Chasing the light
Janice Kennedy
The Ottawa Citizen, April 26, 2009
No matter what your politics, listening to New Zealand feminist Marilyn Waring is like joining a march toward hope.
It is a march that began decades ago. The 56-year-old economist – a public intellectual and passionate activist who is also a writer, professor, globetrotter, international development consultant, classically trained singer and former goat farmer – was once best known as New Zealand’s youngest member of parliament. She was 23 when she was first elected in 1975, International Women’s Year, a young feminist determined to put her money where her mouth was.
Her constituents were rural, propertied and overwhelmingly conservative, but they loved her. Until 1984, when she quit partisan politics, she listened to them, represented their interests vigorously – and regularly offered them alternative ways of thinking about things.
Waring is in Canada to launch her new book, 1 Way 2 C the World, a collection of writings from 1984 to 2006, published by University of Toronto Press. Ottawans can hear her tomorrow night at the main branch of the Ottawa Public Library (120 Metcalfe St., 7-9 p.m.), when she will read from the book and answer questions. She might also offer a few alternative ways of seeing the world.
She does have a talent for it. Take the time, decades ago, her local party organizers were grumbling about how easy New Zealand convicts had it, what with free meals, television, table tennis. “So I put them all in a van and took them to the local prison,” she recalls. “They never said it again.”
The potential of seeing things from different angles has always interested Waring, who recently gave a speech called “How Do We Know What We Know?” Her own delivery of information is creative, and she enjoys citing Leonard Cohen’s beautiful Anthem, with its powerful observation that “there is a crack, a crack in everything/ That’s how the light gets in.”
Waring has spent her life chasing the light that slips through cracks, something she thinks the rest of us can do, too. And when she speaks, whether with words or actions, people tend to listen. Her fans have included such luminaries as feminist extraordinaire Gloria Steinem and economist extraordinaire, the late John Kenneth Galbraith, with whom she spent some time as a visiting fellow at Harvard. Canada’s National Film Board made a 1995 documentary about her, Who’s Counting: Marilyn Waring on Sex, Lies and Global Economics, based on her most famous work, Counting for Nothing/If Women Counted, which argued for the economic value of unpaid work by women.
But while she’s passionate about her beliefs and hopes, she remains non-confrontational, a courteous woman with a kiwi musicality to her voice. Unlike that other celebrity feminist from Down Under, the self-infatuated Germaine Greer, Waring doesn’t badger. Instead, like the stealth teacher she is, she lays out facts and possibilities in a diversity of ways, making a strong case for alternatives to the status quo. That, she thinks – that flexible willingness to deliver, and to absorb, varied information – is crucial if we ever hope to fix this broken old world.
On that score, Waring has much good to say about Canada, which merits an entire section in the new book. She appreciates this country’s innovative approach to statistics gathering and analysis, providing economists and policymakers with the tools to interpret unpaid work. She likes how Canadians generally respect their beautiful environment. She thinks highly of our Charter of Rights and the reality that a whole generation now embraces Charter values as Canadian values.
And as one who has spent her life fighting for equal rights in all spheres, including marriage, she applauds not only this country’s early embrace of same-sex marriage, but the humanity that accompanied its bloodless legalities. “It seems to me that Canada is one of the few countries that really understands that dignity is equal to equality. I think that’s pretty special.”
Despite nearly four decades of unflagging activism and progress that sometimes proceeds at a glacial pace, Waring remains stubbornly hopeful, especially where the work of contemporary feminists is concerned.
“If not us, then who? We have no excuses not to be resilient.”
Essentially, she wants women and men, both, to think about things they never thought of before, or to think about old ideas in new ways. What if we reordered our economies to impute value to all productive labour, including the unpaid? What if our screwed-up values are supporting a system that is destroying us all? What if dumb questions are the best questions, demystifying what the system prefers to keep mysterious? What if the evacuation of the world’s first climate-change refugees (from atolls of South Pacific islands like Papua New Guinea, which are sinking into the sea) is actually a wake-up call for all of us? What if our most comforting beliefs -- the ones we take refuge in, instinctively -- are really doing us and the world no good at all?
What if? Until you admit the possibilities, you can’t know what’s possible.
“There are far too many people out there who want us to feel hopeless, to think we can’t change the world. So the first act of defiance is to be hopeful.”
For Waring, that’s how the light shines in, through the cracks. One bright sliver at a time, we use what we know, and what we are willing to learn, to redeem tomorrow.
(© Canwest Publications)
Janice Kennedy is a columnist with The Ottawa Citizen.