CONVERSATIONS with HISTORY: Women's Rights

The unfinished struggle to secure women's rights
has been long and difficult.

» What role do social and political movements play
in securing these rights?
» How does the individual make a difference in this struggle?
» What are the turning points in this long march?

This feature is one of a series that draws on the resources of the Conversations with History Archive at the University of California at Berkeley. In these lively and unedited interviews, distinguished men and women from all over the world talk about their lives and their work. At the heart of each interview is a focus on individuals and ideas that make a difference.

"The battle for excellence, for credentials, has to be fought every day. You have to validate yourself as a woman wherever you are every day, and you don't have it easy because – not me personally, be cause I was privileged – but women have to stand up to tremendous discriminatory practices, whether inherited traditions, whether imposed norms, male perceptions of power and control. The women always have to go through that and cannot take any privilege for granted."

"Not only do they have this problem of the violation of their rights, they have a problem of the community who has witnessed their "guiltiness," that's how they believe it. But also they are in conflict with their bodies. How do you live with a body which has been taken from you? Your psychosexual identity has been grasped from you. And it's a burden because you must live with it. But at the same moment I guess that it's no longer yours, because anybody can come and use it as they want."

"Assuming the responsibility for the knowledge you have once you see injustice, once you understand pain, you cannot walk away from that responsibility. Once you see the harm that's being done, you no longer can have the excuse of ignorance. And once you know, it seems to me that you then have to assume the responsibility of that knowledge. "

"So, even to pay attention to what women say about sex, motherhood, relationships, depends so much on what one thinks a woman ought to be saying, ought to be feeling, on what is legitimate to express. Unless you have a political movement that says, 'Forget what everybody else thinks you ought to be feeling, what you ought to be saying. Get down to it. Tell the truth. What did you actually think and feel and notice in your body.' You need a safe space to be able to do that. You need a political context to be able to do that."

"But we have to accept that, for the women's issues, the woman activist is more sensitive than a male activist. Not because I think the men activists have no heart or no attention for women's problems, but their way of thinking or their socialization tends to make them neglect women's issues. So, for women's rights at least, I think women activists do better than the men."

"…Any human being acts differently, depending upon the kind of center that they have within them. If you have a center that says you have strengths and abilities and should be allowed to develop those, then I think it's easier to move into situations that are non-traditional areas, because you, yourself, feel that you have a right to be there, you have a right to make a contribution. "

"In the last thirty years there has been the most extraordinary cultural revolution in history. Women have changed the way they think about themselves. Once women in industrialized countries, but also in most developing countries, decided that the patriarchal family (the institutional domination of men over women and children in the family) is not correct, that men and women are equal and women have to develop their own interests and culture, have their own relationship to work, to everything – once women have changed that, everything changes. "

"I think the one important early achievement was the cessation of testing in the atmosphere. And that was a wonderful example of a mobilization, on the one hand, of mothers with their concern for babies, and scientists who tested the babies' teeth to identify levels of strontium-90; you had a coalition of people who, one way and another, have stayed active. The women never really returned to business as usual since those early demonstrations in the sixties. You've had a growing participation of women in peace movements."

"...It's strong women's organizations that make the difference. In countries where you have that, then you also have more women in politics, and they are able to influence. And that's not only the experience I have from Sweden. It's also in international organizations or in the European Union."

"In general, women are less adept or less willing to just jump into conversations. I think they're more likely to do better in structured conversations. So that's an example of a negative. I think that it's still the case today that if you look at the press and look at how many times women are quoted versus men, that there is a tendency still to perceive power and wisdom more with men than women."

"If one had to say, "From the point of view of anyone on the left, what are the best things that have happened in the world, the good things that have happened in the last twenty, thirty years?" It's certainly the women's movement – often a slightly misleading term; you can speak of women's emancipation, women's liberation, I prefer that term. Because very often the kinds of liberation and emancipation brought about have been molecular."