Gloria Steinem

And also I saw in the program that I'm here for an hour but I would like to imitate the Chinese women who in times when they were not allowed to go to school invented their own entire language and they always wrote in a column down the center of a page so the reader could add to whatever they said. So I will not take up my whole hour because I think you're all part of this speech and we'll all create what would have been one speech.

We come, I know, from very different situations. Some of us have 70 percent of the journalistic workforce that is female. Others have much smaller percentage. But I believe that all of us share the problem of not having what we say in English - the clout positions. In the United States only three percent of the clout positions that are those that can decide whether a story is telecast or put on the web or put on the radio – only three percent are women. Nonetheless I think we have come to a critical mass in power – when we can truly begin to change the way that conflict and post-conflict are covered – and I'm very grateful to the studies they've done before because they have shown that that is true – that in general women stay longer on the scene of conflict and more likely to report the human cost of the conflict and to see different things.

At the same time I know we are not talking about biology here. And we know that there are many men who have this view, too and we know that there are some women who don't have this view. There was a famous study in the United States of children who were brought up as the wrong gender. They chromosomally were male but were brought up as female and vice versa. In trying to figure out how to help them the conclusion was that the culture was so strong that it would be easier to surgically change the sex of the child than to change the culture. So there is no biological dictate. Freud was wrong. Biology is not destiny. Nonetheless there is very often a strong cultural difference. And that I believe we can bring to each other as male and female journalists. So we have a full circle of a way to cover all human experience.

One of the ways of we at Women's Media Center which is a new organization, three years old, in New York with which I'm involved – one of the many things we are trying to do in addition to training spokespeople and the media experts who can then come to the media putting out our own stories – you can go to the Web and see Women's Media Center dot com – is to do a massive book on language called "Unspinning the spin" that is trying to create, suggest, explain the origins of certain expressions and to suggest more accurate ones. And in that context we I think can share solutions that we may come to that help linguistically. Since words carry forward our understanding. We try not to say "war on terror", for instance. We try to say "adversary", not "enemy", we try never to say "there is no draft" – because in the United States there is a draft. It's a poverty draft. It's an education draft. It's a green card draft. And actually it's a criminal draft in a way because you can now enter the military with a criminal record that you could not before. This figures into the behavior of our soldiers in Iraq and elsewhere – it figures into the fact that one of three US women in Iraq in uniform has been sexually assaulted by her own comrades. Because it is the psychology of war, it is nature of the people who are there.

So perhaps today we can come up with the richness of the diverse group of languages, we come up with more accurate solutions. I think that two things have happened – women cover war differently and war is different. I mean it used to be a war that mostly killed combatants – now it mostly kills civilians. The same might be said of slavery – in the 1800s 60% of slaves were male, now with sex trafficking and labor trafficking 85% of slaves enslaved people are women and children. So – the substance has changed as well as the style of coverage.

I'm going to address myself first to some situations where we have allowed to become invisible the successful peacemaking of the past. And when we do that we lose examples of how to behave in the present. There is one film especially which I have brought with me and I hope that some time we can make time to see – which is called "Pray the Devil Back to Hell". It's about Liberia where the Muslim and Christian women together – ordinary women – over a very long period of time at considerable danger to themselves managed to depose a president who had turned the country into an outlaw country, a lawless violent country. And to achieve election by means you will see in the film, which are extraordinary. Which meant sitting in the road surrounding peace conferences of warlords who were not making or creating an agreement and not letting them out of the building until they came to an agreement. And even after the United Nations were there it meant disarming to the women that United Nations could not convince people, the young men to disarm – only women could. The women actually collected the guns and machine guns and so on.

And eventually they elected Ellen Johnson Sirleaf as you know as the president. There are still enormous difficulties in that country but it is an example of women's role in peace making is very important. Up to now we have been told – if you're not a president you have no role to play. Right? These women were not the presidents – they got rid of the president – they confronted the warlords. The very strength came from the fact that they were not in an official position. It continues to have waves of change. In 2007 the first all-women peace-keeping force, the United Nations peace-keeping force in the world, was sent to Liberia from India – inspired by the nature of this peaceful revolution. On March 8th this year, 2009, there will be a meeting in Liberia of a large number of women world leaders. Because they are looking to this example. If we could show this film on blimps above North and South Korea and in various worrying groups in Pakistan and India I guess – I believe that it would inspire a sense of possibility that has been hopeless for very long time. But because we know about it and the reason we know about this example is because Abby Disney, a woman who became a filmmaker and ordered to make this film really – has given us a record of it. And that is the role we can all play – report to make an invisible visible. And therefore show that if it happened in one way here – perhaps it can be adapted to another situation of conflict.

And there are many examples that we sort of know but have got lost. Think about Ireland – there was a very long time when the Irish conflict seemed almost as difficult as the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It had been going on for centuries, it had been memorialized by playwrights, and just continued. But what we forget that what happened. Women there had spent ten years building bridges between protestant and Roman Catholic families in Northern Ireland. They toured the United States to try to tell US advocates, US-Irish advocates who were arming, who were playing a destructive role by sending arms into Ireland. They toured the United States lecturing those groups saying: "Please do not do this, do not send arms into this region". They were extraordinarily brave, they got up and said things – unsayable things. They said: "If I felt that my son was going to continue this conflict that has gone on for so many centuries, I would – I've forgotten the word they used – I would murder him in his cradle. This has gone on too long".

After they had very dramatic effort for at least a decade – there were many other women who played important roles and who are not that well-remembered. Monica McWilliams – who was the commissioner of human rights in Northern Ireland and a founder of the Northern Ireland's women's coalition. She was crucial to the multi-party negotiation that led to the 1998 "Good Friday" agreement. And there are many others. And she is now a professor of women studies – so she is a great example of somebody who is an academic and an activist. It's not a choice – one can do both.

In El Salvador because there were at least a few women leaders at that official negotiation – unlike the situation in Liberia where they were completely unofficial – they insisted that the beneficiaries of land grants and other resources include the names of women fighters and also non-combatant supporters of the opposition movement. And this single provision made the peaceful negotiation possible because otherwise the peasants would have revolted against the peace agreement. It was not genius on the part of the women, it was experience. They knew how important those land grants were and they knew who the participants really were. But when we discuss El Salvador, when we report on El Salvador – I have not seen very much of this fact reported. We can trade our research, we can find many many more such examples.

In South Africa, perhaps, it's better known. The Black Sash and many of the women's groups played a very important role and were the most sturdy bridges between the white minority rulers and the black majority subjects of that rule in the long apartheid period. During the post-apartheid transition women's groups pressured for reform in the Constitution and in the laws. And they did something very important – they insisted on a role for all civil society. It was really the women's groups that did this.

Women like Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela organized the first outreach program of the truth and reconciliation commission. The commission was in cities but how it was vital that it be put on the road. That it be accessible to people who had suffered. And she organized that first effort. She wrote a book called "A Human Being Died That Night" – a South-African story of forgiveness, which was a landmark in post-conflict wisdom.

Perhaps, we can put together a library of these kinds of works that already exist and have great wisdom to share. But we really don't hear about the insight, we only see the large outlines of these struggles.

In Somalia, women presented themselves as a sixth clan – I think it's very interesting – they went to the bargaining table which was very much divided by men – and they said – women are the Sixth Clan, and we have issues that cross the boundaries of clan lines. And they presented those concerns. Thus both building bridges and getting a national charter that guaranteed women ten percent of all the seats in the election. Ten percent is very small but from zero to ten percent is a very very big step.

All of these efforts, of course, have become a bit more visible because of UN resolution 1325, because of the whole attention brought mainly as your group had pointed out – the mass rapes of women, rapes used as a weapon of war – which up to that time really had been in most of what I was reading presented as inevitable. Rape just goes along with war without a real understanding of the ways in which it terrorizes the population, threatens to wipe out a particular ethnic group and all that we have subsequently learned. And the fact that women reported – and some men, too – but especially women reported on these crimes – meant that legal cases were taken up by feminist lawyers and meant in turn that Navi Pillay – who was the only female judge on the international criminal court – could rule that rape was a war crime. Navi Pillay is now the commissioner for the human rights in the United Nations, newly appointed. And she herself is South African, of Indian origin from South Africa.

And I would like to say parenthetically here that at least one major human rights group in the United States opposed her – because they said she was too interested in women. That means that we have to understand, you know, it's not all simple. It's not all simple. As a dear friend of mine, an actress, once said to me: "I've been married to one Marxist, one fascist, and neither one took the garbage out". So – it's not always the patriarchal values or all on one side or the other which is why it's very helpful for all women to unify to some extent and to present themselves as a sixth clan.

Still, women are something between one and maybe eight percent of the members sitting at peace tables. They are 24 percent of the full-time observers of the fourteen peace talks that at least have been recorded – so at the official meetings there still not much of a presence but what we have discounted I think are experiences like that in Liberia where women are not at the peace tables but they can still be very forceful. And also the lessons of those at the peace tables which is that they must come to the peace table not as itemized individuals but with an organized populist constituency that is putting forth solutions. So it's very important, I think, that we report on the preparations that women are making, not just a peace conference, so not only do we need to stay in the post-conflict region – we need to be in the pre-peace process and understanding and reporting on what the preparations are.

They've been successful to some extent in that way in Uganda and Burundi and Sierra-Leone and Nepal and Timor, and Somalia. So that is yet another pattern. However I wonder if we even in our own literature from UNESCO, from UNICEF, from women's groups – I wonder if we're really putting the first thing first. Because I noticed we have titles like "Peace agreements as a means of promoting gender equality", and this comes from UNICEF. I think it's the other way around. I think it's gender equality as a necessity of peace agreement. Because the truth is that the single most shared characteristic of societies that … - indeed, the only shared characteristic – of societies that don't have organized conflict – self-defense, yes, but not armies, not organized conflict – is that they don't have polarized gender roles. So they don't grow up believing that there are the leaders and the led, the conquered and the victim, the dominated and the dominator. Olof Palme the former… the murdered chief of state of Sweden – once said that it was the primary responsibility of every government on Earth to humanize and eliminate gender roles because they were the primary cause of all violence on Earth other than that in immediate self-defense.

What we have here is not just a way that women can contribute to peacemaking process – but the peacemaking process can't go forward without a presence of women who see themselves – and men – as human beings, not as masculine and feminine. We have also neglected the extent to which violence in the family normalizes violence everywhere else. The Irish peace women knew that. Women in many conflicts have said that. But it's not in our academic curricular much, at least in the United States. Because the academic curricular itself – its courses are genderized. There are courses on family, and child rearing – and they are feminine, and there are courses on government and political science – and they are masculine. Never the twain meet. Yet the single greatest determinant of whether you have a democracy in public life is whether you have democratic families. It is not possible to have democracy without feminism. It's not possible. But these two things are not seen as a continuum. Not even when they are evident in the life of specific rulers. You can go through the upbringing of the most famously sadistic rulers and discover that they have been the most sadistically abused as children. This is not an excuse – because many people who are sadistically abused recover and don't continue this – but it is a reason. Because it is so shared across the boundaries – whether it is Ceausescu, or whether it is Saddam Hussein - they were throughout their childhoods sadistically abused to a degree that it broke the natural bond, the natural leap of empathy between one human being and another. That leap of empathy is part of our evolutionary equipment. It's why when people, say, people did something heroic – they rescued someone who was in front of them and in trouble – they generally say "I don't know why I did it. I'm not a hero. I just did it". It's because there is a natural leap of empathy from you to a member of your own specie. Between men and babies, too – you know, our species couldn't have survived without this. And the only way that can be broken is to be cruelly treated for a very long period in childhood by people on whom you're totally dependent. So that you ultimately come to the point where there are two choices – to be the victim or the victimizer. And that's it. In the absence of that – it isn't as if we have to invent a new way – we just have to take away the cruelty, and it would make a huge difference. We don't know what would be possible if one entire generation of children was raised without violence. We have no idea. And this is also part of what we, I think, especially women and also many men journalists can begin to report and begin to connect and move beyond. Yes, we need to report women as victims. Yes – when they are victims, and men too. But we need not only to stand by the side of the river plucking people out when they are drowning – crucial as that is – but we need to go to the head of the river and see why they are falling in – and be able to keep them from falling in.

I must say that I also question "post-conflict" as a term if one applies it to the female half of this world – I'm not sure there is any post-conflict for women. We are in conflict everywhere. And I think it's part of the reason we have such empathy and attention when it comes to news events that are called conflict. Cause the truth and the matter is that we are – female human beings – are the victims of most violence in the world. There is no culture or race or country on Earth where domestic violence is not a huge, huge problem. Yet in our various countries – I looked up the dates – our first battered women shelter was in 1971 and I think yours in Russia was in the 90s? So we just now are beginning to have a word for it. Indeed, there are many countries in the world in which if you ask women – do men have a right to beat their wives? – they will say "yes". I brought alone this atlas that you may be familiar with – it's a work of genius, really, because it has very-easy-to-understand maps about every issue, and it's every country in the world, and it shows you what the patterns are. It shows you that the most dangerous place – statistically – for a woman anywhere in the world is in her own house. She is much more likely to be murdered by a man who she has some relationship to in the family. Sometimes they are place-specific, like dauri murders or honor murders – but mostly they are not, and in any case they all have to do with patriarchy and - whatever they're called – the desire to control reproduction. And therefore, to control the bodies of women.

We know that trauma is greater from body invasion than any other crime. To be beaten is traumatic, to be invaded, to be raped, to be systematically used – results in even more trauma. We know that the trauma is much greater, say, for people who have been assaulted and tortured and beaten by family members, people they are dependent on, people who are supposed to love them – than when it is done by people in a uniform – marked as an "adversary" – it's a different level of trauma. There is a book called "Trauma and Recovery" by Judith Herman which you may know of – which estimates that at least half of the women in the United States are walking around in some state of trauma because of childhood abuse, because of domestic abuse – she is only talking about United States.

You know, I don't think there is a post-conflict zone for women actually. And when we find one – we'll know we have made great, great progress. And I believe that together all of us here can begin to move toward that time for both women and men, and use our own experience as a bridge, use the fact that women have no country, we don't have a neighborhood, most of us don't even have a bar – but this makes us very subversive –it's a good thing. It makes us able to cross boundaries, based on experience and begin to make bridges across those spaces. So I'm very much in awe of all of you who cover double conflict zones, war, named as war, and conflict that women always experience – but more so in a war. And I believe that the wisdom that comes from shared experience can allow us to make great, great leap forward of which this meeting is a part.

Thank you.