Power Shift: The Longest Revolution

By Sally Armstrong

Bestselling author, journalist, and human rights activist Sally Armstrong argues that humankind requires the equal status of women and girls.

The facts are indisputable. When women get even a bit of education, the whole of society improves. When they get a bit of healthcare, everyone lives longer. In many ways, it has never been a better time to be a woman: a fundamental shift has been occurring. Yet from Toronto to Timbuktu the promise of equality still eludes half the world’s population.

In her 2019 CBC Massey Lectures, award-winning author, journalist, and human rights activist Sally Armstrong illustrates how the status of the female half of humanity is crucial to our collective surviving and thriving. Drawing on anthropology, social science, literature, politics, and economics, she examines the many beginnings of the role of women in society, and the evolutionary revisions over millennia in the realms of sex, religion, custom, culture, politics, and economics. What ultimately comes to light is that gender inequality comes at too high a cost to us all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: House of Anansi Press
• Release date: Sep 17, 2019
• ISBN: 9781487006808

Sally Armstrong

Sally Armstrong is an award-winning author, journalist and human rights activist, and a four-time winner of the Amnesty International Canada Media Award.

Book preview

9781487006808_cover.jpgTitle page: Power Shift, The Longest Revolution, by Sally Armstrong.

The Massey Lectures Series

The Massey Lectures are co-sponsored by

CBC

Radio, House of Anansi Press, and Massey College in the University of Toronto. The series was created in honour of the Right Honourable Vincent Massey, former Governor General of Canada, and was inaugurated in 1961 to provide a forum on radio where major contemporary thinkers could address important issues of our time.

This book comprises the 2019 Massey Lectures, Power Shift: The Longest Revolution, broadcast in November 2019 as part of

CBC

Radio’s Ideas series. The producer of the series was Philip Coulter; the executive producer was Greg Kelly.

Also by Sally Armstrong

Nonfiction

Ascent of Women: A New Age Is Dawning for Every Mother’s Daughter (published in the U.S. as Uprising: A New Age Is Dawning for Every Mother’s Daughter)

Veiled Threat: The Hidden Power of the Women of Afghanistan

Bitter Roots, Tender Shoots: The Uncertain Fate of Afghanistan’s Women

Fiction

The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor

Copyright © 2019 Sally Armstrong and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

Published in Canada in 2019 and the

USA

in 2019 by House of Anansi Press Inc.

www.houseofanansi.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Power shift : the longest revolution / Sally Armstrong.

Names: Armstrong, Sally.

Series: Massey lectures series.

Description: Series statement:

CBC

Massey Lectures

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20189067829 | Canadiana (ebook) 20189067837 |

ISBN

9781487006792 (softcover) |

ISBN

9781487006808 (

EPUB

) |

ISBN

 9781487006815 (Kindle)

Subjects:

LCSH

: Sex discrimination against women. |

LCSH

: Sex discrimination. |

LCSH

: Women’s rights. |

LCSH

: Women—Legal status, laws, etc. |

LCSH

: Women—Social conditions. |

LCSH

: Women— Economic conditions. |

LCSH

: Social justice. |

LCSH

: Human rights.

Classification:

LCC HQ

1236 .

A

76 2019 |

DDC

305.42—dc23

Cover design: Alysia Shewchuk

Cover illustration: Barry Blitt

Canada Council for the Arts and Ontario Arts Council logos.

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada.

For all the women and all the girls in all the world. This is our time.

CONTENTS

Chapter 1: In the Beginning(s)

Chapter 2: The Mating Game

Chapter 3: A Holy Paradox

Chapter 4: When the Patriarchy Meets the Matriarchy

Chapter 5: Shifting Power

Notes

Permissions

Acknowledgements

Index

"I know that many men and even women are afraid and angry when women do speak, because in this barbaric society, when women speak truly they speak subversively — they can’t help it: if you’re underneath, if you’re kept down, you break out, you subvert. We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.

That’s what I want — to hear you erupting. You young Mount St. Helenses who don’t know the power in you — I want to hear you."

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Chapter One

in the beginning(s)

So many beginnings. From delicate handprints on a cave wall to goddesses in ancient Mesopotamia; from political tyranny that came in the guise of a message from God to the convoluted journey to emancipation — the story of women is the longest revolution in history. So many times change was in the wind. So many times the finish line blurred. And so many times hope soared. Still, from Toronto to Timbuktu, the promise of equality has eluded half the world’s population. Now there’s a power shift. There’s never been a better time in human history to be a woman. And despite the blowback from misguided politicians, leftover chauvinists, and hypermasculine misogyn­ists, women are closer to gaining equality than ever before. The journey ahead is bound to be epic, and it will affect everything — our wallets, our jobs, our very future.

Why now? How come the power shift didn’t happen during the first wave of the women’s movement (1848–1920), when the suffragettes struggled to get the vote? Or the second wave (1963–80), when women put all our faith in the pill and attended consciousness-raising sessions that discussed the oppression of women and demanded change in the status of women? Or even the third wave (1992–2010), which began after the American lawyer and academic Anita Hill was called to testify at the televised confirmation hearing of U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, whom she had accused of sexual harassment, thus challenging his fitness for the position? Hill was then excoriated by the all-male Judiciary Committee, who didn’t believe her, and Thomas was appointed to the Supreme Court. The fallout became a watershed moment in American politics and a turning point in raising awareness of sexual harassment. But still the long-term status of women was mostly unchanged.

Now with the fourth wave, a movement that began in 2012 when social media took off, there’s a focus on intersectionality, a push for greater empowerment of traditionally marginalized groups — Indigenous people, people of colour;

LGBTQ

; ethnic, religious, and cultural minorities; people with physical and developmental disabilities; people of differing social classes — and for greater representation in politics and business. Fourth-wave feminists argue that society will be more equitable if policies and practices incorporate the perspectives of all people. While earlier feminists fought to shake off the ties that bound them to subservience, this new wave calls for justice against discrimination, assault, harassment, and it calls for equal pay and individual choices over our own bodies. Words like cisgender, non-binary, and polyamorous reflect the new vocabulary of a changing, more diverse society, and the clarion call for inclusion is being heard around the world.

This wave created hashtag feminism and put abusive powerful men on notice. And by all accounts, this one got liftoff. The symbiotic relationship between social media and individualism is likely driving the bus for change. The internet is all about instant. Twitter and Facebook can elevate people and create extreme celebrity and propel movements. Some of these, like #MeToo and #TimesUp, have been amplified by attention from influential entities such as the New York Times and the Hollywood film industry, but others have been simmering over the last decade. As a journalist, I have watched human rights and the rights of women and girls become the focus of conversation, whether in the forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo or the savannah in Kenya, in the deserts of Afghanistan or the college campuses in North America.

We have always depended on political will to change up the agenda — the stroke of the politician’s pen to install the stop sign or build the shelter or legislate a new law. It often took public will — marches and petitions — to push the politician to make change happen. But in the last few years, I’m seeing what I call personal will as the driving force behind both public and political will. Malala Yousafzai is a good example. She was fifteen years old, living in the Swat Valley in Pakistan; she wanted to go to school to learn to think for herself. But the Taliban, who claim they act in the name of God, forbade education for girls. She defied the cowardly thugs by speaking out publicly on girls’ rights to an education. On October 8, 2012, she climbed onto the school bus. The last words she heard were: Which one is Malala? The Taliban gunman shot that child in the head for going to school. But Malala recovered, and then she started a movement. Today everyone knows her. She’s become the world’s daughter, not because a politician in the Swat Valley insisted that the girls go to school; not because there were marches and petitions demanding education for girls. It was personal will that propelled Malala.

The other telling side to this episode is that atrocities like this happen every day. But this time the world grabbed on to the story and didn’t let it go. I believe it was more evidence of liftoff, of the changing status of women; proof that people realize that dismissing half the world’s population is dangerous and expensive and wrong.

The holy grail for the social innovators of the twenty-first century is knowing how campaigns such as #MeToo and the rise in personal power can be sustained.

Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms, authors of New Power, think they know the formula. They call it the difference between old power and new power. "Old power works like a currency, they say. It is held by few. Once gained it is jealously guarded, and the powerful have a substantial store of it to spend. It is closed, inaccessible, and leader-driven. It downloads, and it captures."

As for new power, as exemplified by the #MeToo movement, it operates "like a current. It is made by many. It is open, participatory, and peer-driven. It uploads, and it distributes. Like water or electricity, it’s most forceful when it surges. The goal with new power is not to hoard it but to channel it." Their conclusion is that #MeToo gave a sense of power to the participants, and that each individual story was strengthened by the surge of the much larger current.

Today that empowerment is taking on everything from date rape to old lingering mores that cling to the lives of women the way barnacles attach to ships, slowing them down, denying their fair passage. It is also fuelling change — enormous, life-altering change.

---

My own voyage on the equality caravan began with a kipper — a fish that’s been split, salted, and dried — an unusual and ugly-looking concoction that appeared out of clouds of dense smoke puffing out of the boiling water in a large wrought-iron frying pan on Saturday mornings in my mother’s kitchen. The kipper was served like food from the gods to my father, who sat at the end of the kitchen table. It was a ritual my Maritime mother executed for my Scottish father. My sisters and I watched, often wide-eyed, from our porridge bowls as this broad, flat, dark offering was picked apart and devoured with gusto. I thought the kipper breakfast was about Saturday mornings or being Scottish. Until I was eleven. That’s when my baby brother, ten years my junior, was old enough to sit in a high chair at the kitchen table. And there, in front of my astonished eyes, my father was slipping tiny pieces of kipper to my brother. There you are, laddie, he would say in his Highland brogue, with the pride of a patriarch. I had never been offered a piece of that frightful-looking fish. Nor had my sisters. Although I doubt we ever asked for a bite — nor had this small male in the high chair, who couldn’t even talk.

It was the first time in my young life I realized boys got things that girls didn’t. It wasn’t about favouritism — my father was guilty of adoring all four kids. It was a ritual in the making — a father sharing his Scottish tradition with his beloved son, as his own father probably did with him.

I wasn’t jealous, but I was perplexed. This moment marked the beginning of a long journey. It would be followed soon enough by more telltale signs that all was not equal between boys and girls. In high school, the girls’ basketball team could only play two-thirds of the basketball court, while the boys played the full court. We could only dribble the ball three times — there was no such restriction for the boys. And when the weather turned nice and we went outdoors for track and field, the boys ran marathon races — the girls did not. In fact, women did not participate in the marathon at the Olympics until 1984 — almost ninety years after the men started competing in the 26.2-mile (42.195-kilometre) race. There were no team sports for women at the Olympics until 1964, when the

IOC

admitted women’s volleyball because it was considered a non-contact sport.

Then, at university, the boys could carouse all night long, but the girls had curfews. While we did, no doubt, do our share of carousing, there was a powerful message underlying the systemic and societal codes of conduct that we absorbed as if by osmosis: Women and girls are lesser, weaker, and not as valued as boys. Sports scholarships were for male athletes, not women athletes. And girls and young women who became pregnant disappeared — gone to an aunt’s, as author, journalist, and television host Anne Petrie described in her book about girls who were unwed, in trouble, and ashamed. The father of the unborn child stayed on campus, strutting around like the cock of the walk. She was never seen in classes again.

Married women were bound by another set of baffling edicts. I was a child of the Sixties. Change was in the wind. We were knocking down old rules, old presumptions. But when it came to being, as Barbra Streisand sang, Sadie, Sadie, married lady, dismantling the roles in a traditional heterosexual marriage was like trying to rewrite the holy texts. Women were expected to say I obey when they took their marriage vows. A married woman couldn’t open a bank account without her husband’s signature, couldn’t seek hospital treatment for herself or her child without her husband’s permission. Until 1969, birth control was illegal, while life-threatening abortions were still performed in back alleys. We had a lot to do — a long way to go.

Between 1957 and 1977, Doris Anderson, the first woman to be editor of Canada’s best-known women’s magazine, Chatelaine, turned the publication into the vanguard for the women’s movement. Before Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963, Anderson was leading the charge with her sizzling magazine, raising issues no one dared to speak about before: incest, wife assault, child abuse. It would be decades before other realities, like date rape and workplace harassment, would make headlines, but Anderson was a pioneer in creating a safe public space for whispered conversations. Then, as now, the status quo was under assault. To many, the demands for change were unsettling and seen as an attack on decency and decorum. You must hate being married if that’s how you feel was one common accusation. Clearly you don’t like being a mother was another. It was also a time of miniskirts, high wet-look boots, and a fashion known as bra dresses. Hindsight brings a little comic relief — there we were, marching and demanding and accusing, seen as freedom fighters by some and as dames dressed like hookers by others.

It was a journalism assignment that made me decide to devote the rest of my career to the lives of women and girls, the obstacles they face, the sometimes horrifying consequences they suffer simply for being female, and the courageous steps they are taking to alter the status quo. In 1992, I was sent to Sarajevo to write about the effect of war on children. In the 1990s, the former Communist state of Yugoslavia imploded with a civil war that split the Balkans along ethnic and religious lines. The political upheaval and civil war led to the secession of Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Macedonia. The world looked on in horror as Sarajevo — the host of the 1984 Winter Olympics and home to Muslims, Serbs, and Croats — erupted into ethnic conflict: first the Muslim Bosnians and Croats against the Serbs, who wanted a Serb republic. When the Croats also turned against the Bosnians, the ugly term ethnic cleansing became a miserable fact in the lives of Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croats in some pockets of Croatia, and Serbs in other parts of that country.

It was Sarajevo that made world headlines when it was under siege and the fighting turned into a bloodbath. The day before I was to leave that troubled city, I heard a rumour that Serbian soldiers were gang-raping the wives and sisters and daughters and mothers of Bosnians and Croatians. Journalists know well that often one of the first casualties of war is the truth. So my skepticism was running high. But as the day wore on, I kept hearing the story from credible sources. By nightfall, I was convinced there was some element of truth to the rumours. At the time, I was working for Homemaker’s, the subversive little digest-size magazine that served up scrumptious recipes on one page and a blueprint to alter the status quo on the next. It would take about three months to get this story to press, so I diligently gathered up all that I could — names, mobile phone numbers, anecdotes, statistics — and when my plane landed in Canada, I gave my packet of data to an editor friend at a large news agency and said, Give this to one of your reporters — it’s a helluva story. Then I went back to my office to wait for the explosive headline.

I waited a week, another week, a third week. Nothing. Seven weeks later I saw a four-line report in Newsweek that read, essentially, They are gang raping women in the Balkans. I called the man I’d given my data to and asked what had happened. He said he had been busy and had forgotten to assign the story. I was flabbergasted. Between twenty thousand and forty thousand women and girls were gang-raped, some of them as young as eight years old, some of them eighty years old.

At a staff meeting later that day, I expressed my dismay to the editors of Homemaker’s. Don’t you get it? they said. No one wants the story — it’s only about women. Everyone was in Sarajevo —

BBC

was there, so was

CNN

, the Guardian, the New York Times,

CBC

— some of the best journalists in the world were there, but not one of them covered the story. My editors said, We should do the story. I replied, It’ll take us three months to get it to our readers. They said, So — who else is doing it? Soon enough, I was on a plane, going back to the region.

When the story was published, the facts went into the stratosphere: at last the news agencies picked up on the horrific truth of those rape camps. But there was still a protective silence around the details, partly because the women who had been raped were frightened that their families would find out and they would be rejected as damaged goods, and also because the Geneva Conventions, which outline rules of engagement and atrocities of war, made only one passing mention of rape. Many courageous women who survived the diabolical gang-raping in the Balkans went to the International Criminal Court in The Hague and had their case heard. In 1998, the Yugoslavia War Crimes Tribunal made rape and sexual enslavement in the time of war a crime against humanity. Only genocide is considered a more serious crime.

Our record is easily distorted. It took a women’s magazine featuring recipes and fashion and beauty and decor to expose a war crime. The omission, diminishment, and erasure of women in the historical records has had serious implications for gender equality. Applying a gender lens to the many beginnings in women’s lives — to the mating game, to customs and religion, and to politics and economics — will expose the flawed

Reviews for Power Shift

[mdoris_6 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was a 2019 CBC Massey lecture. Armstrong, a well traveled journalist, gives an examined look at injustice and inequality for girls and women. She has many stories to tell and gives an historic and contemporary look at major concerns. Many of these concerns are horrific. At times she draws some over generalized conclusions (full of hyperbole) and at times the book was hard to read as there are so many tales of woe. She is correct to take this subject on however as much work needs to be done. She does give some interesting book references.