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President Simmons, trustees,
faculty, family, friends, and members of the graduating class
of Smith College for the
year 1999, I am very pleased to be with you today and to
receive, with my distinguished colleagues, an honorary degree
from this great institution. I cannot imagine four more outstanding
women to be sharing the honor with.
Well, graduates, you
did it! Here you are at last, at the culmination of four
hard years of work and exploration, surrounded
by friends and family, and about to leave this campus and
the town of Northampton which has been your second home.
Congratulations! You have been successful, even though the
goal at times must have seemed distant and the path difficult
and pitted with errors. Winston Churchill said, "Success
is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm." We
can all taste your enthusiasm today as you are rewarded with
a degree from one of the finest colleges in the world. Your
success is real. I am delighted to be the last
Smith commencement speaker in this century and in this millennium.
These annual
speeches
are the one place where older people like myself get to
tell all you younger people how to live your lives from now
on,
what works and what doesn't and how when I was your age
we did it better. Well, I'm not going to do that. I think
you
are well on your way to living your lives as you see fit;
I believe you have been given a great education, and when
I was your age we didn't do it better.
However, I am going
to tell you how I believe you can save the world -- just
a short prescription for planetary health
in the 21st century that involves you graduates. But
I'll get to that shortly. First, since I am the last commencement
speaker for this millennium, I feel it is incumbent upon
me to briefly sum up the last 1,000 years.
The planet
earth in the year 1000 A.D. was going through a lot of
jockeying for territory: The Turks were taking
over the Byzantine and Islamic empires, the Vikings
were raiding
the north from Ireland to Russia, the Christians were
soon to embark on their holy wars, and the Far East
had not
yet been invaded by the Mongols. People were on the
move and
the move was pretty bloody. Skipping 500 years to 1500
A.D., there was still a lot of jockeying for territory.
Spain and
France and England and Portugal and the Netherlands
were laying claim to lands all over the globe as fast as
their
explorers set foot on them. Native people were murdered
or enslaved and it was all pretty bloody. Skipping
another few
hundred years to 1800 ... well, you know what I'm going
to say. You 're the scholars, not me. You know your
history.
This "goodly frame, the earth" has been pieced
out and parceled up until there is not a lot left of her
to discover and subdue. Yes, we still have wars, we still
have violence, but the overriding issues now and for the
future are going to be how we live with one another as we
are now. Our world is finite; we are not. "Oh brave new world
that has such people in't!" exclaims
Miranda in "The Tempest." It is a brave new world.
The old rules don't apply; all the oceans have been crossed,
the lands have been mapped, the mountains have been climbed.
What was done in the name of possession is now done in the
name of tourism--- for fun. The last frontier today, other
than the distant reaches of the stars, is the human brain.
It is our brains, not our brawn, that will move us forward.
I believe in the transcendent
powers of science. Science has been good to us in the 20th
century, giving us wings
to take to the air, pills to quell the body's ills, images
and sounds to delight the eye and ear, life in a petri
dish, and Velcro --- so many things that they can't be counted
coming at us so rapidly that we can hardly keep up. But
watch
how young children grasp the nature of new things, as if
the circuits of their brains are channels longing to be
filled; they have none of the informational overload I experience
from decades of cramming. I remember watching amazed when
my nephew, Daniel, at the age of three, mastered, unaided,
the remote control and VCR, the subtleties of which still
elude me. Our brains are patterned to receive intricacies
and so I believe in the redemptive powers of science.
I also
believe in art. The educator Ernest Boyer said that "the
arts are one of humankind's most vital forms of language....
In most respects the human species is far less equipped than
other creatures on the planet: we are no match for the lion
in strength; we're outstripped by the ostrich in speed; we
can't outswim the dolphin; we see less acutely than the hawk.
And yet, as humans, we excel in the exquisite use of symbols
which empowers us to outdistance all other forms of life
in what we see and feel and know." These symbols have
made all forms of communication possible, from simple hand
gestures, which convey information and feelings, to the most
intricate combinations, which gave us the computer and take
us to the stars.
Art is a language we cannot
quantify, and it has its own reasons for being. Some art
is still unknowable
in a world
where we know so much and the frontiers of art keep moving.
As Daniel Boorstin says, art "awakens us to our own
possibilities." If religion teaches us that love is
all-encompassing, art teaches us that anything is possible,
and science shows us how to get there.
I spent four years
trying to get a bunch of troglodytes in Congress to understand
that cutting the budget of the National
Endowment for the Arts was like cutting out the best part
of our brains. Rather than invest in a future of possibilities
for young people, such as arts programs after school nationwide,
they decided to build more prisons. Rather than celebrate
the millennium through the arts, sciences and humanities,
they are devoting billions to a new version of star wars.
Over and over again I felt their priorities were all wrong.
One man said to me, "My god, we don't want any more
artists in the world, we have too many already!" That's
like saying we have too much imagination and beauty running
amok in the world --- let's get rid of it!
I have felt for
some time now that women should be running the world. I have
observed group behavior for the better
part of 45 years and watched women grow in leadership positions
and management. I was there at the beginning of the feminist
movement in the late '60s and '70s and have seen how far
we've come in juggling our complex lives. I don't know if "women
are from Venus and men are from Mars," though I do know
that Carol Gilligan [an honorary degree recipient at the
commencement exercises] has written brilliantly on the differences
between men and women. I just believe that women are better
suited at this time in our planetary history to run the world.
This takes nothing away from men---many of my closest friends
are men and I adore my husband unabashedly---it's just that
they are using old operating systems in this brave new world,
and their testosterone is showing. Women at least are not
dragging the baggage of territorial obsession behind them,
nor the cultural history of weaponry. When was the last time
you heard of a marauding band of girls sweeping a village
or a school with semi-automatic guns?
All well and good you
say, but how to go about it? By increments, not by coup
or fiat, even if that were possible. And not
by dropping out of the system. Back in the '60s many of
us hoped to make changes; we were dedicated to new ways of
living
with each other, from civil rights to an end of violence
to mind expansion. Well, we may have changed ourselves
to some small degree but we didn't change the system.
Right
now women represent only about 10 percent of our federally
elected officials but more than 50 percent of the population.
We need equal representation in places where vital decisions
are made, and that is at the very top, in government and
in the corporate boardrooms. We're lucky, we live in a
democracy. We can vote, we can get ourselves elected, we
can get on
school boards and PTAs, we can start businesses, we can
find a way. But you can't seize the day
if you sit on the sidelines. You have to believe that it
all matters: that it matters
that the population of the world will reach 6 billion shortly,
20 years ahead of schedule, and that the repercussions
of that are mind-boggling. That it matters that our kids
are
dying from bullets or abandonment or lack of opportunity.
That it matters that huge corporations are dictating what
we do, what we wear, what we eat, where we go, sometimes
to our detriment and the detriment of our planet. That
everything matters, from the frown on your friend's face
to the fence
put up by your neighbor. That the happiness of the world
is based on one-to-one relationships and not on statistics
or polls.
First and foremost you have
to believe that you matter, that your voice will make a difference.
You do and
it does.
Not
all of you will want to be out front and active, and
for those of you who will be mothers, I cannot think of anything
more important than being there for your children when
they are little. The wonderful thing about being a woman
today
is that there are no stigmas attached to what you choose
to be. It is all possible.
In 1840 Elizabeth Cady Stanton
and Lucretia Mott began working to change the inequality
they felt; 80 years
later, in 1920,
women finally won the right to vote in this country.
Now, another 80 years later, in the year 2000, it is
time for
women to move into decision-making positions of the
world, or at least actively work towards that goal, because
it will probably take another 80 years to achieve.
I
ask you
to make
equal representation in the halls of Congress, in local
and state legislatures and on the boards of our corporations
a reality.
Smith women have a long history
of giving to the
communities they are in and working for causes in
which they believe. My prescription for saving the world
is for you,
the finest young women in America today, to be running
it. This brave new world is in good hands. God bless
and godspeed. |
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