Jane Fonda

By JOHN NORTH

Perhaps there was a time when patriarchy was needed for civilizations to progress, “but it’s long outlived its usefulness” and it is time for women to step into leadership roles to use their unique capabilities to make the world a better place, actress-activist-workout guru Jane Fonda said last Saturday morning in downtown Asheville.

“It feels like things — everywhere in the world today — have tipped to the masculine extreme, and what we have is chaos” everywhere, Fonda told about 300 people at the Time for Our Power women’s conference in Thomas Wolfe Auditorium.

““The solution to patriarchy is not matriarchy; rather, it’s democracy,” Fonda said to cheers from the mainly female audience.

“If patriarchy, as a system, is historical, then it’s not based on biological determinism and it can be ended” in a historical way.

After her talk, Fonda fielded questions from a moderator and the audience. (A story on the Q&A appears on Page 6.)

On the sidewalk outside the auditorium, two Vietnam War veterans held signs that urged “Hanoi Jane” — the derisive nickname given to Fonda by her detractors — to relocate permanently to the capital city of America’s former enemy.

The veterans told the Daily Planet that they still felt betrayed by Fonda’s visit — during the war — to North Vietnam, where she posed for photographs and made comments that they construed as traitorous to American soldiers and the U.S. war effort. The veterans identified themselves as Fred English of Asheville and Tim McAlee of Leicester.

Meanwhile, Fonda, who was introduced to the audience as the winner of two Academy Awards for her parts in the films “Klute” and “Coming Home,” was lauded — because of her accomplishments in many spheres — as a role model for all women. Fonda received a standing ovation as she approached the lectern, clutching a small pet dog in her arms.

Fonda, now 70 but an international sex symbol in the 1960s and early ‘70s, opened her 45-minute address by noting that “the fact is, I didn’t think of myself as having power” until late in her life.

Previously, she would have thought the conference’s title referred to women breaking the so-called “glass ceiling” in the corporate business world.

She said, “Leadership is a problem for women,” while “men are taught implicitly” what leadership looks — and feels — like. In contrast, “women are raised to please” and to be accommodating and supportive.

Women have rarely held leadership positions independent of men in recorded history, although “there are exceptions,” she noted, pointing to Indira Gandhi of India and a few others.

Fonda noted that while Argentine President Cristina Fernandez recently was elected to her position to much acclaim, her ascension to the helm was heavily dependent on the efforts of her husband Nestor Kirchner, whom she succeeded.

She praised Senator Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., for her recent campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, noting that she was different from many women in the limelight because “she clearly owned her power” from the start.

As for Clinton’s failed campaign, Fonda said, “We have to get over it.”

She added, “More and more, women are seeing that women and power go together.”

In citing the many-year house arrest of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, a populist woman leader in Myanmar; and several other similar cases around the world, Fonda said, “These attacks on women leaders are attacks on democracy” and they need to be addressed.

Fonda then shifted her focus to talk about her own development as a social activist.

“I first became an anti-war activist in 1971,” she said. “I was a movie star. In fact, I’d just filmed ‘Barbabella,” a 1968 science-fiction film in which Fonda played the highly erotic lead character.

The crowd laughed along with Fonda at her flippant reference to the Roger Vadim-directed cult classic. “Barbarella” remains famous for a sequence in which Fonda undresses in zero gravity during the opening credits.

“I was married to a French film director and living in Paris. I’d never done anything like this (political activism) before ... I couldn’t stand keeping quiet about all I had learned” from American soldiers upon their return from Vietnam.

As a result, Fonda said she read books, studied and even married an “expert,” Tom Hayden, a prominent anti-war activist in California, who later was elected to the state Senate.

“I was thrust into a leadership role,” Fonda recounted, even though she admitted that she always felt she needed “to look to a man” to serve as a leader.

Hanoi-Jane.jpg

Vietnam War veterans Fred English of Asheville and Tim McAlee of Leicester hold signs expressing their opposition to Jane Fonda’s visit last Saturday morning outside Asheville’s Thomas Wolfe Auditorium.

She lamented that five administrations — Democratic and Republican — “knew they couldn’t win, but they kept going at it anyway” in the Vietnam War. Fonda said a succession of male presidents likely shared Lyndon Baines Johnson’s fear of being called “an unmanly man.”
Fonda paused and drew a cheer from the largely female crowd when she used a double-entendre to quip, “No wonder we worried about premature evacuation!”

“It’s not that women are morally superior to men — they just don’t have their masculinity to prove,” Fonda asserted, triggering more cheers from the audience.

“Whereas men’s style of leadership tends to be elitist, for women, leadership tends to be circular and inclusive,” she said.

In a reference to Senator Barack Obama, Fonda asserted, “For the first time, I think the Democratic candidate for the presidency is a man with feminist skills.”

“Just as it took me a long time to acknowledge my leadership and try to figure out what kind of leader I am,” Fonda said she has decided that “I’m more of the kind of leader who brings people along ... I’m not a visionary, nor am I a strategist.”

In discussing qualities women leaders need, she began by citing vision and passion and provided examples including the vision of Eve Ensler, who wrote “The Vagina Monologues,” and the passion of Beverly Paigen, a cancer research scientist, who volunteered her services in the Love Canal case involving a toxic environmental hazard.

As for herself, Fonda said, “The way I can be helpful is, if I’m there, more of the press will show up.”

She added, “Women leaders have to become the change we seek. We need to incubate it in our bodies.”

In spring 1971, Fonda said she had just become involved in what she termed “the G.I. movement,” involving anti-war gatherings at coffeehouses that were springing up around military bases around the U.S. at the time.

“You see, I was a movie star and people often tried to use me — usually for good reasons” to further their causes.

To that end, Fonda said, she met peace activist Terry Davis at a coffeehouse in Fort Hood, Texas. — “and she saw me differently.” The actress said Davis was the first person she had met who saw her as a whole person to be appreciated — and not just someone to be used.

Fonda also praised Davis for — unlike many others she saw in the peace movement — being nonjudgmental of the soliders she met who were headed off for the Vietnam War. “She knew most were from poor, rural areas” and felt they had no other choice,” she said.

“With her (Davis), I first felt I was in the presence of a woman leader,” Fonda said.

To her, Davis exemplified two other qualities women leaders need — empathy and compassion. Davis practiced what Fonda termed “heartful listening.”

Unlike many other activists, Davis asked questions such as “How did that make you feel” — and listened patiently and closely to the answers.

“Having clear values in another quality of women’s leadership, Fonda said. “I do think values are important.”

She also listed courage “as an essential quality for a woman leader” because, Fond said, a woman leader will be under attack by virtue of the rarity of someone of her gender in command — and be subject to name-calling.

As an example of courage, Fonda cited Bella Abzug (1920-98), a former New York City congresswoman and woman’s movement leader, who successfully organized women leaders from around the world to “gain a seat at the table” at a United Nations conferences.

Previous to Abzug’s efforts, women’s non-governmental organizations were viewed “as a special-interest group with no place at the table” of the U.N., Fonda said.

Led by Abzug, the message at the U.N.’s first woman-inclusionary conference in Cairo, Egypt, in 1994 was that “if you want to stabilize” the world’s population, “you have to view everything through a gender lens,” Fonda said.

“Everywhere in the developing world, it is the girls and women who plant the seeds,” tend the fields, harvest the crops, keep houses clean, raise the children and do much of the other work that keeps families together, Fonda said.

Therefore, attention needs to be given to helping the plight of girls and women — and when females’ income increases, studies show that it increase children’s survival rates by a multiple of 20, she asserted.

“When women control incomes,” Fonda said, there is a tremendous decrease in spending for cigarettes, alcoholic beverages — “and, yes, prostitutes.”

After a pause, she queried, “You want to control the world population rate? Educate girls. Educated girls can read bottles” filled with medicine and understand the ways to avoid pregnancy.

Alas, Fonda noted that, despite the United Nations International Conference on Population and Development in September 1994 in Cairo, “there has not been gender change.”

“Despite all the findings to the contrary,” the U.N. “powers” are not acting to empower girls and women in the developing world, Fonda lamented, noting that the “powers” to which she was referring includes the World Bank and other such agencies.

Specifically, she noted that the World Bank gave allocated $600,000 for Incentive Fund for Gender Mainstreaming a few years ago out of an $18 billion budget, reflecting the low priority gender commands among bank priorities.

“The profound structural changes we need simply will not happen until women move into leadership positions — as women.”

She also said women “can’t be like a herds of cats,” fighting among themselves.

Instead, “We have to be like Bella Abzug, who formed a club of the world’s women ambassadors.” As a result of Abzug’s efforts, “for the first time, rape was rated as genocide” by the U.N.

As for male-run institutions, Fonda said there nearly always is “the deep undergirding of the male psyche, which makes a man dependent on his status as a male and in charge ... It’s a hierarchy paradigm.”

“If the paradigm was circular, how would that look?” she asked.

Making it clear she was joking, Fonda said with a smile, “The American Indians used that (circular leadership style) and look how badly that evolved! The savages — Starhawk and the others!” The audience laughed.

Fonda contended that patriarchy began in 3,100 B.C. in what is now — “ironically” — Iraq and Iran, and then spread around the world.
“Class was not what initiated or institutionalized patriarchy — it was the enslavement of women from conquered groups for the sexuality and reproductive capability. That’s what came first.”

“Once women were made property, then hierarchy became predominant and nation-states developed,” Fonda said. As a result, women lost their reproductive rights, which, she termed ,“an issue of power, not an issue of fetus.”

Women’s struggle today around the world for reproductive rights constitutes “a fundamental struggle for our basic human rights,” she said.

Based on her research, Fonda said the gender-role scenario before patriarchy was clear, with men hunting and women working as foragers, “but, according to anthropologists, both men’s and women’s work were equally respected.”

Next, Fonda asked how many in the Asheville audience were familiar with the works of author Eckert Tolle, prompting many to raise their hands.

She noted that Tolle contends that “the new consciousness is rising as the old consciousness is fading.” Moreover, she said Tolle believes women “will be the ones to lead the new consciousness” because, he says, “it is harder for the ego to take root in the female than the male” because of innate gender differences in which the ego dominates in men.

“So it’s up to us,” Fonda told the largely female crowd. “We are the majority — 51 percent of the world’s population.”

In concluding, she said, “I’ve traveled the world — and I am optimistic. I think what we’re seeing is the last flailings” of the patriarchal, war-prone leadership style.

In a reference to the Old Faithful geyser eruptions at Yellowstone Park in the Western U.S., Fonda said, “I have witnessed the presence of women and men around the world bubbling up — and I am here to energize you to be volcanos!” As she left the lectern, the crowd gave Fonda a sustained standing ovation.