biology, that women are essentially different, was rejected by early feminists as an providing a rationale for our subservience. Postmodern women's studies emphasizing gender have helped to obscure the issues arguing that the gender differences are socially constructed, not real.
For me, the loss of woman's essential difference is a mistake. We are different, biologically and by conditioning. There is a growing body of studies showing that we do things differently. Women's greater support for funding social programs is only one example. Women's management styles have been found to be generally more open than men's, more inclusive, receptive to input from other members of the staff, more cooperative. A study comparing how men and women relate to strangers showed that women meeting for the first time have no trouble finding they have something in common to talk about, whereas men tend to freeze. Studies have also shown that young girls, more than boys, have techniques for resolving conflicts without resorting to violence. And women now are more readily offered loans for small businesses in developing countries. Women have a better record of paying them back!
To me, the differences between women and men seem obvious. Even though we are all a mix of "feminine" and "masculine" attributes and ways of being, and even if we eschew some of the more superficial qualities of either -- women speak softly; men are good with gadgets, and so forth -- we who live in women's bodies have certain unique experiences. One of them, alas, is being forcibly raped. Rape is not a natural event but it happens to us because we are women.
What is natural and essential is our sexuality, regardless of sexual choice -- we have wombs. Women's cyclical rhythms, with all the changeability that implies, profoundly affect how we feel and how we see the world.
We bleed. And though we modern women do our best to ignore the inconvenience of our monthly cycle, bleeding is a monthly confrontation with our elemental be-ing that keeps us anchored to the earth, offering us month after month the opportunity to go through the gateway to a realm where inspiration prevails over analysis. We are taken out -- our routines interrupted, our energy transmuted -- into the realm that Mary Daly has called the Background, where intuition and pure unconditioned being prevail. And sometimes that hurts.
Because we bleed, we can give birth, whether by choice or by accident; and this potentiality for conceiving and carrying new life without even knowing it has begun is a fundamental part of our existence as women. A woman's life can be derailed in an instant. Once again, nature has intervened, and we are grounded in the moment, having to assess the situation and deal with consequences that certainly will disrupt our lives.
To say that we are essentially different from men because we are mothers -- whether we actually have children or not -- does not necessarily imply that we are inferior or that we should be confined to the home. Actually it may mean that we are very special and should be honored for our life-giving power -- and supported in the labor it demands! If we were so honored, the world would be a very different place…
Because we carry babies and raise children, our priorities tend to be different from men's. And the difference is, that we don't take life lightly. We are attached to it, anchored in it, immersed in its rich fluids, and tethered to its results. We want life to succeed through us in its mission, which is to evolve through connection -- through loving relationship.
In a new book, Women, Power, and the Biology of Peace, biologist Judith L. Hand compares men and women with primates and argues that for females, "social stability for long periods" is the first priority. As with primates, raising children takes many years and a lot of effort. "Serious social turmoil or anything that threatens the life of these expensive offspring before they can reproduce -- and certainly war that results in their death or the death or loss of their primary caregiver, their mother -- is hugely counterproductive." Males do not feel so strongly, Hand says, because "male primates are generally more involved in spreading their seed widely rather than investing heavily in any given offspring."
Sound familiar?
This difference is crucial. It is, if you will, essential. If we fully realize the implications of woman's unique difference, we are empowered to identify why it's so urgent, at this perilous moment of human existence, for women to be heard.
We live in dangerous times. There is simply no way to overstate the seriousness of the situation. Even if the American government finds a new leader to change our foreign policy, the planet is over-burdened from wanton industrialization, poisons, and new technology. Life itself is under threat from all directions. The extinction of so many species -- the evidence that climate change is accelerating -- pollution of earth, air, water -- depletion of essential resources -- epidemics of new and strange diseases -- you name it, we've got it. As Dr. Helen Caldicott has said repeatedly, the patient -- the earth -- is terminally ill, and the global economy is moving ahead with no regard for the consequences. Life as we know it is profoundly threatened by human behavior, and if we don't change how we live, everything -- every living thing -- is going to die. Most endangered of all -- ourselves.
By far, the biggest threat to our continued survival is nuclear war. Feminists, no matter how busy with specific women's issues like choice, childcare, divorce, have always found time to protest against war. During the heyday of American feminism, in the 70s and 80s, feminists were active participants in the movement for nuclear disarmament, as you yourselves have certainly been. When the Soviet Union disbanded and the Berlin Wall fell, it seemed that the peace movement had accomplished its goals. The Cold War was over. Even though there were still 50,000 nuclear missiles aimed and ready to fire in the United States alone, nuclear disarmament seemed to be attainable. With START I and START II -- suitable acronyms for the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties that never did complete their mission -- it was possible to believe that a paradigm shift had indeed occurred, that the emerging new consciousness had peaked and triumph was ahead. Reassured, many peace activists turned their attention in other directions.
Nevertheless, in 1995 "Women and Armed Conflict" was the fifth "strategic area" for action in the Platform of Action produced at the fourth International Conference on Women held in Beijing. Most of the objectives in that category were concerned with specific impacts of war on women, but the role of women in peace making was also highlighted. The Platform's goals are:
Recognizing the leading role that women have played in the peace movement:
i. Work actively towards general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control;
ii. Support negotiations on the conclusion, without delay, of a universal and multilaterally and effectively verifiable comprehensive nuclear-test-ban treaty that contributes to nuclear disarmament and the prevention of the proliferation of nuclear weapons in all its aspects;
iii. Pending the entry into force of a comprehensive nuclear-test- ban treaty, exercise the utmost restraint in respect of nuclear testing.
In support, UN Resolution1325 in 2001 called for women's full inclusion in the peace process.
But the Platform's goals were not to be met. Along came 9-11 and, six month's later, Bush unveiled his New Nuclear Posture Review. There he announced that nuclear deterrence could only be achieved by a willingness to use nuclear weapons. Never before has any president since Harry Truman suggested that nuclear weapons would ever be used -- except in the extreme case of nuclear attack from outside. That this administration, sophisticated as it is in effective public relations -- also known as brainwashing -- felt the public would accept the proposal to actually use nuclear weapons and use them pre-emptively, is very significant. It does show how deeply threatened people feel since the fall of the trade center -- and also how numbed out the American public is. It also demonstrates how desperate our leaders are to control a world spinning out of their control.
This Nuclear Posture paves the way for the development, testing and deployment of a new generation of low-yield nuclear weapons like the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator missile. The objective is to develop new, lower-yield nuclear weapons for use against "targets capable of withstanding nonnuclear attack," such as hardened underground bunkers. These small nukes -- which may be bigger than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima -- are relatively invisible. They don't go off above ground creating the signature mushroom cloud that fills our hearts with dread, so they can be promoted as being far less dangerous. Small nuclear weapons could be employed in retaliation for the use of chemical and biological weapons or simply as a response to "surprising military developments." The new nuclear policy includes putting nuclear weapons in space. Nuclear reactors are also used as energy sources in space stations like the one Bush has proposed to put on the moon, so get ready for lunar radiation…
In a special report by the World Policy Institute published in 2002 at its website, William Hartung follows the money behind the new nuclear policy. Few people are aware that the weapons industry has more influence in this administration than even the oil companies have. 32 major policy makers had significant financial ties to the arms industry prior to joining the administration, as compared with 21 appointees with ties to the energy industry. The ten biggest defense industry firms -- including Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Raytheon, Boeing and Northrop Grumman -- gave $8.6 million in political contributions during the election year of 1999/2000, with 61% going to Republican candidates. Such generous donors acquire privileged access to key lawmakers, "access which they can use to shape the terms of the debate over Pentagon spending." Many members of the administration are former lobbyists or former executives of these companies. According to Hartung, Rumsfeld has "made corporate experience a virtual litmus test for appointment to key positions in the Pentagon." Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz once had a consulting contract with Northrop Grumman.
Corporate backed think tanks, especially the Center for Security Policy and the National Institute for Public Policy, also shape weapons policy. Like the American Enterprise Institute and the Program for the New American Century, they are dedicated to the vision of "peace through strength."
Arms manufacturers help support these think tanks, happy to see that nuclear weapons are no longer "undervalued" as they came to be after the end of the Cold War. C. Paul Robinson, director of Sandia Laboratories, a government owned laboratory that helps develop nuclear weapons to be built by Lockheed Martin, wrote:
…it is my sincere view that the majority of the nations who have now acquired arsenals of nuclear weapons believe them to be such potent tools for deterring conflicts that they would never surrender them…nuclear weapons will likely have an enduring role in preserving the peace and preventing world wars for the foreseeable future…"
Is this man sane? How can arsenals of nuclear weapons "have an enduring role in preserving the peace"? Yet this way of thinking dominates the military. And in his personal life, Mr. Robinson may be a very nice man. Carol Cohn served as a senior research fellow at the Center for Psychological Studies in the Nuclear Age in Cambridge, MA. She spent a year at a university weapons policy think tank and discovered that the language scientists use to speak about nuclear weapons completely obscures the gross reality of what these weapons actually do. "There is no real way to talk about human death or human societies when you are using a language designed to talk about weapons. Human death is simply collateral damage -- collateral to the real subject, which is the weapons themselves." And most of these scientists -- most of them men, of course -- are well-intentioned people…
Bechtel, one of the key players in the global privatization of the water supply, is also a nuclear weapons producer. Bechtel's $1 billion-plus in annual contracts for "atomic energy defense activities" is likely to grow substantially under the Bush nuclear plan, says Hartung.
Dreadful as all this may be, the fact is that small nuclear weapons are already in use. Better described as radiological weapons, these bombs and missiles employ and distribute significant amounts of radioactive material innocuously named depleted uranium. First used during the Persian Gulf War to penetrate tanks with 6-inch bullets tipped with depleted uranium, these weapons are touted by the Pentagon as advanced weaponry that saves soldiers' lives.
Nobody claims that DU saves the lives of civilians, but then civilians -- most of them women and children -- are always victims of war. And though American casualties in the first Gulf War were relatively low -- depending on how you look at numbers of dead young men -- the incidence of Gulf War Syndrome has been taking its toll since the troops came home. More than 100,000 American soldiers are now on disability as a result. For civilians, rates of cancer and deformed births in Iraq have reportedly risen three or four times since the first war. We can imagine what lies ahead for the people of Iraq in the wake of "shock and awe."
Imagine, after all they have been through -- imagine giving birth to a child with no arms -- or no brain -- or no heart. And for what? Those elusive weapons of mass destruction?
Depleted uranium is creeping across the continents. It was used in Kosovo, under Clinton's direction, and, before this war on Iraq, du was employed in Afghanistan. Independent scientist Leuren Moret has alleged that a thousand tons of DU were dropped on that country -- which was not an enemy of the United States. Moret's estimate has been disputed by other du activists, but it is difficult to get accurate information about the bombings in Afghanistan and Iraq because both are controlled by the US. Certainly the United States does not want to be held responsible for cancers and deformed babies. It doesn't make good press, and besides, cleaning up contaminated bomb sites and providing medical care would cost billions of dollars.
A group of Canadian scientists from the Uranium Medical Research Center traveled to Afghanistan four months after the war to investigate the use of depleted uranium. What they found astounded them. Urine tests of civilians living near bomb sites revealed significant levels of uranium, but it was not depleted. When I spoke with Ted Weymann, one of the researchers, he acknowledged that this type of uranium suggested the possibility that the United States tested small nuclear weapons like the penetrator missile in a several locations in and near Kabul. That was before the Nuclear Posture Review was announced. More investigations must be done to establish what really is the source of this uranium, and indeed we may never know for sure.
Radioactivity spreads. Winds blow it around. Birds carry it, leaving radioactive droppings in their path. In Iraq, bomb sites are not identified as contaminated. I read that American soldiers, on their own initiative, were putting up signs to warn local people. Children -- who are highly sensitive to radiation -- play in bomb craters. Sometimes they pick up pieces of metal like the "trophies" soldiers brought home to their families during the first Gulf War -- containing radioactive uranium. Children tend to put their fingers in their mouth so, there you go. Ingesting a single alpha particle released in a depleted uranium explosion wrecks havoc on the body's tissues. And it never goes away.
The probability that nuclear testing will be resumed means radioactive residues will be distributed at home as well. Of course we already have plenty of radiation flowing through our water supply, especially on the lands where Native Americans have been forced to live. Now Bush has proposed that radioactive and other toxic waste be stored in "unregulated" disposal sites. So we can all expect to become slightly more radioactive in the years to come than we already are. Radiation, even from x-rays, is bad for the brain. Maybe that's why the American public is so easy to mislead.
Nuclear weapons and nuclear war are a very frightening subject -- so frightening that we don't like to talk about them. In that way, nukes are a little like feminism. In a world where most old fashioned taboos have been broken, a new taboo seems to hover over the subject of nuclear weapons. Yet at the same time, "nukes" has become an every day word. We talk of nuking food in the microwave. In children's video games, nukes are used as if they were bullets in a cowboy gun. So nukes are becoming normal, even if nuclear war is a topic we avoid
But if we don't start talking about nuclear war -- and if we get numb to the consequences of nuclear war -- if it is no longer shockingly scary -- if it starts to seem somehow normal, we are going to have it.
What has all this got to do with the women's movement?
Feminism may have divided women from one another, but in addition, feminism has divided with itself, forming so many factions and intellectual divisions that we now must speak of feminism in the plural, much the way we refer to fundamentalisms. Regardless of whether feminism has failed as a whole, it certainly has succumbed to this particular failing of divisiveness and disagreement, much like the patriarchal society from which it has come, and maybe more so.
But as women, and mothers of the race, there are some things we certainly must agree about. And I'm fairly sure that even women who proudly send their sons off to war would agree that making the world more radioactive is not a good thing.
If anyone is ever going to stop this nonsense -- this lunacy, as Arundhati Roy would call it -- it's going to be us, the world's women. And to become truly effective -- to counter this patriarchal war machine with an alternative -- and if it weren't Bush, you can be sure that another of our world's "leaders" would happily seek global domination -- we are going to need to be united. We've got to come out in full force to stop this poisoning of the planet, beginning with radioactive weaponry.
We have a lot of power.
The trouble is, we use some of that power to support patriarchy. We give our power away when we send sons and husbands off to war in defense of country. We lose power when we treat our sons better than we treat our daughters, and whenever we allow a man to come between our friends and sisters. We all support patriarchy in many other ways. If we didn't, the whole house of cars would have collapsed long ago. Men need women at least as much -- and probably more -- than women need men, and women's approval is what keeps them going. No surprise that the Indian government named its first atom bomb shakti -- the female source of energy. Yes, patriarchy can't get it up without Her…
A passionate witch that I know in Northern California, Felicity Artemis Flowers wrote an essay that we were pleased to publish in our magazine. The best part was its title. It was called Pulling the Plug on Patriarchy. I believe we can do that. We can find ways to completely withdraw our support from the male-privileged, power-by-domination machine gobbling up the planet. We can stop paying taxes to governments that make war. We can buy lots of re-used and re-cycled and handmade goods instead of spending our money in shopping malls. We can refuse to have sex with men (and women!) who contribute their energies to that system. We can refuse to have children, do dishes, smile -- we have only to think of the many many ways that we give energy to a system that oppresses us, and which is running headlong towards its own destruction, taking us all with it.
As a global women's movement, we can hold our governments accountable for what they do. We can insist that the United States mark all areas that are contaminated with uranium, clean them up and take the garbage home, provide health care and pay compensation to the victims. We can demand that other governments -- Italy's, for example -- put pressure on the United States to clean up its act.
It will become so expensive to use these weapons that it will no longer be profitable to produce them! Hah! Never mind, we can find lots of other ways to make money without building more bombs.
To strengthen our women's movement for peace, we can build our own networks through women's circles, workshops, the Internet -- and travel! -- and define our priorities for solving the crushing problems we face. We can let the world know what a woman's priorities are, by publishing a Global Women's Agenda and presenting it to all our governments and the United Nations.
To help consolidate the global women's movement and compose a woman's agenda, Awakened Woman has formed a new nonprofit organization, Women for a Better World. You'll find us on the web at awakenedwoman.com/ The mission of Women for a Better world is to hold women's circles where we can talk openly and find a base for agreement, putting our differences aside in the interests of unity. We'd like Women for a Better World to have bases -- yes, bases! -- all over the world. Bases for peace. And I hope you will join us, building your base for peace here in Italy, as you have been doing all these many years.
As Mother Theresa once said, "I can't do what you can do and you can't do what I can do, but together we can do great things." We can work together, building a safe world for our children, and our men will work with us. We can link arms around the earth, and build a powerful grassroots network that no one will able to break. And we can save the world.
Thank you.
This talk, in shorter form, was delivered at the
international meeting, Fare Pace con la Terra (Making Peace
with the Earth) organized by the Convenzione permanente di
donne contro le guerre (Women's Standing Convention Against
War) and Marea Magazine.