We're concluding this course, this International Women's Health and Human Rights course, which for me was an adventure. Jumping in and trying to do this on the internet was an adventure. Of course, I couldn't possibly do it alone. I know a little bit about some of the issues, but I knew nothing about the technology; and my partner has been Kevin Hsu, a young man who knows all about the technology and is learning about the content as we move along. We've been great partners, and I think it has been a great illustration of the kind of partnership that can happen across sexes - male and female; across age - old and young; and across fields, where we know very little about the other person's field. It's been a terrific partnership, and neither of us could have done it without the other. So, I wanted to start out my remarks today just commenting on that, a partnership between differences, between people who are very different. It can be done, and we all know that; we have all practiced it, and we need to practice it more. This last week of our class was going to be focused on choosing priorities and making a difference. Instead, I thought It would be interesting to invite the three women who have just spoken to us to talk about their ideas of what was achieved over the past ten years or so, and what will be the challenge for women in the next ten years or so, from their three perspectives: from the Middle East, Latin America and then a kind of global perspective, but also from a person from Africa, Musimbi Kanyoro. I will probably set myself the task to respond to the same questions that I put to those three women. Before I do that, however, I wanted to say that in my class, as we come to the end of the class, we do look at positive interventions and transformative interventions, trying to figure out what does actually make a difference. We talk in my class about whether or not we try to make a deep difference to individual people, or a small group of people, trying to make a broad difference to a lot of people, trying to make a difference that will last a long time over time, and each of us might have a special thought about what makes us feel better as we allocate our precious resources. And that really has to do with choosing priorities. So, as I speak with my class about allocating resources, we have a number of resources that we could allocate. Some of us have some money, we all may have time, we have commitment, we have interest, we have passion, we have talents, we have education perhaps. All of these things that we may draw upon to allocate, to choose priorities in how we are going to spend our time and our lives. We have just been talking about aging, and it is very dear to my heart because I'm certainly in that place in my life. I'm aging fast. I'm old, anyone would say - in my late seventies. And now, almost more than at any other time, I spend a great deal of time thinking about how I want to spend my precious life. I talk about this with my students in class, and I often quote the last stanza of a poem by Mary Oliver, one of my favorite poets. Maybe you know this poem, it's called 'A Summer's Day' or 'The Summer Day'. I'm not going to read the whole poem, but I am just going to come to the last, near the last stanza, or the last few lines of this poem: "Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" And, I ask that question of myself very often. What do I want to do with my one wild and precious life? There is a lot of philosophy around this, and we can talk about how unique each one of us is, and how our unique contribution will be ours to make just by ourselves. We are one of a kind, each of us. So, it is interesting to contemplate choosing priorities: how do we spend our time? Well the three women that have spoken before me on this session have summarized what they think were the achievements in the women's movement over the last ten years and the challenges ahead. Those three people contributed greatly to what has happened in the last ten years. And, I was lucky enough to be working at the Global Fund for Women, not in the last ten years but in the last 20 years. I was working at the Global Fund for Women, putting it together from the very beginning. That was a great achievement, and a personal one. I think it's affected a lot of women around the world. Now in the last ten years, I have had the privilege of interacting with young people, students, at Stanford University, and I feel that that's been a good way to spend my time, even though one would say how much difference do you make when you are dealing with individual students. Well, a great deal of difference we hope. So my priority has been in recent years to try to make a deep difference on a few people. When I was working at the Global Fund for Women, I had hoped we would make a deep difference, or at least a difference, to many, many people. As I look back, I think one of the great achievements in the women's movement is a steady increase in making injustice visible. We have tried to do that at the Global Fund, and that is what I try to do as I teach at Stanford. But, I think many people have contributed here. We are more and more aware of the injustices in the world in general, and particularly against women. And I focus in, as you know from my remarks as we were talking about violence against women, I focus in on violence as perhaps one of the most important issues of our time, and certainly key to women's health and human rights. Violence is the strategy of people in positions of power to maintain those positions of power. Or a strategy by people to try to increase their power and move up in the patriarchy or in the hierarchy. It is a very important issue for the paradigm in which we live. And I feel that the understanding and the knowledge about violence, particularly violence against women, has really spread far and wide in the last ten years. I think Musimbi Kanyoro mentioned that as one of the achievements she felt was very evident over the last ten years. We don't know yet really what to do about it. We don't have the excellent interventions around violence against women, but we do have the visibility of the injustice, and more and more. The second achievement I think, and certainly a challenge for the future, is how women will be using the internet--this fantastic tool that we have, that we must learn to use, for the good. I think that women increasingly are doing this, especially younger women and we are making injustice visible through the use of the internet. In this course, and it is one of the reasons I wanted to do this course, we are trying to do just that: using the internet and using modern technology to make injustice visible -- and then learn about what different people are doing to actually implement programs that make sense and that make a difference. So the achievements over the last ten years have been greater visibility I think of injustice. And another important thing I think is that women are more and more understanding the tremendous importance of coming together. [Comment: Let me take those glasses off, they're shining a bit.] Of coming together and supporting each other. I believe that is absolutely key, and in fact when people ask me what I think is a major intervention, the most important intervention, I say it is the strengthening of community. And, I think women increasingly are doing this. There are millions of women's organizations all over the world. But, when I grew up, there was quite a culture of women sort of undermining each other or not really supporting each other, especially when I was quite young or in teenage, many years ago. We wouldn't be necessarily supporting each other. We may have a best friend, but coming together in groups to support other women was not something we were taught or we were encouraged to do in those days. I hope that is changing and that would be, in my mind, one of the challenges of the future; that is that we learn to come together and be extremely supportive of each other. Out of my concern with violence, teaching at Stanford and writing about it, I came to be even in more interested in non-violence and in love as a force for social justice. I teach a second class at Stanford on the topic, entitled: "Love as a Force for Social Justice." And, I begin that class with a few quotes from Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Buddhist who writes on peace and true love and he has laid out four mantras of true love that I often quote. The first, I'm reminded of now, when I was speaking of women supporting each other. The first mantra is: "Dear one, I am here for you." I think it is very simple, but Thich Nhat Hanh suggests that it is the first of four mantras that he lays out having to do with true love. And, that is something that I wish we, as women, would take to heart, that we would help each other, that we will be there for each other, seeing each other in an equal sense. That is, dear one, not poor miserable person who needs me to write a check, or something like that. Not that. "Dear one, I am here for you." I think that we in the women's movement need to fully come together and support each other at every turn, individually and in groups. So, we are working on that. In other words, there has been some achievement about women coming together in groups and supporting each other, and I feel that that is a major challenge of the future. Another challenge of the future, along with supporting each other, supporting women, is to support men in this struggle. And I know that Iman stressed this in her comments. We need to find ways to involve men in this struggle, to move to a society of equality and partnership. Men do not wish to be identified as violent people. They are gentle. We need gentle men in our process of change, as we move to a new society, where we are treating each other in ways that are different from the ways we have treated each other in the past. We need to figure out how to do this without disempowering ourselves, without disempowering men. That is a challenge I think for the future. And, that would lead me, along with some of the other remarks I have made, to emphasize something that I believe very strongly. I learned it when I was running the Global Fund for Women and I was interacting with so many women's groups around the world, and we were trying to do good things. We were trying to provide help to women, money, helping them change in ways that they wanted to change, and all of that. What we did was noble, that was true, but the key to the success of the Global Fund, in the early days especially, and I think recently now, is the way we did our work. And anyone who knows me knows I come back to this--maybe it's my mantra--and that is that "what we do is important, but the way we do it is more important." So, I think we need to learn ways of not only supporting each other as women, but reaching out and involving men in our work. We don't really know how to do it very well, it seems to me, and the men have to help us to work that out. So as we move forward, I think that women's organizations and individual women working in the field of human rights and international development could be leaders in defining ways of interacting, ways of doing our work, that themselves are transformative. I think that is really our role in the future and our real challenge. There has been an awful lot of international development. We've done a lot of work around the world. A great deal of money has been spent, some of it spent wisely, some of it spent not so wisely. But now we need to be something different. We need to do our work differently. I believe that the way we need to do our work is in terms of a set of values that we all work out for ourselves. And I often say to people when I serve on boards for organizations, what kind of organization do we want this to be? Do we want it to be a generous organization? A loving, compassionate, honest, transparent, all of these things? It is the same kind of question that we would ask ourselves when we sit down to figure out a plan for our own lives. What kind of a person do I want to be? I have a couple of teenage grandchildren and occasionally I will have a conversation with my grandson. Sometimes he says things to his mother that he probably regrets, getting into an argument or something, and I have occasionally said to him, "What kind of a person do you want to be? Do you want to be a young man who speaks rudely to other people? No, you don't." So, if you can figure out what kind of a person you want to be, try to practice being that now. I think the advice is good for all of us, and I try to follow it myself. So, all of this may sound very, very idealistic, so idealistic that it may be unrealistic. I have been accused in the past of being an "unrealistic idealist," and I have said, "well, many of the things I have tried to do and even accomplished in my life, would never have been accomplished unless I was in fact an unrealistic idealist." So, perhaps that is what I am advocating in my turn to speak today: That is, that we be unrealistic idealists, and that we move forward with passion and try to figure out what we want to do with our wild and precious lives with the time that we have left, knowing that happiness really will come with being there for each other. "Dear one, I am here for you": putting that into practice as best we can. Thanks very much.
