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Here’s an excerpt from a 1994 conversation between Justine Willis Toms and Gloria Steinem. It is New Dimensions program #2466 COMING INTO FULLNESS. Steinem was 60 years old.
Steinem: If we remember that all lasting change happens from the bottom up, not from the top down, it will renew our faith because otherwise we’re persuaded to give up our power and to say, “Well, I wonder what they know.” What are the ubiquitous they going to do?. Or what is the White House is going to do? We need to be concerned about that when we vote and when we pressure and write. But we need to be most concerned about where we have most control, which is in our daily lives. There are all kinds of things that we could do, and, in some parts of the country are doing, I mean, we could have women centers and in shopping centers so that they’re easily accessible. It’s where women go. We could have a little storefront there with a coffee pot and a table and literature of all kinds of groups in the community. If we look in the phone book under W for women or women’s liberation or F for feminism, we don’t find it. So, women don’t know where to go.
We need more populism. We need portable versions of women’s history that can be put on placards and on slides and taken to women at lunchtime, brown bag lectures, or just wherever women are. We need black history told in that way. We need Wilma Mankiller, who is the chief of the Cherokee Nation, who has evolved a system of telling Cherokee history in that way so that the pride and the knowledge and the understanding that of the great cultural tradition is not confined to three people on a college campus. We haven’t done that yet. In the suffragist wave there were also, at any given moment, probably 100 paid full-time women organizers crisscrossing the country helping to start groups in communities, helping communities to do what they wanted to do. We need to do that again.
Toms: But you don’t mean to have some sort of hierarchical organization doing it.
Steinem: No, I mean being an organizer is a little bit of a gift in the same way that being a diagnostician is, or being a painter, or being a sculptor. So, you know, if six people listening know somebody who’s a gifted organizer, they might offer to pay her or his expenses for six months or a year to be a kind of wandering labor organizer you help start community organizations. Now that’s radical.
Suppose somebody is gifted at helping groups get together and make coalitions. That person could be subsidized to do that.
We also need to restore and enlarge the tradition of consciousness raising groups, as they used to be called 20 years ago. Now, they’re called networking groups, or they’re called book clubs. It doesn’t matter what you call them. I think women, especially, who because we as a discriminated against group are uniquely ones that don’t have a nation. We’ll never have a nation. We don’t have a neighborhood, and mostly we don’t even have a bar. So we have a special need to once a week in our lives have a group of women who get together for mutual support.
But we wait for someone else to do it, or we think that somebody else is going to organize it. Well, we could subsidize a woman who’s gifted at putting these together, and she could go from place to place and spread the knowledge. Each group, of course, would change that knowledge, in their own way, as they should. But at least there, would be a catalyst and a guide and an aid in the beginning,
Thank you so much for your continued support.
With deep gratitude,
Justine Willis Toms
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