Sisterhood is Still Powerful

Robin Morgan, who wrote a book by this title in 1970, is one of the founding members of the Women’s Liberation Movement, often called second-wave feminism. At her talk at the University of North Carolina in Asheville in 2015, she spoke about the lack of a unified women’s movement today. She mentioned her hope for young women who were becoming feminists today, who, she felt, would be taking up the torch for the struggle for the women’s rights movement. She spoke of the work of the Women’s Media Center, which she, Gloria Steinem, and Jane Fonda started in 2005, to shed a light on the underrepresentation and misrepresentation of women in the media. Robin also interviews women on the Women’s Media Center radio show, called by The Huffington Post, ‘radio with a brain’.  

I asked Robin about the consciousness-raising groups of the late 1960s and 1970s, in which I had gotten support and felt solidarity with other women in the movement. She told me that we needed to resurrect them if we are to unite women in a struggle for social justice, although they might have to take a different form or use a different platform than face-to-face meetings. I was thrilled to meet this long time heroine of mine. It got me thinking that we women in Prout  (Progressive Utilization Theory) and other groups advocating for social justice for women, must work together in this same way that women did in the 60s and 70s, supporting one another, sharing our hopes and vision, our struggles, fears, and love. 

If we are to build a movement, we need to learn to trust one another, to talk to one another, to give praise and gentle support to overcome our individual and organizational obstacles. We must talk differences out face-to-face, giving one another the respect and benefit of the doubt that we, ourselves, want to be given.

I hope we can begin to join hands and create the world we want our children and our children’s children to inherit. We hold the future in our hands.