The WOW Lecture Lives up to its Name with the Glorious Gloria

The Fourth Feldt/Barbanell Women of the World Lecture
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On the evening of Oct. 18, 2007, Gloria Steinem mesmerized everyone at the fourth Feldt/Barbanell Women of the World Lecture at Arizona State University with her warmth, candor and flawless oratory. Her speech was a declaration of faith and peace and, at the same time, a war cry.

The other people to address the audience this evening were Mary Margaret Fonow, director of the ASU Women and Gender Studies Program, Quentin Wheeler, vice president and dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Alex Barbanell and Gloria Feldt.

To people that packed the Arizona Ballroom to capacity, to people that had to sit in the adjacent room to just hear her, to people that struggled to get in, Steinem expressed her gratitude for "taking a chance on a stranger" and taking time out from their busy lives to join her for a precious one and a half hours.

The writer, activist, feminist leader and organizer, a woman with many liberating roles and many feathers in her cap, is no stranger to feminists and freedom lovers worldwide. Yet Gloria Steinem, in all humility, articulated her joy to be together with the university community and hoped that everyone would leave with, "one new idea, organizing tactic, troublemaking notion or a new support, because we were together here tonight."

She started her address by asserting that feminist movements and movements to secure social justice, equality and self-determination were not over. From discussing the phenomena of social movements, she went on to talk about the status of women, the issue of women's work and democracy. She averred that there is a long way to go to free the world of oppressive socio-political structures but at the same time it is important to give ourselves, the women of the world, credit for how far we have come.

She said there was a strong need for redefinition of women's work, and attribution of economic value to it. She regretted that women have not been part of crucial decision-making and peace processes worldwide. She identified democratic families as chief units and determinants of democracy.

The firebrand-feminist compared everyone present in the room with imaginal cells that become innumerable, beautiful, glorious butterflies whose wing-flapping can change the weather miles away. She called for collective action and organization. Sparks of her brilliant humor were evident in statements like, "patriarchy doesn't work anymore anywhere."

At the Q and A session, Gloria discussed her upcoming book and Islamic secularism, and many other issues with equal élan.

"If Gloria Steinem and her generation are, “the women their mothers warned them about,” then this generation has become the women (and men) that our mothers taught us and hoped for us to be," said Tiffany Lamoreaux, a women and gender studies doctoral student. "I feel that ASU's campus being honored by Gloria Steinem's visit will go down in the history of the Women of the World Lecture series as a time when in one voice the feminists (men and women) declared, “We will not go quietly into the night, we will not go without a fight!”

Alicia Woodbury, another doctoral student, said, she "found Gloria's message to be one of movement unity—of young feminists drawing from the experience of older feminists, of feminist activists remembering to recognize their inseparability from the agendas of race equality and gay rights, of local organizers using technology to communicate amongst themselves for the next 30 years of the movement's work, of creating partnerships across abstract international boundaries as we rework the impact of globalization."

By Debjani Chakravarty, gender studies doctoral student