The March to Equality: Women Creating the Future

Are women creating the future? Well, aren’t we all creating the future? I mean, why does it need to be said?

Of course we all always create the future. The very fact that we act, and that our actions have an effect on the future, means that we create the future. But what future do we create, and why is this important for women?

I have always assumed that I create the future just like anyone else. But over the years, something strange became obvious. Even though I grew up thinking that feminism was something rather dim for old-fashioned sour women (I had all the freedoms I needed, so why go out and do embarrassing things like burning bras?) I realized that reality never quite matched my ideas of freedom.

What was it?

Who Is A Woman? In Search of Female Identity – Part 6

So Who Is A Woman?

“If we apply the concept of Karma and Creativity to the contradiction of women’s identity (which, as we have seen, is a mixture of liberation from and new enslavement to our genderedness), we can come to a new appreciation of how deeply ingrained our past views of sex and gender are; they are not a jacket we take off to exchange it for a new one, but they most probably are woven deeply into not only our ideas themselves, but our ability to look, feel and think.”

With this, we come around full circle to where we started: Who is a woman? From what do we derive our identity? What is that identity in a time of tremendous change?

When looking through these four different perspectives (which are only half of the quadrant-perspectives available to us!), what struck me was the level of ambiguity that is revealed in each of them. Woman’s authentic interior experience seems a mix of unlimited possibility and muffled inhibition. The structural lens most used to get access to woman’s experience is that of the feminine typology, yet throughout history that very typology has gone through countless renderings with hugely different meanings. Looking at a woman’s physical manifestation, it is baffling how difficult it has been for human beings to get to some sort of objectivity, which makes one wonder what our assumed objectivity means. And if we feel into a woman’s internal experience of her physical nature, we find turmoil, paradox, and an extraordinary capacity to adjust and sacrifice.

Who Is A Woman? In Search of Female Identity – Part 5

The Fourth Perspective: Feeling Like the Female Species

Classically, a woman’s autopoiesis has been entirely focused on the cycle of attraction, consummation and childbirth. With increased power over all of those, autopoiesis might be shifting its energetic activity to the new purpose we are giving it: that of attractiveness and individualism. What these factors of fear and attraction, supported by automatic chemical and cognitive reflexes, convey is a complex picture in which my own say into the motivations I deem “mine” is put to question.

Our look at the outside of our exterior has naturally brought us to inquire into what is happening inside our physical reality, and how we experience our changing body and behavior. This perspective, of seeing, or feeling into, the exterior reality of woman from the inside, illuminates the unseen 1^st-person experience of our visible 3^rd-person manifestation.

I never had much view on our experience of our bodies beyond the fact that as women we have always been burdened with our fertility, yet also found our purpose and identity in this; that I was privileged to be born into the first generation with a choice; and that consequently our relationship to our body is in flux. But again it was Simone De Beauvoir, although a little gloomy in her descriptions, who brought new depth to these issues. Reading her analysis of women’s anatomy, it is not hard to see that the hormonal patterns, dangers of childbirth, misery of miscarriage, and ever-present possibility of being overwhelmed by the physically stronger half of the species, cannot but have a profound impact on women’s chemical and cognitive processes, which are endlessly thrown off-balance, and equally endlessly trying to restore balance. She describes in detail the chemical processes, circulatory adjustments and hormonal cycles that cause physical and emotional instability for a woman as the price for her ability, by means of reproduction, to secure the stability of the human species. Added to this instability

Who Is A Woman? In Search of Female Identity – Part 4

The Third Perspective: Woman As A Species

Even today, I am not sure that we have fully let in the radical consequences of contraception for human beings, as half of the species suddenly has the freedom to divert her path away from this reproductive turmoil, putting an end to what De Beauvoir called “the abdication… of her individual abilities”.

Just as we can gain 3^rd-person access to our interior experience, so can we gain 3^rd-person access to our exterior manifestation. This perspective is where we look from the outside at the physical reality of a woman, capturing through biology or behavior her arising as a visible manifestation.

I did not realize the full importance of this perspective until Simone De Beauvoir, who has been experimenting with various perspectives in her writings, surprised me with a long analysis of female anatomy. She points out how through evolution, each higher species is less determined by sex but more individualized, with the human female being the (relatively) least sexed and most individualistically evolved mammal on earth. Yet, with the decrease in physical emphasis on sex and the human body becoming built less for sex and more for individual expression, mammal reproduction has become increasingly risky and difficult, thus rendering females subject to the demanding, destabilizing and at times life-threatening cycle of menstruation, childbirth and menopause.

For many thousands of years, human beings have had little objective knowledge about women’s anatomy, other than the fact that women spent most of their lives giving birth to and caring for babies, not always

Who Is A Woman? In Search of Female Identity – Part 3

“Mary Wollstonecraft revealed how women’s interior experience was determined by a forced structural typology that caused her to use her self-awareness exclusively to censor her own critical faculties. In understanding woman’s interior through the cage that was holding it captive, she started liberating the woman who did not dare allow herself to know she was caught.”

The Second Perspective: The Look Of Feeling A Woman

This perspective is the 3^rd-person view of the 1^st-person experience, or in Ken Wilber’s words: “The look of a feeling”. Our own direct internal experience is a 1^st-person perspective; by either removing ourselves one step from this, or gaining access to someone else’s direct experience, we can establish a 3^rd-person view of the 1^st-person experience, which enables us to detect the internality codes that govern an interior “I”. But we can take this one step further: by discovering these interior patterns or structures through access to an individual’s experience, we discover the deeper Kosmic patterns of existence, beyond this moment and locality, and this in turn helps us to read anyone’s interior experience.

As we saw earlier, in the earliest times of civilization there was little notion of a woman’s interior, and therefore we do not have much to go on. Gerda Lerner shows how in early patriarchy women were thought to have little interiority, and what interiority they had was considered devious because of its difference from men. Later, this provoked strongly paternalizing Church commentaries to keep those devious tendencies under control. The Enlightenment broke up the moral grip of the Church, but rather than relaxing these gender steriotypes, the great power shift in culture that resulted meant that the structures of gender types became strongly dichotomized and even more cemented in culture, but in a new way. A newly sophisticated contempt of women’s perceived lack of interiority emerged; woman was now a weak, feminine being with no will or intellect of her own.

Thankfully, the rise of individuality of that period also meant that

Who Is A Woman? In Search of Female Identity – Part 2

Four Perspectives

“For many years I supported the very reasonable idea that I was equal to men. But over the years, it became clear that this was not the whole picture. After years of denial, I had to admit that I still felt inadequate compared to men.”

The First Perspective: The Feeling Of Being A Woman

This perspective is the view of a woman’s interior experience, viewed from within. This is called a phenomenological perspective: it shows us the interior of a person as it arises. Ken Wilber says about this: “Mental objects exist in a mental space… whether they do or do not [also] exist in a sensori-physical space”. This means that mental objects do not depend on sensory proof like exterior phenomena do, but that phenomenology “brackets” phenomena (which nevertheless must be verifiable) and studies them as they arise, the way they arise. The experience can be felt, not seen, and its proof of existence is the feeling.

From the earliest times of civilization we have few direct accounts of human beings, and even fewer of women; women were not taught to read or write, and much less encouraged to speak out. Even when history started to be preserved and human beings started to record their individual existence, the basic structures of patriarchy meant that women were not part of the public sphere and had little access to that history. Most of the very rich accounts from medieval mystics were written by men; the great twelfth-century Hildegard von Bingen kept her visions silent for half her life for fear of being condemned as a heretic. Feminist historian Gerda Lerner, who meticulously researched the role of women in history, points out a widespread “internalization by women of their inferiority”.

With the arising of the Enlightenment women started getting access to education and some began to speak out. Eighteenth-century Mary Wollstonecraft wrote her brilliant, scathing commentaries on women’s carefully cultivated inability to reason. Yet even she did not write explicitly about a woman’s actual experience, although hers can be deducted from her impassioned writings.

Who Is A Woman? In Search of Female Identity – part 1

Introduction

Who is a woman? This question is so simple and straightforward that for many years I never thought of asking it. But the changes in culture and society of the last half century, and the big questions that follow these changes (Are women equal to men? Why are women paid less? Why is there still a glass ceiling?) finally made me track back to this very basic question. And when I looked for answers, the answers I found in our current culture proved to be remarkably confusing and contradictory.

It all used to be so simple: there were men, and there were women. Men were equated with the masculine and women with the feminine, and each had their roles. With the many opportunities opened up by feminism, this started to change and many more opportunities became available to women. But as I considered above questions about equality and success, I realized that as we women broke out of the confinement of our fixed role of bearing and caring for children and shed our mother’s identities, we found ourselves increasingly as strangers in a male world and discovered that the outward changes of earning money and controlling our fertility were only the beginning of the journey.

Many of us now realize that we have gained freedom but are losing our bearings. It is no wonder, then, that the third wave of feminism has moved the feminist journey from women’s rights to women’s identity. In many circles, this identity is increasingly more described as a

Change In Process…

This blog has been idle for a long time. If you wonder why I abandoned it, this is why: shortly after I had started it, I jumped head-first into a university program that required me to write daily and did not leave me time to think about much more than the learning materials of the course.

This program  is the Integral Theory Master’s program at JFK University in California; an engaging, cutting-edge program that deepens my understanding of 21st-Century complex thinking and gives me the philosophical underpinning that I could never dream of (because I never had the philosophical sophistication to imagine it!).

In the mean time I have been writing a lot. Some of the fruits I will begin to share here. It will be a mix of various topics: women’s development, developmental theory, issues around learning and intelligence. It might not seem as practically oriented as my previous posts, but I promise it will be interesting because, after all, there is nothing more practical than a good theory!

Why? Well, I guess I have to write a full blog post about that some time…

Emergence or Emergency?

I was at an event earlier this week that highlighted the crisis our planet is in: environmentally, economically and morally. Some were speaking about an Emergency, and some were linking this to the word Emergence.

I thought it was a clever and elegant to link these words. But thinking more, I realised it is tricky business.

Anyone who has gone through an organisational or personal crisis knows that times of emergency can bring enormous potential and new creative solutions. Where do these come from? Sometimes we’re not sure – they just seem to emerge.

I would define an emergency as a state of breakdown across the board, caused by changing life conditions and inadequate coping systems. The only way to find a lasting solution is to think in a new way – or, as Einstein elegantly formulated it: “You can’t solve a problem at the same level that it was caused.”

Now how often do we really solve an emergency? And how often do we just patch things up, get everything back to normal, and upgrade our security systems to make sure next time we won’t get caught so easily?

A great example is WW II. An enormous existential, developmental and moral emergency resulting in millions and millions of dead, wounded and traumatised. But the fifties were all about restoring order, wealth and ‘the old’. I recently listened to Churchill’s famous “We’ll fight them on the beaches” speech, which is a moving example of courageous leadership, and was amazed to hear him finish with the words: “And if for any reason, which I don’t believe at all, this island will get conquered, then the Empire will fight to restore the Old.”

The Old lasted until the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, burning bras and University riots. Which was the emergency, and which the emergence?

Truly new solutions, the sort of solutions that permanently solve emergencies, don’t get handed down, thought up or constructed from existing knowledge and morals; they emerge. And the only way anything new can emerge is if we have the courage to stop our current way of thinking and make space for something new to emerge in our awareness.

As human beings we are conditioned to deal effectively with emergencies. We’ve been so successful because of our ability to apply our knowledge consciously and innovate. We learn from each emergency and do better during the next one – which then of course always triggers a next one because we continuously upgrade our life conditions and therefore keep outgrowing our coping systems.

Now the thing is that this is nothing more than a sophisticated survival technique. It doesn’t bring anything fundamentally new. We are programmed to preserve the old through our very ability to learn, remember and seek stability.

This very tendency to develop pushes us from emergency to emergency. We always think that this time we will really solve it, but that’s only because we usually don’t see that our lives are a part of a vast evolutionary process. If you take a step back, you can see that we always need to innovate and the very moment we achieve stability things start going off the rails – because of that very stability, which changes the game!

Now the cases where truly new solutions are found, they usually don’t come from anyone or any place in particular. They emerge, and usually surprise us entirely. When European feudalism, the Church and robber barons had snuffed out any sense of freedom, some religious innovators moved to the “The New World” and started a revolution in democratic principles that, however eroded they may seem to us now, changed the human experience of freedom for good. When IBM was on the verge of death, the first steps on the path of its transformation into an online services giant were set in a hallway cupboard by some enterprising renegade employees fiddling around with the net.

Too often when we find ourselves in an emergency we act like a blind horse trying to use the same solution over and over again, only to find things getting worse. What if we would actually stop and let go of the one and only thing that we put our faith in: the very thinking that we get our sense of security from – and that got us into trouble to start with?

That’s a challenging thing to do – particularly when you are fighting for your survival. It takes real courage, leadership and vision. But I’m sure that we all have at least one experience in our life when taking that risk to not know the solution actually brought about a completely new solution; a solution that came out of nowhere – it simply emerged, you knew it was right, and it changed the game forever.

And I think that’s where the rub is. Linking Emergency with Emergence can be effective in the right context, but if taken superficially without questioning our values we will muddle up two concepts that tend to be opposites: Emergency arising from survival, and Emergence arising from trust.

Unless we are very conscious, extremely courageous and have a vision for what we are doing and why, when faced with an emergency we will most likely descend to survival mode – the very last place that will tempt us to let go of what we know and take a risk. Emergence needs space to arise and dedication to a purpose beyond ourselves and our very human worries.

When I look at the state of the world, the state of the environment and the state of our global economy, I feel overwhelmed. Often I try not to look at it because I feel too small to handle it. But what do you think we need: a State of Emergency, or Emergence?

Direction, Alignment, Commitment: Leadership Revisited

After a previous post about Leadership, Jonathan Reams, editor of Integral Review, sent me a fascinating paper illuminating the subject and putting my attempts to think about a new leadership on acid.

“Direction, alignment, commitment: Toward a more integrative ontology of leadership” is a paper published in Elsevier Leadership Quarterly 19, written by Wilfred Drath and 5 colleagues at the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, NC (USA).

They start by stating that leadership has always been based on what can be called a tripod: “In its simplest form [leadership] is a tripod – a leader or leaders, followers, and a common goal they want to achieve”. So basically the act of leadership has been this: leaders and followers interacting with each other to figure out how to achieve their common goal.

The writers noticed a fundamental shift in the emergence of a new form of leadership and decided to find out what is happening. Based on their research, they proposed three new principles for leadership: Direction, Alignment and Commitment (DAC).

This is based on following principles: “(1) direction: widespread agreement in a collective on overall goals, aims, and mission; (2) alignment: the organization and coordination of knowledge and work in a collective; and (3) commitment: the willingness of members of a collective to subsume their own interests and benefit within the collective interest and benefit.”

The reason I was very excited to read this paper is that it takes the focus off ourselves, and puts it onto that which we aim to achieve. It also illuminated situations of success and failure that I had not seen as clearly formulated.

For years I struggled with what is called the tripod, and I think most of us know this struggle. In a world that consists of hierarchies based on leaders and followers, we all pick a place we feel most comfortable with: some at the top, some at the bottom, some safely tucked away in the middle. I often wrestled my way to a leadership position, only to crash down because of arrogance and hubris, incredulous to my own lack of common sense. It took many years to learn to have the humility and appropriate self-knowledge to renounce compulsive interest in positioning, and just be myself. Similarly, I know many people who suffer at the bottom while they have everything in them to deserve being seen and highly respected – but some seem to value the security of the place they suffer most. And there are truckloads of us hiding out in the snug uneventful middle, hoping to have enough freedom to be ourselves somewhat, but not enough visibility to be forced out of our comfort zones.

Leaders then have the noble task of making sense of this and, in more egalitarian environments, to understand and encourage everyone. But it all in all it is a sad picture because the focus tends to be a lot on our interactions and little on what it is we want to achieve!

What started to shift for myself, after I had crashed down often enough to know that my approach had to change, is not that I position myself differently. It is more that I started to lose interest in the whole business of positioning, the energy-consuming act of being leaders and followers trying to figure out how to manifest our common goals. I realised I just want to get on with it, I have my own relationship with the purpose and feel deeply responsible for it. That means working together with others, inspire, respond to what is effective and genuine, and avoid what is inauthentic and bureaucratic, in order to not be distracted by the messy complexity of human interactions but use the best of it.

Leadership in the DAC-paradigm means that the people who are most committed to a clearly defined direction and create the most alignment with those around them will emerge as leaders. It doesn’t mean they are leaders, or try to be, nor that others couldn’t be – it means putting yourself behind the mission with everything you have, and align all possible people and talents.

There is another phenomenon that the writers noticed: DAC is a framework in which there is no specific content, no investment in how it is being used. It is all about the functionality of finding the best way to fulfil a purpose.

This could be anything. With some colleagues I work on an equal footing that doesn’t contradict the fact that one of us is the boss, while the naughty kids next door seem to prefer a forceful shout – at least they always give me a big, generous grin when I shout my “Oy you little monkeys!” In larger situations, I often long for simple, clear structures, which help to facilitate effective, clean interactions.

This puts our ideas upside down. We have reaped the enormous benefits of the postmodern change from ‘command and control’ to mutual understanding and equality, and we have cultivated enough openness for many more people to think independently and live with dignity and respect. Might it be time for us to go a step further and question the entire system that this need for equality arose from?

That’s a challenging thing to do. It is hard to release the stranglehold of our imagined need for control. Many corporate structures hang together in the tripod approach and would fear falling apart if questioned. It might feel threatening to not have clearly pre-defined power structures to rely on. Not everyone might understand the difference between “whatever!” and “whatever works best”. Talented individuals might not want to change their tack after spending a fortune on their MBA. Our society has not changed yet.

But if we really want to make good on the promise of post-modernity – full self-expression for every human being – why wouldn’t we take that in the biggest possible context? How about going a step further and developing the free expression of our deepest passion for purpose, without interference of our interpersonal structures?