First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

PRAYER: From the Qur’an, Umm Salamah’s verses (Surah 33:35):

“Lo!  Men who surrender unto God, and women who surrender,
         and men who believe and women who believe,
         and men who obey and women who obey,
         and men who speak the truth and women who speak the truth,
         and men who persevere, and women who persevere,
         and men who are humble and women who are humble,
         and men who give alms, and women who give alms,
         and men who fast and women who fast,
         and men who guard their modesty,
                and women who guard their modesty,
         and men who remember God much and women who remember –
    
God has prepared for them forgiveness and a vast reward.”

AFFIRMATION OF FAITH: Women’s Work, Clare Tilson

I was watching TV with my grandfather while my grandmother scooted around cleaning.  I asked him if he ever helped her and he said that THAT was Women’s Work.  He didn’t just mean that being traditional was his way of life.  He meant to convey that he was superior to that sort of work.  Yow.  This was the first time I’d heard the term, Women’s Work.  Since then, the term has been redefined for me.

As a graduate student of Animal Behavior, a professor asked if I thought the traditional parenting roles taken on by men and women were influenced more by nature or nurture.  I gave an answer that Gloria Steinum would have been pleased with.  In short, such behavior was mostly learned.  But he politely disagreed; that there must be quite a bit of hard wiring to such a behavioral pattern since it was so prevalent among animals.  I chaffed at the way his logic bound me to a certain life.  Ha!  Now, I am immersed in the reproductive part of life where men’s and women’s roles tend to polarize.  I have to say that this women’s work feels pretty hard-wired, and is the most perfect fit for who I am of anything I have ever done.  And, contrary to what my grandfather thinks, life as a stay-at-home mommy is far from inferior, menial work.  In fact, it is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.  I bet he couldn’t do it.

But, there were other times in my life where I have done women’s work or witnessed the benefit of women’s work and wisdom.

Davidson sent me a New York Times article about cutting-edge scientists examining personality in animals.  He sent the article to me because I had once told him about the personalities I had come to admire in my study animals when I was a master’s student.  My study animals weren’t cats or dogs or something charismatic like that.  They were moths.  Big moths that I had to hold and hand-feed every day.  Some were more fearful, some were gutsy fighters, and some were quicker at learning the routine.  I still remember one moth in particular.  She had long outlived her experimental usefulness, but I continued to feed her every day because I had grown fond of her.  She was exceptionally sweet-tempered.  I remember telling my advisor about my observations.  He was incredulous and condescending.  Whatever.  I was right.  Now, studying animal personalities is cutting edge.

And there are plenty of other female scientists influencing science.  I remember hearing a seminar on befuddling bird hierarchies.  They couldn’t figure out why one male was top bird one week and then dirt the next.  Until, that is, a female researcher looked at the same data and said, the hierarchy you seek is among the female birds.  Male status was a function of which female the male associated with.

So science is evolving under the influence of women’s work and wisdom.

But what about business and politics and religion?  I think women have even more room to do their work in these fields.  And when they do, it’ll be amazing.  Won’t you just love it when business is less about greed and more about making sure that one’s success is not at the expense of our children’s world?  Won’t you just love it when there are no more wars, and the most aggressive thing that happens among nations is an occasional catty remark shot across the desks at the United Nations?  And won’t you just love it when God is no longer used as a tool to justify violence and intolerance, and instead used to exemplify the nurturing, accepting, forgiving way we all could live?

SERMON: Women’s Wisdom, Women’s Work

International Women’s Day – March 8^th

Today I want to tip the hat to International Women’s Day, and celebrate women’s work and the contribution women’s work makes to our quality of life.  Now Women’s Day is technically March 8^th, this Tuesday,  although for the purposes of the marches, protests, conferences, forums, art shows, performances and gatherings which typically mark the day all over the world, any convenient day in the beginning of March is acceptable.  Typical of women’s ways, the actual day is less important than the fact that it suits the participants. 

Let me ask some questions of you now.  I have been surprised at how many folks are not familiar with the International Women’s Day.  How many of you, and I am asking both men and women, have celebrated, at some time in your life, International Women’s Day?  How many have never heard of it?

For myself, I was always drawn into its observance by my first cousin, who was more like my sister as I was growing up.  She would always march in the Women’s Day parade in Toronto and then get together with all her close women friends for a shared meal.  It was, as far as I could tell, not as much about fighting the good fight for gender equity and woman’s equality as a simple celebration of our own womanhood.  Joining together to support one another as women.

Now I have spoken to the young adult group here, and not one of them had ever heard of Women’s Day.  I have also spoken to two women from among the congregation.  One has had a history of gathering together with an international group of women to celebrate the day and the other had spent a recent women’s day dressed in white and dancing for peace.  She hadn’t the heart to celebrate this year since the invasion of Iraq. 

And what about you?  Work is certainly not something only women do, nor is wisdom limited to the female half of our species.  But the tip of the hat is special consideration I want to give this morning to the work which we typically associate with women, no matter the age they lived in or the culture they were born into – and that can be described as the work of homemaking, the provision of food in the form of meals in the homes, and caring for others in the home, whether children, adults or elderly family members.  This is not only women’s work.  It must be acknowledged that men are also responsible for the provision of this work, at least paying for these services, if not executing or managing them. 

But let’s see:  Who here, personally, takes care of a home?  Who has the responsibility of providing meals in the home?  Who is actively engaged in providing care to children, or dependent adults?   Is it mostly women’s hands that are raised?  One more question:  How many of you who have raised your hands to any of these last questions, also work outside the home?

I want observe Women’s Day because it gives us the opportunity to celebrate the worth of the work of women to the quality of life we experience and share.     

International Women’s Day got its start in this country in 1908 with a march of Socialist women in NYC.  They were demonstrating to call for the vote and the political and economic rights of women.  Two years later at a meeting of The Socialist International in Copenhagen, the international nature of Women’s Day was established to honor the move towards women’s rights including the right to vote.  In 1911 more than a million women demonstrated in European nations, not only for voting rights but for the right to hold public office, the right to vocational training, the right to work outside the home, and the right to be treated as equal workers.  Now the Industrial Revolution was a fact of life, so was child labor and these demonstrations underlined the need for all workers outside the home to be treated fairly.  In the same year, shortly after Women’s Day, there was a terrible fire in NYC in which 140 working girls, mostly Italian and Jewish immigrants, were killed while on the job. The timing of this tragedy so soon after the IWD highlighting of the need for including women workers’ interests, had significant impact on labor legislation in the US.

Since those early days, IWD has become a day of global celebration for the economic, political, and social achievements of women, and the societies they live in.  It is a time to reflect on progress made, to call for change and to celebrate acts of courage and determination by women and men who have played extraordinary roles in the history of women’s rights.  And in keeping with this, today I want to tell you the stories of two women who have uniquely expressed  the synthesis between traditional women’s work, the home-making and the procurement of food, and the hard-won power which comes from breaking free of traditional women’s work enough to become educated, articulate, free-thinking problem-solvers and leaders.  I offer these portraits to you as examples of the incorporation of women’s wisdom into domains far beyond the reaches of the household, into the affairs of whole peoples and states.      

First, the winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize, Wangari Maathai.    I am sure most of you have read about her.  I had, though I hadn’t bothered to pronounce her name until now, I realize.  She is a Kenyan woman, born in 1940.  Educated.  Went to school in the West.  Became a Zoology professor.  She married and had three children.  She divorced her husband in the 1980’s.  Her former husband described her as “…too educated, too strong, too successful, too stubborn and too hard to control.”  Right on.  Seems to me that’s just what my cousin and I celebrated on women’s day.  It is interesting to note that no one would ever think of describing men as too any of these things.  We admire men who are too educated, strong, successful, stubborn and hard to control.

Wangari Maathai started the work that was to lead her to Nobel recognition in the 1980’s when she became concerned with the then government of Kenya’s policy of deforestation and the negative impact it had on the soil, and the lives of women.  The traditional work of women in Kenya was and is to make the meals, and keep the fires burning under the pots.  But because of the deforestation, women were having to hunt farther and farther afield for their firewood.  This took them away from home for longer and longer periods, leaving children and homes unattended.  So Wangari Maathai not only protested the government policies, she also came up with the idea of planting trees.  If the Kenyan women could plant trees close to home in their villages, they could start cultivating and harvesting their own firewood.   Thus in control of their fuel, such women would not remain powerless even with autocratic husbands and village chiefs, even with ruthless presidents.

Wangari Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement.  She organized women in villages to plant trees.  It was found that to plant trees in groups of one thousand not only produced sustainable wood for cooking, it effectively combated soil erosion, as well as enabling women to work close to home, where their responsibilities lay.  Now there are six thousand tree nurseries in Kenya, and it is estimated that the village women in the Green Belt Movement have planted between twenty to thirty million trees in Kenya.  The treeplanting confronts big problems:  it has slowed the desertification of the land, it preserves the habitats for wildlife, it provides sources for fuel and building materials, and with fruit trees, food for future generations.  It shifts power from policy makers and enforcers to the women who want to take care of their homes and families. 

Wangari Maathai, like many leaders, made huge personal sacrifices for the work she has undertaken.  She was jailed for fighting the single-party state and protesting for its end.  When Kenya allowed new political parties to form, she established the Mazingira Green Party.  She has been beaten for her efforts.  Yet when Kenyans finally did get a choice for their government in 2002, she was elected with a huge majority for her region’s seat in government and there was dancing in the street when she was appointed Deputy Minister of the Environment. 

Her insight led her beyond the concerns of the traditional work of women to the larger and more complex issues of food security in the era of global free trade, with its pressures to export food as commodity and as dept repayment to the international money lending interests.  Such concerns are national in scope but they reach into every home and village.  And it is there that the wisdom of women leads them clearly in the priority of their work.  The tee-shirts of the Kenyan Green Belt ladies reads, “as for me, I have made a choice” and that choice, once made available through the work of this leader, is about taking control of their living environment, cultivating, planting and managing trees, re-establishing kitchen gardens and indigenous crops using organic methods, wherever and whenever they can.  Such are the choices of an empowered Kenyan woman, an empowered citizen. 

Wangari Maathai likes to retell the old seven-day Creation story this way:  If God created humans on the Tuesday instead of on the Saturday of the first week, the humans would have been dead on Wednesday because there were not all the essential survival elements in place yet.  So, just to explain that abit, on the third day of creation there would have been light and sky already made and that’s it… not yet the land, not yet the seas, not yet the plants or animals, none of the things without which we could not live on this Earth.  Human life needs the land, the water and the plant life to survive.

The Nobel Peace prize was awarded to Wangari Maathai for her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace.  With this award the Nobel Prize committee reveals a new understanding of how peace is constituted.  Instead of trying to end armed conflict, they are acknowledging that peace on Earth now depends as much on our ability to secure our living environment so it may, in turn, sustain our lives.  Wangari Maathai has a neat way to say the same thing of her work, she says, “We plant the seeds of peace.”  We all do.  She did it by organizing ordinary women into undertaking homemaking on a new, broader scale, not confined to the hut or house, but with a view to the common good.  We cannot all be Nobel Peace prize winners but we can appreciate in her leadership how her non-traditional education and public service is intimately connected to the more traditional forms of women’s work and wisdom.   Too educated, too strong, too successful, too stubborn and too hard to control …for what?

Another woman I want to tell you about is Vandana Shiva.  She is an Indian woman, born in 1953, in the Himalayas of North India, in a fertile valley where she grew up on the family farm.  Her father was a forest conservator and her mother was a former government official.  Vandana  Shiva remembers that her mother taught her that there was nothing beyond the reach of a woman, and that education by itself did not make you a better human being.  Vandana  Shiva always loved and yearned to know more about nature.  Albert Einstein was her hero and so she studied physics “…to figure out a little better the patterns of nature’s laws.”  Like Wangari, Vandana was privileged with an extended education.  Also with studies in the West.  I was surprised to learn that she studied at the University of Western Ontario, in Canada.  In her work as a nuclear physicist she learned first hand about the practice of what she calls “one-eyed science”, science that looks only at the benefits or profitability of its discoveries and not at the costs. 

 In the early eighties, Vandana became involved with a grass roots Indian women’s initiative which succeeded in stopping commercial logging in the Himalayas.  Then the Indian government asked her to do an impact analysis on mining in her home valley and her work became instrumental in shutting down mines and other polluting industries there. So, in 1982, she founded an organization in her hometown with the goal of working with local communities and social movements to promote sustainable agriculture and combat genetic engineering, water privatization, and factory farming.  The independent Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology  would work with such communities and movements by providing the scientific research and technological understandings needed to mount their challenges effectively in business meeting rooms and legal chambers, the places where men have traditionally made the decisions.

In 1991 she stated Navdanya, a national movement in India to protect the diversity and integrity of living resources, especially seeds.  In the late nineties she initiated the international movement Diverse Women for Diversity which acknowledges the role of Third World women as seed conservators and as experts in the use of medicinal plants. 

Vanadana Shiva has written many books on agri-business, the dangers of industrialized farming, and biotechnology.  She is a leader in the social-justice and ecology movements.  Here is a quote:

“I care deeply for people’s right to food.  I devote my life to ensuring that we have sustainable agriculture …. and the efficient use of scarce resources.  Biotech, or genetically modified seeds, fails the sustainability test because the intellectual-property-rights system perversely treats plants and seeds as corporate inventions…. What is supposed to be the farmers’ highest duty – saving seed and exchanging it with neighbors – has become a crime… If enough people practice alternative forms of political organizing and present a different political message, it can add up to a sound loud enough for the deaf to hear.  And the more we start taking power into our own hands, the more we shrink the power of lifeless capital to destroy life on the planet.”

Shiva still lives on her family’s farm.  She is not living in a traditional family structure.  She lives with her brother, sister and her grown son.  When she is not flying all over the world giving lectures, she is there farming and writing.  Traditional women’s work dedicated to the procurement of food but supplemented with the non-traditional work of thinking, researching, writing and problem solving.

If it is women’s wisdom and women’s work to focus on the provision of food, on the preservation of forests and soils, and the integrity of the living environment around us to sustain our lives and homes, and if it is men’s wisdom and men’s work to consider the science, and the possible use of technology, to make the decisions, and to make the rules, then Vandana Shiva’s work is an example of the way women can add the world of women’s wisdom to the playing field of “a man’s world.” 

Now, you may have a garden, and I know that there are some members here who take gardening and growing food very seriously, but we are not concerned for the most part with seed conserving or planting or harvesting.  We shop at HEB, or at Wheatsville coop.  Our lives as women are as far removed from the productive soil as the men folk among us.  Women’s work here is about getting up and getting everybody else up, dressing, feeding, dropping off, working our jobs ‘til we pick up at daycare.  Come home, maybe shop on the way, get dinner, deal with the homework situation, limit TV, manage the bath and bedtimes, clean up dinner, tidy up house, do laundry, make calls, attend to necessary arrangements, get ready for the next day, get to bed.  It is busy and sometimes it is crazy busy.  But we have managed to get ourselves here this morning for rest and worship and a meaningful message.  So, what has the work of these two foreign, accomplished ladies have to say to us??

Here are my answers:  Our world is made better by the work you do as homemaker and meal-maker.  The quality of the lives of your partners, children, parents, is enhanced every time you knock yourself out to make things nice: good food, clean clothes, paid bills.  Thank you for doing this women’s work, whether you are a woman or a man.  I wanted to highlight these two ladies to inspire you.  Their work is grounded in the concerns of all women and men, the common needs we all have for food security, and the shelter of a livable environment, whether that means accessible firewood, or a functionally de-cluttered car interior.  Their work also exemplifies the wisdom of women, to work with what you’ve got, to understand the limits you labor under, to work with others building relationships which are as sustaining as food and land, and more precious in the end.  In Kenya and in India women with much less social mobility and much less economic power than any of us can imagine are working together to protect and restore their lands.  They are not all landowners but they know they are stakeholders just as we do.  They know also that they cannot and will not turn away from their work as women, wives, mothers, daughters.  And in that can anyone, can any woman be too educated, too strong, too successful, stubborn or hard to control?  I don’t think so.  These are good traits for the ladies, and too much of a good thing is a better thing.  Much better.