[EDEQUITY Technology Dialogue] Closing statement by Cornelia

From: Cornelia Brunner (cbrunner@edc.org.org)
Date: Wed Jul 25 2001 - 11:10:00 EDT


Brunner
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Dear EdEquity members:
Due to technical difficulties on Friday, July 20, we were not able to post
Ms. Cornelia's closing statement as part of the Technology and Equity
Dialogue, July 16-20. The following paragraph's are her closing statements
for your enjoyment.

Shireen Mitchell's story about her traditionally feminine friend is very
telling. It's a real dilemma. The answer sounds so simple: celebrate
diversity within the women's community. But in reality, that's really hard
to do, as is all genuine acceptance of diversity. The closest thing to a
fail-safe technique I've encountered in my own life is that thing we did in
the seventies: consciousness raising groups.

I mean the technique described by NOW a long time ago, where a small group
of women commit themselves to meeting for a period of time and do
go-arounds, listening to each other. (I think the origins are an old
Chinese tradition called "speaking bitterness.") Anyhow, in my experience,
this taught us to listen, really listen to each other. There was no
cross-talk during these go-arounds, no need to be either supportive or
analytic, but only to listen. There was always a topic we set during the
previous meeting, so everybody had a chance to think about it all week, to
notice how the topic came up in our daily lives. So then, when it came time
to take our turn, we could just relax, breathe, and see what came up as we
started to speak. We didn't have to make a point, just to tell the kinds of
things we found ourselves remembering, noticing or stewing over during the
intervening days and nights. This meant we had time and space to listen to
each other because we weren't busy beforehand planning what we would say or
chewing over how someone responded to us afterward. All we had to do was
listen.

After a few weeks during which this process first seemed a little awkward
and quite artificial, an amazing thing started to happen. We started to
hear the music in these stories. We started to notice common themes and
recurring melodies with many fascinating variations. We started to realize
that we really were all struggling with the same issues, in our own
individual ways. The middle-aged woman wearing make-up (which I thought
close to a criminal betrayal of true feminism at the time, being young,
dogmatic, and not needing the miracle of make-up to get some color into my
washed-out, wrinkled face - I never have worn make-up because I don't like
how it feels, but I wear mascara because I never learned to make peace with
my pale eyelashes) and the young, intense, apparently androgynous,
liberated radical actually ended up seeing that they were sisters because
they came to realize that they were trying to deal with the same
contradictions, if in very different ways. We ended up gaining genuine
respect for each other, and a far deeper understanding of the power of
socialization and the need for emotional autonomy than would have been
possible any other way. We experienced the connections, we didn't just talk
about them abstractly.

This very feminine, way of relating, making room for everyone's story,
listening, sharing, supporting through attention rather than rhetoric,
through feeling rather than idea, had a profound effect on every woman I
know who went through it. More than anything, it taught us respect for each
other and for ourselves, for the common struggle we saw every woman engaged
in, whether it took place in her home or in the workplace or in the public
forum of political action. It is what finally freed me personally from
wanting to convince my male academic peers that they were wrong in their
chauvinism and turn my attention instead to making women's lives less
difficult. I learned to value femininity even as I also learned how
powerful its prescriptions are and how deeply its constraints have harmed
us. I learned to live with that contradiction.

When I see girl-friendly projects now, filled with good will, encouragement
and positive messages to young women (about science and technology and
other non-traditional fields), I wonder whether we wouldn't help them more
if we did a little more consciousness raising with them instead, found
feminine ways of making room for the stories of our own struggles, stopped
pretending that we are free, and started looking again at the
contradictions we have to live with and hopefully resolve just enough to
give the next generation a slightly better chance at fashioning a genuine
way of being themselves. I think good role models tell you about their
struggle. They show you that it's worth struggling because you can succeed,
and that the fact that something requires struggle does not mean you're not
meant to go there; that recognizing the myriad forms the struggle takes is
what joins us to each other and makes diversity not only acceptable but
necessary.

Sorry - this turned into a sermonette. Chalk it off to my advanced age and
forgive me. It has been a pleasure to participate in this conversation. I
want to thank everyone who posted - and even those who lurked. (I plan to
lurk in the next one myself...) And I want to thank Hilandia for managing
this whole enterprise. Good work!

--
Cornelia Brunner
Associate Director
EDC/Center for Children & Technology



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