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Gloria Steinem:
"Networks are psychic territory. Remember, women of every race are the only discriminated-against group with no territory, no country of our own, not even a neighborhood. Even powerless men can usually point to some part of the globe, past or present, where they were honored in authority. A place to travel, if only in imagination, and gain self-respect. Within their countries, men also have neighborhoods and bars where they can gather freely. But women rarely do.
In a patriarchy, a poor man's house may be his castle, but a rich woman's body is not her own.
That's why groups run by and for women are so important to us. They are our psychic turf, our place to discover who we are, or could become, as whole independent beings. They help us go beyond a secondary role in the family and in the workplace--to leave the tyranny of society's expectations behind.
They also force us to develop those qualities and skills that, in mixed groups, we tend to assign to men.
A few hours a week or a month of making psychic territory can let us know that we are not alone. They can affirm a new reality in an era when national leadership and daily papers are full of top-down assumptions about 'what the majority of Americans want,' or for that matter, who the majority of Americans are.
But our need may go even deeper than a need for a territory of our own. Since very few of us grew up with mothers who were allowed to be powerful in the world, we often felt motherless. Perhaps in the freedom and support of groups run by and for women, we are becoming each other's mothers.
If so, that's a need that also crosses boundaries.
Devaki Jain, a distinguished economist in India and a longtime friend , has spent twenty years as a feminist working on family planning, health care, and employment. Though all are important, she has concluded that the most important single element in women's progress is this: one woman-run group outside the family and outside the work force the work force; at least one structure in each woman's life that is a free place for women.
In India, this might be a handicraft cooperative as well as a social network, a group of women who talk by the well every day or a professional association. But without this source of confirmation and mutual support, women rarely have the confidence to use the rights they already have, much less the strength to demand more.
Somewhere in our lives, each of us needs a free place. A little psychic territory. Do you have yours?"
