The True Liberation of Women

Many things have been done to liberate women in the last thirty years and there are some basic problems still inherent in the human society. One problem is whether women really have equality in the workplace. I am making strong point that equality in the workplace not only means that they get dollar-for-dollar what their male counterpart gets but that women no longer try to be men. Instead, the women influence a more suitable climate for them, bring childcare to the workplace, allow sick leave days for the menses time or different occasions to allow workers to go and pick up their child if they need to, bring this flexibility that allows a woman to work naturally. Rather than keeping the strict schedule of a man or take a pill and pretend to be all right on a menstrual day when she is having pain and not feeling strong. Changes are needed so that the workplace is not strictly designed for the needs of men but is also designed by women for the needs of women. The approach of western society to work is not conducive to the life and needs of women. It is based upon male competition and power.

Women have entered the workforce on these terms. They have been expected to function as men and they have placed that expectation upon themselves and integrated it into their own lives. Therefore they find themselves believing these expectations, admiring women who can meet them and not admiring women who cannot meet them, who may be seen as a little emotional, a little weak or too erratic because they have different needs at different times of the month or compromise their careers because they want to have a child or they have a child and they pay too much attention to the child and not enough dedication to the career. Even women adopt these values and then function by the male standard without bringing the needs of a woman’s body and the needs of motherhood into the workplace. This divides women between those who sacrifice career to have family and those who sacrifice family and their own emotional needs for their career.

Many women are in this situation. When you talk to them, they are not happy. Research statistics show that sacrificing children and family for career does not make most women happy. The problem remains that the work environment and the work ethic are not humane. They are driven by capitalist values, by corporate greed that is based on competition, male competition. The values are established in a workforce where men made the decisions. Over the last twenty years the workforce has changed a little. More and more women have come into positions to make decisions. But they have risen through the ranks of the male-dominated corporate world and so they have been most able to function in the male value system. They are rarely the women who placed emphasis on their children, their love life and their family. They are rarely the women who would sacrifice for their family. Therefore, those women do not get recognition or consideration.

Q. Carly Fieronia, the CEO of Hewlett Packard just laid-off fifteen to twenty thousand people. How is it that a woman can rise to the top of corporate America and be just as heartless as her male counterpart?

Did she have a choice?

Q. No she did not.

Yes, that is the plan. Yes, if she has no choice this is what she must do. Male or female the hard decisions must be made and women are just as capable as men to make them. Either a male or a female can be heartless or can be caring. If a hard decision must be made, no one likes the person who makes it, but someone must make it. The question is, were efforts made to the maximum of their capacity to assist those who were laid off? If the company can no longer support itself due to the economy, there is simply no choice.

Q. But I think she was more hated because she was a woman.

That is the dilemma of women. I do not know the situation or whether it was fair or unfair. It could have been fair and it could have been unfair depending upon the policies and circumstances that brought this act. The act cannot be judged alone. Nor can it be judged that a woman made this decision. Women throughout time have made very hard decisions. They have had to decide sometimes to save one child and let another die. They have had to decide to rescue some and let others go. Women have made hard decisions for a long time. Women are not incapable of making hard decisions.

Though it may fly in the face of the image of a woman, it does not necessarily mean it is the wrong decision. To determine if it is the wrong decision or the right decision one would have to know the circumstances and the options available. Was it based on corporate greed and were the people exploited, or was it simply that there was no other choice because the financial support to maintain those positions was no longer present?

Was all done that was possible to humanely assist the people who are being laid off, to relocate them or help them find different work? Was money put into programs like this? These are the types of questions that need to be asked. Whether the decision was good or bad cannot be stated in black and white. One must know the circumstance. But who is to say that these hard decisions cannot be made by a woman as well as men. Was it heartless? You cannot say by the decision alone. You must know the situation. It may have been heartless or she may have been deeply saddened to have to do such an action. You do not know. But women can certainly make hard decisions, ruthless decisions just as well as a man.

It is more likely that most women will take stronger consideration of the human element in the situation, but not all. Some men will take stronger consideration than some women. So it is not black and white.

Q. The CEO of Cisco, John Chambers, refused to have very deep layoffs and the lay-off packages were very good.

Yes, one must know the individual circumstances. Perhaps he was in a better position to do that also. Perhaps she had no option, the money was not there, and perhaps she was ruthless and uncaring, you do not know. One must know the circumstance in the situation to make a determination.

Q. She has also become a role model for many women in Silicon Valley.

It also happens in the workforce, particularly in the corporate force, that the women who feeling they are a little one down, try very hard to emulate the more successful male. It is known that in the corporate world many times the admiration and advancement go to the most ruthless individual.

Because of this, women seeing the men who are very successful, these intelligent women emulate those men and may even do it in excess; they may be more ruthless than the men because they have to compensate for being a woman. So they are more ruthless, the women who want to emulate the men who they see as successful through ruthlessness and aggression in the workplace. Those women may be more willing to step on others than even those males whom they are emulating, because they feel they must compensate. They have watched and have taken the role, but their actions are not natural to them. Their actions are expressing their desperation but not their natural tendencies as women.

Yet women as well as men have a great variety of personalities, opinions, and potentials. Their identification as a woman can be more or less. In general, one will find that women are softer with more caring of others. They tend to be more communicative but it is not always the case.

Women can also be ruthless towards other women in a male-dominated environment where they feel their capacity to emulate the male and get favor is important to their success. Women like to be successful in what they do just as much as men do. Women like to be appreciated just as men do. Clearly many women have great leadership potential. Women make excellent leaders. Both men and women have the same potential for leadership. These things are not based in gender. Leadership and excellence are human values that both men and women want to express.

The problem is that society’s attitude towards men and women changes what a woman must do to attain leadership, to express excellence in the corporate world, in the working world in general. Even today the discrepancy remains between the ease for a man to enter certain professions and the hardship for a woman, although it is much better than in the past. In some fields of work it is quite easy for women but in other fields and for high positions of authority, it is still difficult.

In a society where to be someone you must step out of your home and have some type of position denies the role of women as mothers and caregivers to the family. There is an inherent dynamic of conflict set up in this society at the core of the breakdown of the extended family and the nuclear family. When women abandon the hearth and home to find appreciation and success it greatly damages the structural integrity of the society. The society is not home-based. The people are pushed to be automatons, working in factories of the capitalist masters. It is the emphasis upon money rather than children, care of needy people, hearth and home that has created this situation. It is the degeneration of the vaeshyan, the merchant era, not the so-called liberation of women. This is the confusion in society today and it is the confusion of women in society today.

Women want to have intellectual challenge and work, and well they should. And why should they have it this way? Why should they have to leave hearth and home and the happiness of family, sacrifice the welfare of children and of all who rely on them to work in a way that is unnatural where they put in eight, ten, twelve hours a day? Many women feel they must make the choice between the emotional happiness of there relationships and their financial or intellectual success. This is a cruel choice.

Everyone wants to feel that they can have success and that their physical, mental, and spiritual capacities are fully utilized so they can succeed in their lives. But why must a woman sacrifice having children or nurturing children? Why must a woman be out and leave her children to be cared for by another. Why must she sacrifice her home, her family, and her love?

The society is set up by and for the corporation, the money, the production of goods, the consumption of goods but not upon the welfare of family members, children, old people, and those who are sick. It is not set up for the conglomeration of family associations. Alienation came in the society at large along with identification with a successful career in the corporate world.

Women should have careers but there needs to be a change in values of how a career is established and successfully pursued. Can a woman raise children, write books, give lectures and speeches, and do different things in different phases of her life, taking time for her children, making a schedule where she has some days of each month in solitude? When the society is set up with a different standard, these things will not be a problem.

Should men be forced to work, forty to seventy hours a week? Do they not love to be with their families and their children as well? Should work be associated with hearth, home and community and not with a workplace where people only go home for a few hours and then go back? Life is spent in the work. So the entire setup fosters corporate success and not family, not emotional needs of people but higher levels of productivity, more goods, and more consumption of goods. If people spend their time in the family and all the family members have each other’s support, why would they need all these different corporate goods? They will be getting their well-being from their emotional relationships.

The communication and emotional nature of women is the power of women but society is not set up for those values. Society is set up so that that one should consume this and consume that and get one’s happiness from consuming. If one buys more and more and spends one’s time in the shopping center and buys new cars and purchases this and that and the emphasis in life is to get more of material objects rather than interpersonal relationships, one must spend all one’s time working, working, working to get the money and then go shopping in one’s free time. In this, one is the perfect vaeshyan. You work and produce the goods and when you have a little free time you shop and buy them.

It is the power of women, their emotional nature, their capacity in communication, and their emphasis upon human relationships that need to be brought back into the human society. What is needed is to re-establish connections of family and community and put into the society the value of human relationships rather than the value of consumption. In this women can do a great service to humanity.

But today women are confused about their identity. They find themselves in a position of naturally wanting appreciation and success. They want to be heard and listened to. Who does not, man or woman? To find this they must themselves sacrifice relationships for career. But more and more women find this is not fulfilling. Younger women see that it hasn’t worked for the older women.

Then there is the super-mom. The woman who tries to have the career while raising the children, meet the expectations of the corporate world that she not have a period, and does not need anything for her children, and that she can be totally dedicated to her job and at the same time come home and attempt to be there for her children. This woman is torn and ripped apart by high demands. She cannot possibly fulfill both successfully because they are in conflict.

Q. Another phenomenon that has arisen is that a woman may postpone childbearing until her fertility levels are so low that she cannot have children.

It is a great sadness for many women when they find that they have postponed a little too long. Then again, to have children somewhat later in life when a woman is mature is not at all bad. But if it is too late, then it becomes difficult.

However, at the same time, there is a tendency toward teenage pregnancy. So, while on one hand, some women are waiting too long; others are having their babies far too early due to the lack of emotional support in the family setting. The emotional needs of these very young women are not met, so they seek out boyfriends and children. Their needs are not met in the home because their parents are out working all day. No one is there in the house. The girls are all alone with the TV set and their boyfriends.

The daughters of the corporate world wander about in their lives by themselves and either they adopt the corporate values and decide to attain their success in that way; or if they feel the emotional gap and loneliness too strongly, they may one day realize that because they are women there is at least one way to resolve this and then they bear their children early. But if they do this, society and their parents object and these girls are looked upon with disdain. They do not receive support or approval; they are not seen in a positive light, they are not appreciated. Earlier in their lives society said, “Oh, you will be a mother. That is the most noble thing,” but now they are told, “What are you doing? You are ruining your chances for a career!” So they have even sacrificed their self-esteem in an attempt to find that emotional connectedness. This is the conflict in which women find themselves. If they want both self-esteem and emotional connectedness with family, how can they achieve both? The daughters of the corporate world wander about the house ten or twelve hours a day with no one else there. Are they not lonely? They want connectedness, they want a family but if they take that road, they must pay a high price for they become outcasts. They are mothers. They are supposed to be recognised for this. But they are not allowed to be mothers until they are older because they will have ruined their earning power. It seems that the most important thing in such a society is to have earning power in order to be good consumers.

The position of women is not good at this time. Although they have attained more corporate success and they are more accepted in the work place, what have they sacrificed? You will notice that as women have gained their independence, the family structure has become more and more crippled. Some will say, “Well, this is good. Family structure kept women bound in place. Now they are achieving their freedom, their independence.” Yes, they have gained their freedom, yes, they are moving toward their independence. But are they happy?

Many times not at all! And men are not happy either. They long for the security of the family. And certainly those children wandering around the house with no one at home are not particularly happy. They have no uncles and aunts or other people about to entertain them, to make them feel happy, to show them affection and hug them and be with them. They must go and stay with strangers the whole day, come home; and then, even when the parents finally arrive home, for at least one or two hours they are far too busy to talk because this is the only time each day that they have an opportunity to make dinner and get ready for the next day! And what about the old people? They are sent off to the old people’s home, because there is no time for them either, and, God forbid, if someone should get really seriously ill, they put a major cramp in the entire operation! Who will take care of them? Surely there must be some hospital or some facility.

The society is not in a healthy state. So many needs are not been met and now at the culmination of this societal upheaval, this silent crisis, who is even addressing it? Who is dealing with this crisis in the society? Who has even perceived it?

Q. The radical right.

To an extent the radical right has perceived this crisis. That is true. But they do not have good solutions. They perceive a problem because they hold to traditional roles but they do not perceive good solutions because they have not fully understood. That is their problem.

With the breakdown of the extended family and then even the breakdown of the nuclear family, with the push of women into the work force and their subsequent climb to positions of power in the corporate world, many women have become completely estranged from their biological longings and needs. Very frankly, they have been exploited. And now many women see this problem, but each faces it alone. A forty-five year old woman realizes that she is past the age of child-bearing and must now spend the rest of her life childless and remain dedicated to her job. She has achieved much in her life and made many friends at work. She is very much appreciated and her self-esteem is good. She feels she is a competent person. She is financially secure. Perhaps she even has a good husband. But she does not have children and grandchildren and family all around her and she feels the disconnectedness and the loneliness and the emptiness of her life. It is a sobering fact that women nowadays are trapped between having to choose love, community and family on one hand, and success or being seen as a meaningful and competent person on the other. To be able to express their intellectual and leadership potentialities, they must overlook their connection to home and other relationships so that their only community becomes the workplace and their only friends are their colleagues.

So it has come to pass that the value of the home has diminished in people’s eyes and it is now regarded as a boring place whereas the work place has become the site of vitality and reward.

Q. Some people are beginning to understanding that work is too big of a sacrifice but they have not figured out how to solve the problem.

It is good to work. It is very good to work. Do you think that a woman maintaining hearth and home and family does not work? Do you think that she sits around the whole day doing nothing? Do you think that when you care for someone who is ill you do not work? You work very, very hard. When you care for children, is that not work? It is very hard work. When you maintain home and family, do you not work? But in today’s world, a woman is isolated in her home. She is alone in the home working all day by herself, taking care of the children, or the old people. She is sacrificing for others, but very frankly she is seen as a secondary person because she is not achieving something in a job. So women are given no status for all this hard work and sacrifice. And women, like men, look around and say, “Hey! If I do this, I will have to work really hard and still no one will think much of me. But if I do that over there I can work half as hard and I will get a very important position and everyone will look up to me.” Wouldn’t anyone jump for the important position and the status? Whereas being a mother, taking care of others, or caring for interpersonal relationships is not seen as important. Only productivity in the work force is important.

I am not saying that women should not be teachers, scholars, writers, executives, politicians, and so on and so forth. They must and certainly should! They should take a dominant role in the society. And I tell you that in the near future they will take a dominant role in all realms of society. But to do this, they must inject their own values into the society, their own biological, inherent expression. They must assert the value of human relationships, the value of human lives over objects, the value of taking care of human beings over corporate productivity, the value of nurturing as opposed to winning competitions, the value of motherhood and care-giving as a most sacred and honored position. Currently, these things have no value at all in the society. From time to time, lip service might be paid as to how sacred these things are but in reality they are not considered so at all. The fundamental role of women has been denigrated by those men and women who hold the power in this era of history. Women’s fundamental role is not respected, not admired.

I tell you also that if in today’s society the mother caring for her children, caring for the home and the family, was the position of the greatest respect and honor; then women would flock home from their jobs in herds. They would. They are not happy. By tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands they would flock. They would quit their jobs in a moment to get the honored post of mother and family care­giver, which they would much prefer.

What I am saying is that a woman should not be forced out of the house. Honor must be given to the family. Let the family be the center of social life. Let the hearth and home, the extended family, the community, the tribe, the village become the organizing units, the focal points. Let interpersonal relationships be the primary substance of human experience. This type of society is based upon the power of women. In today’s society, women have been subjugated by corporate capitalist values. They are subjugated. It has not been a process of liberation. It has been a process of further subjugation! Perhaps I sound very right wing?

Q. Not really, because the right wing would not say that women should be scholars and writers and leaders, they suggest motherhood and nothing else.

Mothers were once the leaders of the society. All in the family, all in the community once looked to the matriarchs for guidance and direction. Now the matriarch has lost all status whatsoever! She is an irrelevant person. Only as a corporate peg outside of her family, outside of her home, outside of her own personal power, does she gain any status whatsoever. This is subjugation. It is not the liberation of women; it is the further subjugation of women! Let women have the posts and positions, but let the posts and positions relate to their family, their extended families, their clans, their communities and let the emphasis be on human relationships and the nurturance and development of the well-being of all, not the development of greater productivity for corporate success and greater consumption of material goods. Then in such a society women will indeed have power. Right now their only power is to be a corporate peg in the economic system. Or even in the non-profit world this happens not only in corporations. Women have only the power to be a peg to put into a slot. She is taken out of her home, out of her power and simply plugged into an intellectually approved position where her needs or even her real skills are ignored. She is forced to choose between being applauded as a successful person by filling this post which has so little to do with her, or taking on a more traditional role and accepting the resultant diminished status, being considered less successful, and receiving less acknowledgement for her work. Actually I would not call it a traditional role, I would call it the natural role, the mother and integrator of relationships among people, the caregiver, the nurturer.

The society has lost its balance, and at the core of this loss of balance has been the co-opting of the power of women. Part of this co-opting has been to remove women from the home. I will tell you frankly that along with this removal of women from the home and the denigration of women’s role came the destabilisation of the family structure and the destabilisation of the entire network of care-giving within the human society. Who wants to be cared for in those impersonal institutions, separated from family and extended family? Consider the pressure on the single woman alone in the home. No mother is there, no aunts, no uncles. No one is there with her. No one is there to keep her company. She stays there alone with the children. She is alone, isolated, and has no outlet. In the traditional societies, a woman is in a village. All the neighbors are there, aunts and uncles, mother and grandmother. Everyone is there together and all can enjoy each other’s company. Yes, there can also be hard moments. There may be some squabbling. But this environment is vital and alive. And there is much scope for expression and the utilization of one’s potential. In this society a woman has a lot of status.

Q. The agenda of the right in this age is also to cut down spending on social services. We are living in a very expensive society. Families are expected to take care of the children, the mother and mother-in-law or the father and the-father-in-law because they can no longer afford to put them in a convalescent home. So now, super-mom has become super-super-super-mom.

That is because the society has lost its balance. The society now places the greatest emphasis on the individual, on the development of productivity, and on the consumption of material goods rather than upon interpersonal relationships or the establishment of a network of interpersonal support such as extended family, community and the whole web of interpersonal relationships. So those webs of relationships which are the strength of women, which are created and maintained primarily by women, have broken down in order to be replaced by corporate values, or more correctly speaking, by the values of economic productivity and individual career pursuits. The emphasis of the society is on individualism and on individual success; it is an emphasis on productivity and the rewards of productivity; it is an emphasis upon consumption. When the emphasis shifts to interpersonal relationships, to creating and maintaining the webs of connectedness and the support system, you will see the whole society develop into a web of relationships which support all. Those who are strong, those who are weak, those who are young, those who are old all have a place to belong. Now in the United States a classroom must have at least thirty-five children because there is no money, the money is for war machines. There is no money for teaching children. The emphasis is all wrong. The network of support is very strained, very thin, just like the mother in the home, very strained to keep up with everything. The networks are strained to the breaking point. Even now many families do not have two parents in the home. There is a mother on her own with her child trying to hold a job to keep the money coming so that she can feed the child and survive. Observing such situations, many women think: “I would rather sacrifice my heart and my love. I would rather bear the pain of not having the fulfillment of a child and that love because at least I won’t have to suffer like that!”

At the present time, the society is at the point of total social chaos and collapse. It will soon reach that breaking point because of the erosion of fundamental human values and the crumbling of the social structure, of that web of interconnectedness. Can the society survive with only this total emphasis on individualism and individual success? What happens to a poor person who becomes sick or old? Or the child who has needs? What of the emotional needs of people? These things are not attended to. Even the medical needs of people are not properly provided for although there is ample wealth in the society.

The society has lost its equilibrium. To bring balance back into the society will require the rise of women not only into positions of authority but into their own personal power as human beings. They must acknowledge their own fundamental human needs, and say, “I don’t want to be a corporate peg. I don’t want this lonely individualism. I want my children, my mother, my husband, my love and my family and friends, my aunts and uncles. I want my whole family back!” It is women who must do this, who must say, “I can lead. And I can be both a leader and a mother. I can be involved in the family and I can be a source of strength and power in the society.” It is women who must say, “I will not tolerate this compromising of love relationships any longer.” One person speaking out cannot do much, but a hundred thousand, a million will change the world. And the world will change, it is a sure guarantee. The pendulum swings one way and naturally creates the unstoppable momentum for a swing in the opposite direction. Its return is guaranteed the moment it reaches its apogee.

It is women who must tie the world together again and rebuild a structure of love and relationships, bonds and associations in the society of today. This is primarily the work of women. They must be leaders. They must be powerful, and they must say, “Power is not being the head honcho in a corporation and working fifteen hours a day, sacrificing all personal relationships.” Not that they cannot do this work. Perhaps they can. But they must recognize what real power is, and they should take it. How is corporate power more valuable than raising a child? It is only because it earns more money. If you have more money you have more buying power, and this is more valuable only because the emphasis in the society is to consume and have purchasing power. No more.

Q. Also I think it has a lot to do with the lowered purchasing power of people in general. I know women who work more because they are paying high taxes but who, if they could afford it, children or not, would have much preferred low-paying part time jobs to be able to spend more time with friends.

This is part of what women want but women also want to have power and to be successful at this time in history. They have been exploited. They have been treated as inferior and this does not suit them at all and makes them very, very unhappy. They must seize the day! Women must seize the day and change this. Through social change, through transforming the economic system, through political alterations, they can transform this world. Let more and more women be politicians and let them fight for human values. I do not believe in right wing. I do not believe in left wing. I believe in humanity and I believe that it is women who will rise up in force and change the workings of society to bring back, not a return to the past but to recreate a healthy social structure that meets human needs. This is what is lacking in today’s society in western cultures.

Another very important point is the struggle of women to achieve power in themselves and in society and how that relates to spirituality. Women today as people have not only sacrificed their family or their motherhood but many have also sacrificed their spiritual life. Those ideas are like that of motherhood, old-fashioned and passé. To believe in God is passé. “Who needs God? I need a good job and appreciation for my individuality.” God is passé. Being a mother, staying home with the children, being a woman makes one a loser. This is the feeling. And those people who turn to God, “Well, they are compensating for their mental problems. It is a neurosis.” So God is a neurosis, something that weak and neurotic people turn to. And motherhood is a sign of the failure to become someone in one’s life. The problem with this psychology is that it really does not meet human needs at all.

We have talked about the problem of the rejection of motherhood and the exploitation of women. But the rejection of spirituality is also a type of exploitation. For that worker for whom corporate success, material success, approval for their excellence, their productivity becomes all and everything, even spirituality is irrelevant. But today many people have begun to see that there is something missing in their lives. Their life is so uncertain that they begin searching around to find out what might have some real meaning, to find the deeper meaning of life. They do not have the support of the social network that once existed. And as they grow a little older, they feel very much alone and it is frightening, so they do turn to God and spirituality. But when they return to the old religions, many times these do not come alive for them and they are left more confused than ever. In this modern world, there are so many different options and so many different spiritual writings and different things that one can try. They end up tasting this and that and trying to make some sense of this smorgasbord.

The woman that is alienated from her need for family and relationships, even though she feels the sting of that absence, sees no way to achieve that type of happiness. She realizes that if she tries to do so, it may cost her a career. She cannot allow herself to be natural. So then how can she find her own personal power as a woman, how can she understand herself as a woman, and how can she as a woman pursue her association with divinity?

First of all, she must understand the assets that her female body has brought her. It is important for her to understand her gender-born natural strengths, her aptitude in communication, her abilities in relationships, care-giving and love, her strengths of the heart. It is important to recognize these things. Of course women, like men, vary tremendously one from another, so it will not be the same for every one of them. However, in general, there will be strengths of this nature. But most of all, she must realize that as a woman she does not have to adopt the norm of the society, but she can free herself, she can follow her intuition and her instincts to become all that she can be. In the depths of her spirit there is a yearning, a calling, a need to know herself as a Goddess, as a woman of power and strength, and to understand what power and strength her feminine form provides towards these ends.