- Next »
- « Previous
Anna Quindlen challenges women to define their own success
Anna Quindlen, author and columnist, followed Russert with a moving yet funny speech tracing the journeys of three women. Over the course of the speech we came to find that these three women were her mother, her and her daughter. She spoke about what the purpose of the women’s movement was. Was it to be just like men? Or was it, as women, to determine for ourselves what success is, what it means to forge our own balance and change the world in our own way?
“But there’s a catch to all of this. And maybe a gathering of us this large is a good time to deconstruct it. Was the point of this huge revolution we’ve all lived through merely to have that sort of power and position, to get corner offices, executive washrooms, fat retainers?
Did we want to win the right to lead imitation men’s lives or did we want something that we haven’t quite begun to get yet, the right to put our female stamp on the ethos of the entire world? The women’s movement that we all lived through was a kind of classic dialectic.
We started out with a basic thesis, the thesis of woman as wife and mother alone, what (Betty Friedan) called the feminine mystique. And we came up with an opposite in the beginning, an antithesis, and not to be coy about it, it was too often a kind of faux guys life complete with those little floppy tie things that we wore for a while with our suits that almost killed the whole deal.
But today we’ve approached a synthesis, a balance and that is the understanding that work, influence, even power with no countervailing forces, no intimacy, no family, no sense of connection to other is for many of us no kind of life at all and should not be the model for anyone.
But with great gain people always have to be careful of their potential losses. And if we, us, become a group of people who believe that the position of our name on the page or the letterhead is the most important thing about us we will as the bible verse goes, have gained the whole world and lost our own soul.
I mean doesn’t that mean that the price of equality will have been the loss, not of femininity but of our basic humanity? Many of us in this room have done well in our lives. It is fine to want to do well but if we do not do good too, doing well is simply not good enough.
The women’s movement was a battle against waste, the waste of talent, the waste to society, the waste of women who had certain gifts and goals and had to suppress those.
The point was not to take over male terrain but to change it because it badly needed changing. Things don’t work. Things in the business world don’t work, things in politics don’t work, things in all kinds of different venues don’t work. But we can make them work.
The point after all wasn’t the corner office. The point was sisterhood, solidarity, freedom and dignity. The point was bringing the gift we women have to give to the entire world.
Comments