Read Online My Life on the Road by Gloria Steinem - Free Book Online
Authors: Gloria Steinem
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churches of my own country and igniting the civil rights movement. I certainly didn’t guess that, a decade later, I would see consciousness-raising groups, women’s talking circles, giving birth to the feminist movement. All I knew was that some deep part of me was being nourished and transformed right along with the villagers.
I could see that, because the Gandhians listened, they were listened to. Because they depended on generosity, they created generosity. Because they walked a nonviolent path, they made one seem possible. This was the practical organizing wisdom they taught me:
If you want people to listen to you, you have to listen to them.
If you hope people will change how they live, you have to know how they live.
If you want people to see you, you have to sit down with them eye-to-eye.
I certainly didn’t know that a decade or so after I returned home, on-the-road organizing would begin to take up most of my life.
—
I T WOULD BE ALMOST twenty years before I visited India again. By then, in the late 1970s, the civil rights and anti–Vietnam War movements at home had inspired more change, including among women who loved and were crucial to those movements, yet were rarely equal within them. 2 They realized the need for an independent and inclusive feminist movement that would take on the personal and global politics of gender.
This contagion was going on in many countries. Altogether, a new consciousness was spreading as women met or read about one another, whether in small meetings and underground feminist publications or at global events like the UN Conference on Women in Mexico City in 1975. The dry tinder of inequality was everywhere, just waiting to be set on fire.
Devaki Jain, a Gandhian economist and a friend from my earlier time living in India, invited me back toward the end of the 1970s to talk with some of these new women’s groups. It was as if she and I had been having the same realizations by long-distance telepathy. We could finish each other’s sentences. Inspired by our different paths to a shared place, we had the idea of collecting Gandhian tactics into a pamphlet for women’s movements everywhere. After all, Gandhi’s tactic of satyagraha, or nonviolent resistance, would be well suited to women, and so would his massive marches and consumer boycotts.
As part of our research, we interviewed Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, a rare woman leader during the independence struggle. She had worked with Gandhi, led his national women’s organization, warned him against agreeing to the partition of India and Pakistan as the price of independence, and then led a renaissance of Indian handicrafts that used the talents of millions of refugees displaced by partition.
As we explained our idea of teaching Gandhian tactics to women’s movements, she listened to us patiently, sitting and rocking on her veranda, sipping tea. When we were finished, she said, “Well, of course, my dears. We taught him everything he knew.”
She made us laugh—and she explained. In India under the British, Gandhi had witnessed a massive women’s movement organizing against suttee, the immolation of widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres, and much more. In England as a young man studying to be a barrister, Gandhi also saw the suffrage movement, and he later urged activists working for self-rule in India to emulate the courage and tactics of the Pankhursts, England’s most famous and radical suffragists. After his return to India from South Africa, where he organized against the discrimination that Indians were subjected to, he was alarmed to find an independence movement with almost no roots in the villages and the daily lives of ordinary people. He began to live like a villager himself, to organize mass marches and consumer boycotts, and to measure success by changes in the lives of the poorest and least powerful: village women.
As Kamaladevi explained kindly, Devaki and I had the Great Man theory of history, and
I could see that, because the Gandhians listened, they were listened to. Because they depended on generosity, they created generosity. Because they walked a nonviolent path, they made one seem possible. This was the practical organizing wisdom they taught me:
If you want people to listen to you, you have to listen to them.
If you hope people will change how they live, you have to know how they live.
If you want people to see you, you have to sit down with them eye-to-eye.
I certainly didn’t know that a decade or so after I returned home, on-the-road organizing would begin to take up most of my life.
—
I T WOULD BE ALMOST twenty years before I visited India again. By then, in the late 1970s, the civil rights and anti–Vietnam War movements at home had inspired more change, including among women who loved and were crucial to those movements, yet were rarely equal within them. 2 They realized the need for an independent and inclusive feminist movement that would take on the personal and global politics of gender.
This contagion was going on in many countries. Altogether, a new consciousness was spreading as women met or read about one another, whether in small meetings and underground feminist publications or at global events like the UN Conference on Women in Mexico City in 1975. The dry tinder of inequality was everywhere, just waiting to be set on fire.
Devaki Jain, a Gandhian economist and a friend from my earlier time living in India, invited me back toward the end of the 1970s to talk with some of these new women’s groups. It was as if she and I had been having the same realizations by long-distance telepathy. We could finish each other’s sentences. Inspired by our different paths to a shared place, we had the idea of collecting Gandhian tactics into a pamphlet for women’s movements everywhere. After all, Gandhi’s tactic of satyagraha, or nonviolent resistance, would be well suited to women, and so would his massive marches and consumer boycotts.
As part of our research, we interviewed Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, a rare woman leader during the independence struggle. She had worked with Gandhi, led his national women’s organization, warned him against agreeing to the partition of India and Pakistan as the price of independence, and then led a renaissance of Indian handicrafts that used the talents of millions of refugees displaced by partition.
As we explained our idea of teaching Gandhian tactics to women’s movements, she listened to us patiently, sitting and rocking on her veranda, sipping tea. When we were finished, she said, “Well, of course, my dears. We taught him everything he knew.”
She made us laugh—and she explained. In India under the British, Gandhi had witnessed a massive women’s movement organizing against suttee, the immolation of widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres, and much more. In England as a young man studying to be a barrister, Gandhi also saw the suffrage movement, and he later urged activists working for self-rule in India to emulate the courage and tactics of the Pankhursts, England’s most famous and radical suffragists. After his return to India from South Africa, where he organized against the discrimination that Indians were subjected to, he was alarmed to find an independence movement with almost no roots in the villages and the daily lives of ordinary people. He began to live like a villager himself, to organize mass marches and consumer boycotts, and to measure success by changes in the lives of the poorest and least powerful: village women.
As Kamaladevi explained kindly, Devaki and I had the Great Man theory of history, and
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