Women’s Empowerment through Microfinance Clarity Forum

Harvard Faculty Club

November 26, 2007

Transcription of Audio #1

In the circle: Peri Chickering, Susanne R. Cook-Greuter, Helen-Ann Ireland, Rebecca Koeniger-Donohue,Mary Day Mordecai, Kate W. Parrot, Luz Maria Puente, James Ritchie-Dunham, Anne Starr

James L. Ritchie-Dunham–I think – ourbelief is and my aspiration is that this is not a unique meeting. That there have been plenty of people that have gathered women, such as yourself, to talk about this. And so far we haven’t been able to find in our conversations anybody that has started to convene women asking about this question of,“what does an empowered woman mean?” for this specific issue, this context. So it seems to be a fairly unique piece, at least for the organizations we’re working with. So it’s an honor to have you guys together to start talking about this.

What we would like to do to start is ask you to do some introductions and to do that we thought we would go around and take a minute or so each and reflections about your relationship to the question of women’s empowerment and what that might mean to you. And as a way of introducing yourself. Before we do that, did everybody get a copy of the materials that we had sent, the bios and the overview of the project and the agenda?

So we thought instead of having you talk about your work, which you could read about in the files,…

Luz MariaPuente– Anyone need some copies [discussion about who needs copies]?

JLRD – So I thought I would ask you, maybe we’ll take a few seconds to think about that, sharing a little bit about your relationship to the question of women’s empowerment, if that makes sense as a question. Okay, so we’ll take a few second and then start.

LMP – I start? Ok, to me anything that it goes to helphumanity as a whole is attractive to just to think on it and reflect on what things we can do, but especially because as women. I think that the potential is tremendous, if we can help women. To me that there is space for that possibility is very hopeful for the whole of humanity. So the more we can understand how can we help or let them be realized, better the role they have in society and their families and their communities. If we can influence or understand better how can we help these women, it’s helping everybody. It’s helping us, it’s helping all of humanity. So that’s where I am.

JLRD – Interesting.

Anne Starr– Being a woman of a certain age, having come up in the late 60s and 70s, I remember women conscious-raising groups as a very specific sort of rite of passage way back then. And having worked for some time in the search business, I witnessed many women going through transitions and inner processes for themselves around those issues. And I actually, when I read the materials, I kind of laughed because I felt like I’m my own best example of the excruciating inner difficulties about whether one is or is not empowered and how, and why. And having come just from one strand of my family, over the holiday, I’m aware of the different things that influence empowerment. Societal and family, family systems and history and experiences that are woven in one’s history and then also just walking over here, I was thinking about having heard the Bernard Lietaer “financing” and thinking how powerful an influence that also has one’s empowerment. You know, the external systems, financial systems, also have a strong effect. Anyway, so I feel like my lens on this is going to be very internal, internally based, but I’m glad to be here.

Susanne Cook-Greuter – I’ll go next. My first reaction when I read something like Women’s Empowerment coming from that older generation, I have consistently resisted anything that has to do with separating men from women. I’ve always said I’m a humanist not a feminist. Similarly because I think unless everybody is raised, the consciousness of everything, it’s going to be one sided. Once I said that, I do think that in certain ways empowering women, particularly in an example we have listed as micro-loans system, does seem to start things in the right direction. And if I think about it that way as a process with another goal in mind, I’m most at ease with it. And the strongest reaction I had was to the research questions, and I don’t know what we’ll get to that. But it was interesting, to me it was just interesting that I had a reaction. And so I am mostly looking at this as a woman who comes from lower middle class, working class. I never dreamed in my life I would end up where I am now, kind of wonderment and baggage that I still carry. A little bit like Anne said. Things that I know that are still in my way, despite all the external, seeming success. And I think that is just as relevant for other women,wherever they are coming from,if they’re not coming into this world with the same expectations as many here do. So I wonder how good we can be at imagining what that means to women in very, very different circumstances than what we’re used to. I am curious to explore. That’s it.

Kate Parrot – I just wanted to pick up next, because I have had that same question about how much I would have to offer in thinking about what we bring in very different contexts. I would think about empowerment, and I’ve been reflecting on the word “empowerment” and thinking about it in two different ways. So in terms of what is it to be empowered. So to be empowered would be, at least from one perspective, to be able to have the ability to do things that I can see in my own context that are shaped by the norms that I’m situated in. Another perspective on empowerment might be coming from an outside perspective of seeing what’s possible in say a more empowered society like this one, compared to say in Iran for example. So we might have an idea of what it means to be an empowered woman is different in this society even then a woman in that context would. So I think .. as I think about we even understand what it means to be empowered, which is so shaped by the environment we grow up in, I think of my own experience participating in a kind of modern-day consciousness-raising circles with everyone in there. Elizabeth Debold who co-authored a book called Mother Daughter Revolution, who’s been a feminist for many years. She brought in Susanne Cook-Greuter to a program of consciousness evolution that I was doing. And I was raised by my parents to think that I was completely equal to boys and could do whatever I wanted, and I think that’s part of what this generation was raised to believe. But so I was….But I think through the experience of sitting in these circles, I began to realize that in fact my own consciousness was quite constrained in ways that I hadn’t even realized, similar to maybe, you know what a women in Iran might realize through contact with another, with other women discussing these things. I started to realize that I, in fact, often times, apologize for what I was about to say before I say it, which is something that women often do. And I was very competitive with other women, which is true, and can be very true among women. So I started to realize how constrained my consciousness was and I’m curious about.. help me see other possibilities and ways that I could grow. So I started to expand the kind of social context, I guess, that I was living in. So I’m curious about what it might be to actually shift a woman’s own notion of empowerment through a process of dialogue and exposure to other kinds of ideas and context in a way that she’s comfortable with, not forcing it or imposing it in anyway but offering a process of inquiry whereby we women can come to understand what it means to be empowered in a different sense as I have done and I am continuing to do.

Rebecca Koeniger-Donohue–I would like to pick up on the [..] piece that we’ve talked about. I’m on the faculty at Simmons and our mission is partly to [..] vision way back in the 1800s was to give them a livelihood and some people question whether that’s still relevant in the US in this day and age in that mission statement. But secondarily, maybe as importantly as, is to help them find their voice. And I think that this woman’s college, part of the reason that it’s kept me there, is sort of a passion to help women find their voice and also I’m a practitioner in women’s health and so I’ve done a lot of gynecology over the years. That’s a place that as a clinician you can really empower women in the context of a health care interaction. So that’s sort of a micro level. But what I’m really very fascinated and challenged and interested to know, I was thinking on the way over here, such a huge, gargantuan, broad, enormous tackle – YES!

JLRD – This is Helen-Ann. She came all the way from Wilton, NH with her seventh grade class this morning. And we’re going around with reflections on our relationship with the question of women’s empowerment.

Peri Chickering – I’ll step in last. I guess for me it probably most of my thinking at the moment is, as Anne was saying, more internal. I have plenty of experiences about, over the decades, having images of empowerment that weren’t helpful at all. I would be in central Asiaand imposing my sense of how trapped a very close friend of mine was and almost getting her killed as a result, but I tried to be helpful. And that was a big wake-up call to not understanding what I was actually doing with my bright ideas. Because in that context, women are possessions and it’s dangerous for them to assume they’re not. So. And I guess so my main lens at this point has to do with figuring out how I come to understand my own deeper self and the way I live in the world and unpacking the self-imposed constraints on that of which there are layers. It seems like everyday I come across a new one.

LMP – You’re going fast.

PC – Yes, quite fast. And through that, I guess, I would say primarily I use my own experience, to the degree that I understand it, as a way, in terms of what’s been helpful, as a way to hold a space for somebody else’s learning. And I feel like at this point, that’s mainly what I do, is hold the space, to try to help somebody else’s voice come out instead of putting my own self on top of what needs to come out for them. And empowering them to make choices, whatever they are. And often times I don’t even understand but I can tell when it feels like it’s relevant for them, even if it’s a choice that I would not have made myself in a million years. I know it’s right. That it may be their next step. So it’s more of an internal than external dialog, which is the way I think about it right now, today. I’m glad to be here.

Mary Day Mordecai – I hardly know what to say about this question. I’m like you, I’m a woman of a certain age, and I was born a raging feminist. I was born that way. And it took me a lot of a consciousness-raising sessions and a lot of competing with men in various environments and a lot of heart-rending work in the corporate world to get pretty seriously beat up with my notion of what it meant to be an empowered woman. And in the last few years, I’ve been in kind of a retreat and re-evaluation of the whole question of who I am and what I’m meant to do on the planet and what contribution to make. And it’s really brought me into deep questioning of my particular role, but also.. I guess the issue that I think about most these days, in regard to women, is the issue of the deep feminine and what is deep feminine. And how do we understand that, how do we relate to that, how do we become an embodiment and a voice for that. Which I am learning is a very different voice than the voice that I mostly hear in the world around me and than the voice that I used to use. So it’s been quite a humbling and also exciting process. So often I find myself mute when I used to know exactly the right thing to say. I’m astonishingly mute at times or if not mute, not very clear in the way that I would want to be. And I think that’s part of that – that dance. So I guess that’s what I would say about this.

RKD - Did you say de-feminine or deep feminine?

MDM – Deep feminine.

Helen Ann Ireland – I think I could pick up on the deep feminine piece, because I feel like that’s a lot of where I reside. So I’ve been teaching boys and girls, you know, and watching them develop and trying to figure out how do you just empower not just women but boys also? And how do you work with them to find ways that we can really hear one another? I think that the task in women’s empowerment is really listening and finding those silent moments, actually. And those silent places and see what enters. Because I agree, I’ve gone through the whole competitive thing and that’s not really…I don’t think that’s really helpful.

KP – And a lot of work

HAI – Yeah, and so there has to be another way of doing this. So my question about particularly about women from another culture like the Mayans is so who are they, and what are their beliefs and what are they bringing to their situation? And, like you said, even if it’s not what we would think as a choice, it seems like it’s more in a deep feminine, an ongoing process anyway. So to allow that to unfold, to me, is empowering. And not to put any direction on it necessarily to really guide or listen and help assist.

JLRD – But this question of women’s empowerment, to me, I think it’s a number of levels. And by surprise, and Leslie my wife asked, “So why are you doing a forum on women’s empowerment? What does that have to do with strategic clarity?” And I think because I have been sitting with this question and this particular subject for three years now. And these women that I’ve met, and I’ll describe them in a couple of minutes, but people going out and using fairly blunt instruments on a lot of people. And I met some of these women, and I said you don’t know what you’re doing, and you’re doing a lot of it. Doesn’t that bother you? And so it wasn’t clear with the women that I was meeting that it was useful to them or that it was helping them. So that was sort of that part, and as I began to explore it, a bit of surprise, that somebody hadn’t, at least in this realm, been working on that. And then as I got into some of the things I’ll share, I’ve been thinking about it, this empowerment, I found out a lot of it is just really questions. And as Leslie says, she says, “The only reason you’ve ever worked on any of these questions is cause that’s what you’re working on for yourself anyway.” And so it’s just an opportunity for me to do self-development. [laughter] So how do I work on integrating the feminine in me, and each of you, most of you are doing different things with me, working on that, so, that is something I’ve been working on. So I think part of it is my relationship to the issue. The different woman that I work with that are working on this, and then mostly these women that I’ve met in these places such as Guatemala. And a pretty powerful, blunt tool is being used, so I thought it was a question that was at least worth surfacing and bringing in you to help me look at it.

SCG – I’m not actually sure what you refer to when you say this blunt instrument. How they punish …

JLRD – Micro-credit.

SCG – Oh that. Ok I was thinking they are raising children in ways we disapprove of. All right, I get it. Thank you.

JLRD – If we give them money, they’ll be empowered.

SCG – That seems a sort of simple way of looking at it.

JLRD – And it’s not a lot more sophisticated than that.

SCG – Yeah, blunt.

JLRD – It had the same kind of feeling in me of well we’re going to inoculate every child on the planet and at least in our community, they would go, “whoa, you can’t do that,” and everyone is different and is there a way to recognize that every person is different in their biology?Or every woman is different in their empowerment. We’re not asking the question, I think, in most of those cases, so that’s what the question meant to me. For others and for myself.

So I wanted you to have a little sense of who’s sitting around the table for this conversation that we’ll be having, and you got to read the bios and look over that and see the very different lenses that you bring to thinking about this. And the thing I thought was most beautiful about this is that “and why not having, at this stage, women, poor Latin women in Guatemala in this table?” And I think it was actually fairly intentional, right now at this stage, to see if we can even answer these three questions that I posed. Should we assess?, can we?, and how? With people who have done two things, one that you’re women. That you have gone through a lot of the work on yourself of looking at development, what does it mean over quite a long period time and myself. So it’s not just an intellectual exercise. And second that you do have intellectual perspectives on it. So that if we are to see if you can design something and that would be useful in different contexts that you have a way of thinking about them. And so that you’ve done both of those. It’s sort of the first criteria of what we thought about for convening the smaller group. OK?