Prime Time - Jane Fonda [114]
The new reality demands internationalism, multilateralism, diplomacy (with humility), and compassion. But these approaches are considered “effeminate” or “effete” by too many men we’ve elected to office. If you study the gender gap—which exposes the differences between how women vote and poll on issues and how men vote and poll—you can see that these are, in fact, overwhelmingly women’s values. But men are wrong to view them pejoratively. These are the values that will save us. And, on a hopeful note, when the gender gap does narrow—as it appears to be doing on war and peace issues, for example—men are moving in women’s direction, rather than the other way around.
I’ve said in many different ways why elder women are best suited to take the lead in saving the world. Let me say it again: We have the time, the wisdom, the breadth of vision, and the numbers. We have less to lose, and now we’re not afraid to be angry. At least according to some anthropologists, we’ve become the more assertive gender. And there’s the future of the young—in some cases our own grandchildren and step-grandchildren, nieces and nephews—to motivate us further.
It seems overwhelming, doesn’t it? The idea that we can actually change how the world’s institutions conduct themselves? But think of a trim tab! A trim tab is a miniature rudder, a tiny thing that is attached to the edge of the big rudder at the back of an ocean liner. If you move the trim tab just a little bit, it can, with hardly any effort, build up a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Women constitute a critical mass, and older women are the critical mass within the mass. Women over eighty-five are the fastest-growing age group in the world! Let’s become the trim tab on the rudder of the ship of state.
In the time of the founding of our nation, the trim tab was a council of elder wise women who chose the chief for the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. The women weren’t chiefs themselves, but it was recognized that they were the ones who would know which man had the appropriate qualities of leadership (which meant the ability not to go out after things but to hold things together). It was the elder women who decided when to go to war and how to maintain the peace. So successful was the government of the Seven Nations that our founders used it as a template for our Constitution. Except that—surprise!—they left out the elder wise women part.
If we really wrap our minds around what’s at stake and bring all our experience and wisdom to the task, we can not only choose our chiefs; we can be the chiefs.
The cultural anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson has written a book about aging, Composing a Further Life: The Age of Active Wisdom, and, like me, she feels that the growing number of older people has the potential to play a major role in bringing about change. “You and I are living at a turning point,” she told me. “The rise of feminism was a turning point, and the awareness of climate change as an environmental danger is a turning point. And this extension of longevity is a turning point. The question is, Can we contribute to the process of change in a way that really enriches and deepens lives for people of all ages; will we claim the right and mobilize the energy and find our voices again and do it?”
In his Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke said, “Life and Death are the greatest gifts—and usually go unopened.” Shouldn’t our ultimate task be to tear open our gift of life and use our wisdom and deepened consciousness to ripen the time? We ourselves are ripe—“going to seed,” as they say. So let’s sow those seeds far and wide and see what grows! Might this not be our ultimate evolutionary purpose?
With Gloria Steinem.
CHAPTER 18
Don’t Put Off Preparing for the Inevitable: One of These Days Is Right Now
One of the things I have come to feel … is that if you