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GLORIA STEINEM: I think perhaps it's interesting to consider the theory that for the whole first half of human history, women were considered to be the superior beings. We had various kinds of gynocracy, that is, systems in which women were superior; women were worshipped as the gods, and women were considered to be superior in a variety of ways.

The reason that that was true, the basic, core reason that that was true, is because women bore the children. That function has been said to us now to be a very inferior one or at least one that makes us require special protection and somehow ends up with making us inferior. But for the whole first half of human history, the first of the many thousands of years that human beings have been on this Earth, according to this theory, that function was the proof of women's superiority.

It was mysterious. It was envied. It was worshiped. Men in many parts of this world still imitate in their tribal ceremonies the act of childbirth as an envied act. I suppose you could say that it was a period of womb envy, which makes just as much sense to me as penis envy.

[LAUGHTER]

But it was the single act that caused women to be worshipped and considered superior. Now, much of the reason that this was true was because it was mysterious. It was thought that women bore fruit like trees when we were ripe. In other words, the process, the cause, and effect of conception had not yet been understood. Paternity had not yet been understood as a process, a day I always imagine as a big light bulb over somebody's head, saying, oh, that's why.

But the discovery of paternity and the cause and effect of conception was at least as important to humankind as the discovery of how to make fire, how to make metals, and all the other ones we learn about, yet somehow not about this one.

And with that discovery, there began to be several thousands of years of a gradual but very profound change because now, for the first time, men had a sense of connection to children, of ownership of children. They began to realize that if they wished to determine paternity in order to ascertain ownership and, gradually, in order to create chains of ownership through generations in a pattern we have come to know as patriarchy, that they had to restrict the freedom of women at least long enough to make sure who the father was.

Marriage demystified, the restriction of freedom of women at least long enough to determine paternity. And so, gradually, women became more and more restricted in their freedom and more and more regarded, as what we would now call in our economic jargon, the means of production, the single most basic means of production. We produce the workers. We produce the soldiers. We produce the citizens of the tribe or the nation state.

And if that production was to be controlled, then the bodies of women had to be controlled, both in order to determine paternity and in order to regulate the production. Now, of course, we've been taught that as one of the ways we are supposed to be grateful to technology, that technology has given us contraception.

In fact, there seems to have been a knowledge of contraception ever since there was conception and an understanding of the process. That's part of what witches and gypsies were teaching. That's how they got to be witches and gypsies. They were teaching the arts of conception, performing abortions, and so on. They were, in many ways, in many countries, women's first freedom fighters in the era of patriarchy that evolved.

But in order to decide, both, whose child this was and how many children were going to be born, women very gradually became literally controlled as the means of production. And once we were, over the hundreds of years, this kind of growing underclass-- or caste, as we say, since we try to distinguish with sex and race, the fact that there is a visible difference, that it is different from class--

As we became this undercaste, without power, with our mobility restricted, and so on, we also were given the kinds of work that were not honored in that society, whatever those kinds of work might be, whatever was considered trivial or difficult or unrewarding. It really doesn't matter what the job is. Women's work can be functionally defined as anything men don't wish to do.

And it doesn't matter. In some societies right now, it's digging ditches. And in some societies, it's typing. In some marriages, it's paying all the bills and driving to the station. In other marriages, it's staying very far away from the car and from the checkbook. But whatever it is, it can be functionally defined as whatever men don't wish to do. I confess to you that in the movement, we sometimes use the scientific term of "shit work" for women's work.

By which we do not mean that all human work is not important and dignified. It is. That's why men should do it too. That's what we keep saying.

[APPLAUSE]

Now, with women restricted in what was, according to this theory, the first political oppression, we had become restricted as the means of production, and we had become a source of cheap labor, if you will, of unpaid or underpaid labor. As other groups and tribes and so on were captured by these newly materialistic and property-oriented groups, because there are many people who also believe that the ownership of children was the beginning of the notion of private property and so on--

As other groups who often look different or talk different or were somehow marked by a racial or an ethnic difference, as they were captured and brought into these newly patriarchal societies as slaves, they too were given the role of women. That is, they too were restricted by their racial or their ethnic difference, marked by that difference, deprived of education and other skills in order to perpetuate that difference, and given work to do that was not rewarded by that society, that was not paid for by that society, that was unfairly profited from by the ruling groups of that society.

So according to this theory, there always has been the very deepest kind of parallel between women of every race and group and all groups of men who are considered to be, in whatever culture, racially or ethnically second class. Whether or not one believes that this anthropological theory of prehistory is true, it is nonetheless visible around the country, around the world today, that wherever a group-- wherever there is a strong racial and class system, there is also strong discrimination against women.

One has only to look, for instance, at the situation in this country, when slaves, Black slaves, were brought to these shores so cruelly and no one knew exactly what legal status to give them. And so they gave them the status of wives, which was chattel. And our legal reforms have tended to follow one upon the heels of the other ever since. Or to look at the status of women and Jews in Nazi Germany or of women and Blacks in South Africa and other parts of the world.

To look at the status of women in societies that have no racial caste system, at least, and see as in the Scandinavian countries, that it is somewhat better. The class system is still a patriarchy, but it is somewhat improved. One can certainly see whether or not that theory of prehistory is accurate. And we will never know, though it makes much more sense to me than a lot of the other ones I've heard about how women develop breasts in order to attract male hunters. Have you heard that one?

Actually, our theories of prehistory are very sinister, it seems to me, because what they do is just count whatever men was doing as being superior. For instance, because men were hunting or because men were better equipped to hunt, then obviously women couldn't do that. So they couldn't be superior.

But the truth is, if you look at a lot of prehistorical or current, for that matter, primitive societies, you will see that it's true the men are out there hunting because they are unrestricted by childbirth and so on and staying near the children.

But meanwhile, women are developing ways of preserving food and doing basketry and textiles and learning how to build the houses and developing language and maybe metallurgy and a few other things. And when you finally finish, you understand that the guys out there in the bush are fleet of foot but not very bright.

[LAUGHTER]

So we need to rethink all of our suppositions, it seems to me. I remember reading a book put out by the Smithsonian, a wonderful book which I commend to you, which I think was called "Apes, Angels, and Irishmen," in which they had accumulated all of the material, much of it very respectable, very respectable academic material, complete with skull caliper measurements and the whole thing, not to mention lots of pop cultural material, cartoons, and literature, that proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the English were descended from the angels, and the Irish were descended from the apes.

Ever since then, I have not felt quite as-- I have not quite paid quite the same attention to Lionel Tiger as he definitively proves that women cannot act in groups-- do you think that's his real name? I've always wondered-- or to Arthur Jensen as he proves that Blacks didn't have unlimited intelligence and so on.

But the truth is, regardless of prehistoric theories, that wherever women have the least status, there also is a strong racial system-- caste system and a strong class system.

Gunnar Murdaugh, when he looked at-- when he came here to study the Negro problem, as it was then called, more than 30 years ago observed this parallel in one little chapter in which he said that the parallel between women of all races and Black men was the deepest truth of American life, that we were the gigantic pool of cheap labor off which this system ran, whether we were in the fields or other people's kitchens or our own kitchens or on the campus or in office buildings or wherever we might be.

And that moreover, the myths of our shared inferiority were very similar. And of course, the most effective thing about a myth is that the people who are afflicted by it come themselves to believe it. And he pointed out some of the parallel myths, that all women and minority men are said to have smaller natures, childlike natures, passive natures.

Maybe we can govern each other. I mean, a woman can be head of the secretarial pool or head of an academic department that has all women in it. A Black person can be assigned to Black stories. But god forbid that we should ever have power over the ruling group. That's where the nitty gritty comes in. What else? What were all those myths? We're late all the time. We don't like to work for each other.

We don't accept authority in each other, which, of course, is a self-fulfilling myth because as we have been taught all our lives that we as a group are inferior, then we do mistrust authority from each other. But that's something that's shared by all oppressed groups, not just by women. And only as we begin to understand that we are full and equal human beings do we honor ourselves or each other.

What else? That we have natural rhythm. With Black men, it's musical; with us, it's lunar. And the whole idea was that at the onset of our lunar cycle, women were less capable of doing well on exams and had faulty judgment. And of course, you wouldn't want a menopausal woman in the White House during the Bay of Pigs. Remember Edgar Berman who said that? We had a non-menopausal man, and it didn't work out too well. But anyway.

[APPLAUSE]

Anyway, the general idea of all of this argument was that in those days, at the onset of women's lunar cycles, that we were more difficult and aggressive and so on and so on and bitchy and, what are all those words? And unstable. Now, if that were true, which it isn't, incidentally-- there are some cultures in the world in which women are told in that period of time they have magical powers, and pretty soon they have magical powers. I mean, the power of suggestion is fantastic.

But if it were true, then it could be attributed to our hormones. And the truth of the matter physiologically is that in those days at the onset of the lunar cycle, the female hormone is in us at its lowest ebb. So in that case, we would be acting then the most like what men act like all month long.

[APPLAUSE]

I assure you, the friends in the audience, whom I addressed as friends when I said friends and sisters, that we are not trying to overturn this caste system and become superior. We have seen what superiority has done to you, thank you very much. And that is not what we have in mind. We do want to humanize both roles and to approach humanism via feminism, if you will excuse us if we use these little consciousness-raising things once in a while.

I spoke at the IWY convention in Nevada. And I heard myself saying in public something I have not done except in the halls of the office before, but I feel it coming on again. I didn't plan to do this, but since you liked the other so much, let me try.

One of the problems is that anything that women do is inferior and anything that men do is superior. It doesn't matter what it is, right? I mean, you can go in a department store and you see that women are selling men's underwear and men are selling kitchen ranges, and you realize it has nothing to do with expertise. It just has to do with money and so on. And well, a man with less than a high school education makes more than a woman with a BA, with a college education. We all know that.

So in trying to make us feel better about ourselves, by thinking what men would do with what we have, we started one day in the office to think what would happen if men menstruated. And this sort of grew as we started to discuss it. And we had this vision that men would treat it like this terrific thing. They would brag about it. And they would brag with each other about how long and how much--

[LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE]

And there would be a federally funded national institute of dysmenorrhea. All sanitary supplies would be federally funded and free. What else? Well, obviously, military men would make a lot out of it because they would say women can't go in the army. They'd faint at the sight of blood. You have to give blood to take blood and all of that.

And can't you see two guys on the street, kind of street hippies, greeting each other, and one says, man, you're looking good. And the other one says, I'm on the rag. And the intellectuals. The intellectuals Would have a wonderful time because they would, of course, prove definitively-- can't you just hear Sidney Hook-- that, of course, only women could be mathematicians or could have any sense of the measurement of time because-- Or only men, excuse me, because men alone had this wonderful inbuilt measurement of time that every--

And the theologians, of course. I mean, that only men were connected to the spheres and to the movement of the heavenly bodies via this Martian cycle or whatever they would call it.

Well, I think that the more we begin to think about the reality of our situations, whatever it is, of our skills, of our shared physiological natures as women, the ability to have children and so on, that all of this has been turned around in our heads and made to be the proof of our inferiority, when it could just as well be the other way around.

It could just as well be and probably was for a long time the proof of our superiority. So I only say this, again, not to try to overturn the system and to imitate men by dominating others, but only to help us-- at least it helps me-- to begin to feel less apologetic about whatever it is that we possess as women as a group or as individual human beings who happen to be women and begin to assess where we would be as individuals if we had the same hopes and dreams and talents and had been born male and to begin to just look at that as at least a consciousness-raising effort.

However, the fact that what we do share as women is very apparent and the common oppression that we share as women is very apparent in the choice of issues that come forward as women begin to move forward and to overthrow or humanize-- you can use either verb, depending on the state of your patience today, the patriarchy.

So whatever country it's in, whether it's India or China or Italy or France or England or here, the first set of issues have always to do-- or one of the first set of issues have always to do with reproductive freedom. And I think we can see that that's no accident because it is a fact-- it is an everyday fact of women's lives for much of our lives that as the child bearers, we are literally controlled as the means of production.

We are always vulnerable. And how can we have power in the outside world unless we can seize control of our inside selves and decide for ourselves whether and when we will or will not bear children? Which is why feminists have chosen the term reproductive freedom, not population control, which has mean to us, I think, that a group of men up there decide which part of the population can reproduce and which can't.

And that we are talking about the freedom to have all forms of conception that we might wish, the freedom to choose abortion, the freedom from forced sterilization, which is a very real danger to many poor and powerless women in this country. That we're talking about the freedom to have or not to have children.

Now, if we ever needed any proof that this is a very basic gut issue to the power structure as well as to us, we have only to look at the recent Supreme Court decisions, the three decisions that came down on abortion, and see that they say there in very clear, interesting language that it is in the interest of the state to control and/or encourage women to have children.

I mean, they really spell out what I'm saying precisely. It's one of the few bits of feminist theory ever to come out of the Supreme Court. That it is up to-- it is a-- what's the phrase?-- a overwhelming state interest or something to control or to encourage, to be able to encourage women to have children.

Now, when they start talking about state interest, what that means is that all bets are off it's like the all constitutional freedoms are nullified. It's like saying national security. It's exactly the same argument as national security. Suddenly all the other rules don't apply anymore. And that's how they were able to rule, in reality, that this medical service and this alone was mysteriously exempt from Medicare payment and that this health right and this alone was mysteriously exempt from all rationale of equal constitutional rights.

And so we see, whether we look at the women of Italy, who marched in the streets and brought down a government for this reproductive freedom, or whether we look at our adversaries on the Supreme Court, which were six not nine-- I'm happy to say that three men and the one Black Justice voted on the side of reproductive freedom-- but we understand that this is a very basic and fundamental right.

And we begin, I think, to unite around that right and stop worrying about the political labels from our patriarchal pasts that are supposed to divide us. Do you know Lee Grant, who's an actress? Anyway, she wrote a piece once early in the life of the magazine in which she just-- I used to try to explain how come political groupings usually didn't affect women, the conventional ones.

And she just wrote this great sentence where she said, well, I have been married to one Marxist and one fascist, and neither one took the garbage out. These political divisions are all divisions of a patriarchy. So it's really not that different. Women who are in the Republican Party or the John Birch Society and who find themselves mimeographing and making coffee and so on were not having such a different experience from the women in SNCC and in the anti-war movement and so on, who found themselves doing the same thing.

And so we have begun to come together without regard to these labels and to look at the simple, basic, fundamental freedoms that women want. We have heard a lot about the freedom of speech. And yes, we want that. We have heard a lot about freedom of movement. And yes, we want that.

And yet reproductive freedom, for men as well as women, because minority men are sometimes also subject to forced sterilization or powerless groups of men-- this basic fundamental freedom is not regarded as a freedom by our president, is never spoken of in his-- is contrary to his policy at home, is never considered when he discusses human rights abroad. And yet it is the most fundamental freedom for women.

We are also supposed to be divided against each other, which is, of course, the way we are kept from building our bridges to power, a very effective way. According to age, which I've really never understood at all, since all young women are going to be old women pretty soon. I mean, that's the most self-defeating division. But nonetheless, we are supposed to be divided that way, as we are supposed to be divided according to appearance and according to whether we're married or not and whether or not we have children.

But if you'll notice that when we go to get a job, it doesn't really matter what a woman is; it's always the wrong thing. I mean, if she is not married, she might get married, and therefore they can't hire her. If she is married and doesn't have children, she might have them and therefore would have to leave. If she has children, they might get sick, and therefore she would have to stay home. Of course, the father wouldn't stay home.

The only thing you could really do constructively, I think, is to tell the employer you're a radical lesbian, but then they think you're going to attack the other women in the office, even though we all know it's the heterosexual men who attack the other women in the office. So you can't win.

And as we begin to realize that they just don't want to hire women, that these rationales that we take into our soul and say, yes, it's true, if only I weren't married, if only I were, if only I didn't have children, if only I did. It's my fault. It's my fault. It's my fault. everything is our fault. The meat boycott was our fault. The entire nature of our children is our fault. Juvenile delinquency is our fault. All the faults of society are attributable to women. When we begin to look at the reality and finally we begin to unite.

We are also supposed to be divided according to who works at home and who works outside the home. If I hear one more man talk about women who don't work, I will just scream.

[APPLAUSE]

Or for that matter, one more woman. I mean, know we do it too. And the women's movement has often been accused of being for women who work, which it is. And that means housewives too. I mean, women who stay at home and work harder than anybody and end up with much longer hours than anybody and no legal rights and no--

[APPLAUSE]

And so I think all of us, all of us as women, have come to realize that we will not be divided according to who's at home and who's not, that we have to honor all human work and point out that it is the work that's important, not the doer, not who does it, that until we get honor for work at home, whether it's done by a woman or a man, Social Security, and all the other rights that we know that housewives need, that there will be a large pool of women who are an even cheaper labor force than some other pools of women who can be used against each other.

We're supposed to also be divided by our education. And maybe this is a topic those of us who have been able to purchase a BA degree or an MA or a PhD need to think about. Because let me tell you, unemployed women get better educated every year.

And even though it is supposed to be the case that if we do well and behave and are nice and make nice and get lots of degrees, we will get up in the world. The truth is that that's not happening, that men with less than a high school education do make more than women with a BA, that we all know those of us who come from campuses what the power structure is and what the reward is for degrees on those campuses, and that we really need spiritually to unite across the boundaries of supposed education, which I must say in some cases is brainwashing.

I noticed that the women in my hometown of Toledo, Ohio, in the factories became feminists before I did because they were seeing the system pure right there. And they hadn't been told for four years, as I was, that if I just behaved and learned Chaucer, the world was mine. And they were out there striking, I think it was Libbey-Owens-Ford and bringing suit against them and so on, before I was. So we need to rethink what is real education, what is brainwashing, what is the value of education, and what our bonds are to women who are "uneducated," in quotes.

There's also supposed to be a division on the issues of blue-collar women versus white-collar women. And actually, blue-collar women earn more than white-collar women on the average, women in nontraditional blue-collar jobs. Of course, when sociologists talk about blue-collar women, they mean the wives of blue-collar men, which isn't what I mean.

We're supposed to be divided along racial lines, which are perhaps the most difficult barriers for us to cross. And only as we begin to understand that the issues of minorities as a group, men and women, the issues of the powerless are generally all the same issues, do we begin to be able to work in coalition, to become trustworthy as white women because we are not saying let me help you people, like white liberals.

But we are saying, look, this is what all of us need and seeing that it is really, literally, in our self-interest. Of course, we're also supposed to be divided on the issues of sexual preference and private lives, which people have been asking me-- that is, the press has been asking me about all day because of Anita Bryant, who I guess is coming here next. Is that true? Well, I was told that today by the press.

[LAUGHTER]

I went to Florida to campaign, and I actually ended up feeling sorry for Anita Bryant because, I mean, she has created an incredible atmosphere of hate and divisiveness. But it's a campaign run by her husband and her pastor. And there has been a lot of-- the feeling directed at her, I think, is really hate woman. I mean, there's a lot of viciousness and ridicule directed at her. And she's actually just doing what she's been taught to do all of her life.

Meanwhile, two male homosexuals were beaten up and killed in Miami by two men, and nobody knows who those men are. It has troubling aspects, I think. But even though we are supposed to be divided along those lines, a very interesting thing happened to us on the way to our division, which is that we discovered that women who are strong human beings and don't giggle and laugh and say, how clever of you to know what time it is, and all the things that women are supposed to do, are accused of being lesbians.

Have you ever noticed that? I mean, first, you're pushy, bitchy, aggressive. And about 15 minutes later, you're a lesbian. So this has been a very uniting experience for a lot of us because we have discovered what that kind of prejudice is like. And we have discovered that that is a word for a nonconformist women.

I once marched down Fifth Avenue in New York City with one seven-month-pregnant woman and one even more than seven months, and the men on the sidewalk were screaming, lesbians, lesbians, because we were in a women's rights march.

So we have finally, I hope, figured out that we aren't going to let this happen, that this group of women is the most vulnerable group of women. And so they pick them off. It's like Pastor Niemoller said. First, they came to get the Communists, and I wasn't a Communist, so I didn't object. And then they came to get the trade unionists-- and I don't know. And anyway, in the end, there's nobody left to object.

And we've come to this decision I think out of our self-interest because we understand that until the word lesbian is just another word as honorable as any other, that it will be a scare word that is used to attack and to stop all of us who don't conform to the female role.

We're also supposed to be divided along religious grounds, those folks who are into religion and those who are not. I'm not, but I have the most enormous respect for those women who are now-- catholic nuns are saying mass-- very interesting. Protestant women are voting in the church-- fantastic revolution. Jewish women are rewriting all those prayers where it says thank God I wasn't born a woman or a slave. Isn't that what the Jewish men say?

And we are beginning to take over and to humanize and I hope to consider that there's some essence of God in all people, not just in-- but don't you think it's deeply suspicious that God always looks like the ruling class? That's always troubled me. All the representations of God is white and male. It always seemed to me to be saying that somehow they were getting us to worship the structure, the ruling group.

And we are now beginning to look at that. And women in religions are doing it very courageously. And that's so important because that is where so much of our dreams and aspirations and mythological level of thinking is in religion. And that also is beginning to be humanized.

All of these groups are beginning to come together so that we can work on issues, on all the issues that I don't need to enumerate for you because we all know them so well, and your women's committee has enumerated them so well as specific women's issues.

But it also helps us to understand that there is no issue that is not a woman's issue, that if indeed the subjugation of women, the sexual caste system was the model, the political anthropological model for race systems and class systems, and they are completely intertwined in any case, whichever came first, then it's clear that they can only be fought together and that as long as we do not attack the sexual caste system, we can never root out the class system or the racial caste system.

It's also clear when we look at any issue that women bring a special knowledge and a special view to it. You were discussing at this convention the politics of food. Well, one of the deepest problems is that in many parts of the world, girl babies are simply not fed as well because they are not as desirable. Pregnant women are not getting enough to eat in this country. And we are producing children-- and pregnant women have this special curse of being able to see their ill health and malnutrition passed on to another human being who may never be able to recover in terms of brain development and body development because of the nutrition of the mother.

And in many parts of this country, welfare payments are not-- special welfare payments are not given to pregnant women. So now, thanks to the Supreme Court, if they should want an abortion, they can't have one. And if they should want decent nutrition and care, they also can't get that.

I noticed you have baby formula in your workbooks as part of the exportation of baby formula and pushing it on the part of our wonderful multinational corporations who make women in third-world countries feel that this is a wonderful modern thing and that they must do it; it's for the good of their children. Only, it increases the infant mortality rate hugely because the water supply is not hygienic. And they would be much better off breastfeeding their children.

We look at African countries, for instance, and we see some of the food supply problems arise because women are not taught the new agricultural skills, even though they may be the primary agricultural workers. The American technicians come in and teach those skills to the men, as we are indeed engaged in technology transfers all over this globe, and it's going to the men. We are exporting the most virulent kind of prejudice by giving the secrets of the patriarchy, the technological secrets of this witch doctor patriarchy only to other men.

And women in third-world countries know that and plead with us not to export this kind of prejudice. We are making their situations often worse rather than better. We can look at the Food and Agricultural Organization, FAO, also and its internal problems. I accepted a medal from--

What they do is they sit-- the guys in FAO sit and they think, what women can we-- they say, well, Coretta King and who was the other one? Well, there was a couple of actresses. I mean, you can just see them. It's sort of like, who's that Spanish dancer, Jose Greco? They can only think of a few women. So they gave me a medal, which I now have to-- now that I found out how bad the situation is for the employment of women inside FAO, even though, again, women are the primary agricultural workers in much of the world, I'm going to have to go to Rome to throw it over the fence, like a Vietnam medal.

Our educational goals, which are also part of your program, obviously must have in them the humanization of sex and race roles so that finally we can be free to be individual human beings. And in all of these goals, we now find ourselves confronted with a very firm, very well-organized, very clear right-wing coalition, which has as its issues the obverse of all that we're talking about, which has the ownership of women by men and by families and by the state.

Therefore, no contraception, abortion, so on. No battered wives centers, which they refer to as runaway wives centers. They are against child abuse legislation because it interferes with the principle of the legal ownership of children by parents and allows the state into the family. They are against all the things we know, ERA, gun control, all of the issues that we know about.

And they are a very clear and well-organized group. And we confront them more and more in every way. Any people here who belong to states who have not yet had your International Women's Year meetings, I hope that you will heed the telegram from Bella Abzug and participate in those meetings because there has been very organized directives to try to upset those meetings.

We invite everybody to participate but not to destroy them, to really participate. And these people seem to wish to destroy them. So in the name of all of us who are here as women, I hope that we will be able to reach out to each other, to make the bridges to each other, to understand our issues clearly, and to understand that there is no issue we can take up that women do not bring something different to, whether it is the politics of food or whether it is education or whether it is defined as a woman's issue.

So in the name of all of us who wonder what we might have been if we had thought better of ourselves, in the name of all of our grandmothers who had no names and had no histories, in the names of all the witches and the gypsies who were killed for being free women--

--in the names of all the women we read about every day in the newspapers when we open them up and we see that women have been raped or beaten or killed in ways that make us understand it was specific hatred of them as women, for all of the women here and everywhere who have two jobs when their husbands have one, who work outside the home and yet still are supposed to take care of the children and the house somehow more than he is--

--for all of the women who have patriarchal names and not our own, for all of us who have ever been involved, as I have, in such self-hatred that we took pride in not identifying with other women, for the men in this room and everywhere who have also been curtailed in their humanity and made to feel they had to behave in very restricted ways in order to earn their gender--

--and most of all, perhaps, for the children, whose dreams we must most of all set free, we can declare ourselves, in fact, the women our families warned us against. We are the rebels. We are the witches and the gypsies of our time.

And we are the people whose uniting with each other, whose understanding of our shared issues and our special what we can uniquely bring to all of our issues, we are the people who are going to make bridges not just to equality, equal to what their roles are very inhuman to, but finally bridges to humanism. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]