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Open Letter to 3 Women Imagineers of the Integral Age on 100th Anniversary of International Women’s Day
March 8, 2011 by marilynhamilton
This is An Open Letter to Three Women Imagineers of the Integral Age
On The Occasion of the 100th Anniversary of International Women’s Day
Dear Drs. Hazel Henderson, Barbara Marx Hubbard and Jean Houston
I claimed I was never a feminist in the 60’s or 70’s. That’s because I didn’t see myself as an activist then. But in truth, my father programmed me for some kind of emerging feministic perception and behaviours. When I was still in my mid-teens, he brought me Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, and a dash of Germaine Greer and Gloria Steinem along with many opportunities to discuss and debate their arguments on the lives of women. What’s more, he convinced me there was nothing I couldn’t do. I just believed him and carried on as if it were true. So I didn’t encounter cultural resistance in my family of origin and I simply took for granted the fertile adaptive ground that all the suffragettes, feminists, liberationists and activists had prepared for me.
As an older and more appreciative woman, I am deeply grateful to the women (and men) who came before me that enabled the sexual freedom, conscious awareness, political rights and social structures that have become my life-right (if not my birthright).
On this occasion of the 100th Anniversary of International Women’s Day (March 8, 1911) I marvel that I have become an activist. I seem to have skipped over the stages of activism that relate to the modern and post-modern woman and plunged directly into the age of the integral woman – even the integral human being.
Based on my understanding and experience of systems, lifecycles, life conditions, change, resilience, self-organization, global perspectives, marriage, human relationships, cities and cultural shifts, I have even formulated a theory of evolution (and involution) for human systems. I am writing this letter of appreciation today because whatever I know has been so greatly influenced by you trio of women who called yourselves the Power of Yin. Thirty-three years ago, in 1978-79 – two thirds of the way through the century following the first International Women’s Day – Hazel Henderson, Barbara Marx Hubbard and Jean Houston – gathered to share your insights about female sensibility and principles.
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