Document 62: "Speech by Honorable Margaret Mead, Fourth Plenary Session," in National Commission on the Observance of International Women's Year, The Spirit of Houston: The First National Women's Conference (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1978), pp. 230-31.

Margaret Mead. From The Spirit of Houston: The First National Women's Conference, p. 153.

p. 230

SPEECH BY HONORABLE MARGARET MEAD

FOURTH PLENARY SESSION
NOVEMBER 20, 1977

   Women of America, I am only allowed 10 minutes to speak, so let's not waste any of it on demonstrations until the end because I want to use it as fully as possible.

   Demonstrations about me, I mean.

   This Conference may well be a turning point, not only in the history of the women's movement, and not only in the history of the movement of the world, but, in the history of the world itself.

   We have a chance, at last to act as women in a way that women have not been able to act, virtually since the paleolithic period.

   Someone talked last night about restoring women to full partnership with men. They haven't been there since the development of large-scale civilization, when they were left behind and robbed of any political power for the last 10,000 years, civilization has been in charge of only one sex.

   Men know a lot about dying but they don't know enough about living. It has been women's biological and social and cultural task through history to live.

   It is true that women risk their lives in childbirth and men risk their lives on the borders protecting their country. Men had to be willing to die and to kill for the safety of their women and children and their land and their faiths, but women had to be willing to live day after day, year after year, caring for the everyday needs of children who would have died without them.

p. 231

   At this moment in history, the United States is the richest and strongest country in the world. It is the country … that has the greatest chance to save the world.

   The women's movement has at least succeeded in placing enough women in strategic positions of power so that our disarmament discussions this morning came from women in strategic positions.

   We have women in Congressional committees; we have women in disarmament agencies; we have women in all the points that are essential for an understanding that we must stop the proliferation of nuclear power if we are going to protect the people of the world.

   So, it may be thought that we have now reached "take-off" point. We have a President who is willing to undertake leadership in stopping nuclear weapons proliferation and deescalating the arms race and stopping ourselves form being "merchants of death."

   It is not, I say, without historic significance that we share the news today with an attempt to solve the problems between Israel and the Arabs by human friendliness instead of by giving weapons to both sides. It is amazing what it is possible now to do. I think if we can ask, on the one hand, why women have arisen to the call for peace, and then, gone home again and risen, and then, gone home again and risen, and then, gone home again, we can say we have never had a concerted movement before because most of the appeals that have been made to us have been threats and women are very hard to scare.

   It has been women's task throughout history to go on believing in life, when there was almost no hope, and they are unable to deal only with despair. What we must present to every woman in this country today is that if we will act unitedly, forget every other consideration on earth, as we do when our children are at stake, we may be able to turn this world around and produce a world in which our children and other people's children will be safe.

   

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