Where Are The Women's Voices?

Ellen Snortland, Author, Actor,Feminist wrote the following letter to an organization in which she participates. She graciously gave us permission to reprint it here.

I came into adulthood with the stand: A world with no one and nothing left out.

As I look at the “forest,” one thing is pretty consistent; women’s voices are gone missing, generation after generation with a concurrent almost virtual non-curiosity about that from a lot of people. (Are the women simply not speaking? Are they speaking but not published? Do they know they are not speaking and stay quiet on purpose? What’s up with the silence?)

Do most women and girls know that our being public is a relatively new human phenomenon; that Virginia Woolf was not allowed to study at the university library simply because she was a woman? Knowing that has made a deep difference in how I “be”. It encourages and inspires me to know my history as it pertains to the public voice and public discourse of women.

I have been relatively involved in the United Nations system since 1995 and women’s voices — including their writing which I consider to be a form of voice — are missing. Whether it’s the membership of the Security Council, the General Assembly or lesser committees, we are missing. And then if we’re not missing completely, there might be a token woman but I’ll watch her be pretty quiet and reserved and/or having her focus on being not kicked out of the primarily male group.

I know without a doubt that I make a huge difference with individuals in and out of my community. I get e-mails all the time from people who have read my book or seen my play and they’ve taken what I’ve thought through and made a difference in their lives and the lives of their families. But I don’t think I’ve been able to impact the culture of my community. I’m practicing what it takes to make a global difference. So far, as a for instance, I haven’t made any difference that I can see in the quotes that are used. I have been requesting that women’s voices be included in the examples of leadership, not because I’m a brat but because I am a stand that it makes a difference to be able to see yourself in other people’s leadership. And if the only woman whose leadership is cited is Mother Teresa, we get yet another example of a woman who had to attain almost saintly status before she’d be listened to. I say that makes a difference in women’s and men’s listening for female leadership.

Fundamentally, knowing that I stand on some pretty powerful female shoulders in the arena of leadership has made a profound difference; knowing what Margaret Sanger, Jeanette Rankin, Eleanor Roosevelt, Clara Barton, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, et. al. went through to be seen and heard has given me the strength to not go away, to hang in there, to work to inspire other women to show up, lead and play with carving out what it means to be human; invent who they are and what they can say that has never been said before. Gandhi got his ideas for non-violent social change from observing the women in the U.S. and Great Britain go after the vote. Talk about an enrollment conversation!

There’s a United Nations resolution, 1327, that is something that’s never been said: that women must be included at the table in peace negotiations. Women and children are disproportionately impacted by war and refugee status due to the movement AWAY from combatant to combatant conflict in wars and yet, (wars now kill more civilians than anyone else) their lives, experience, needs, vision are largely missing from what “peace” looks like or how it can be attained and/or maintained. That’s an extreme example. Now implementation of 1327 has been another matter. The councils can’t see how including women’s voices might make a difference; they don’t get it; they don’t see how “hearing and seeing” women at the table, (and not just one woman but a critical mass) could have something new happen.
That’s the macro level as for the forest I’m talking about.

My micro level, the place where I practice making a difference so I can go into the global-difference-making domain, I see women missing from the public discourse there too. And I’m curious about the “how come” women’s voices missing doesn’t show up as missing for very many people. One analogy may be listening to a chorus of tenors, baritones and basses a lot and wondering not only why there aren’t any altos and sopranos joining in but that they haven’t even shown up for choir practice. And yes, I’m proud and encouraged that there are so many women who lead in my community. That doesn’t mean necessarily that they know their own history of whose shoulders they stand on. They grew up in the same male-centric educational institutions that we all did.

One thing I observed as a professor at Cal State LA is that the women were almost ALWAYS reluctant to engage, and/or to risk looking stupid, or to insist on inserting themselves into the conversation. Not so for the men. Their strength oftentimes was the willingness to risk. They know men have engaged publicly and I say that makes a difference for a person’s willingness to participate. I would read quotes by women and they, women AND men were amazed that a woman could say such a thing and then, how come they’d never heard of her? Intellectual curiosity begets intellectual curiosity.

One of my missions is to prick people’s “what’s missing?” chord. But the trick here is of course, if you don’t know something is missing how do you know it’s missing?

Is everyone so sure that it doesn’t make a difference to find out what might be said, or learned, by including women? I’ve asked a few men to consider what it might be like for them if (almost) everything they read, heard, considered philosophically or intellectually had been generated by men; the books, the quotes, philosophy, etc. were all generated by women. Would they notice? Would they wonder where men had gone? If men were just not all that bright, or not “good” in those areas? Does it have any meaning? Would it make a difference if their presence were there? What if probing the meaning of life was the exclusive domain of women? And if so, how did that happen?

Anyway, these are the areas that I long to explore and be heard in... mostly because I feel called to be that voice that wonders about missing female voices and what difference it make in transforming what it means to be human.