Dear #W4S Community,
This month we want to share with you the amazing thoughts and contributions of Riane Eisler in her last Webinar with Women 4 Solutions. Her book “The Chalice and the Blade” first came out in 1987 but is still as relevant today, if not more.
Riane grew up as a child refugee from Nazi Vienna and this led her to questions like “It really must be this way?”. She was told that it was just human nature, that humans were bad and must be controlled from the top, but she realized that this was just a convenient story for maintaining and imposing domination systems.
“This is not an issue of women against men or men against women, it's an issue of freeing both, women and men, both boys and girls, and everybody in between, from our rigid gender stereotypes” Riane explains. “Studies of brain function show that the so-called pleasure centres in our brains light up more when we share and care than when we win and dominate, but the rewards of our economic system, of our social system, are still for domination”.
We need to move to what she calls – because she was the first one to call it this way - a caring economics of partnerism, focused on caring of people and nature.
“If you look at Modern History from the perspective of the partnership and domination configuration, never mind right, left, religious, secular, eastern, western, northern, southern, they all marginalize us and have been repressive and violent regimes. None of them tell us what we have to build to move forward, we have had one social movement after another, challenging the same thing: a tradition of domination”.
We are now seeing movement towards understanding that we must pay much more attention to gender. Riane is developing new metrics, new measures, of what is and is not economically valuable, showing the enormous economic value of the work of caring for people and natural life.
She inspires us to continue working for a more Caring Economy: “It has changed once before, it can change again, and this is what we have to keep in mind. I rely on all of you. I have provided some of the evidence but now it's up to you”.
