The Value of the Outsider

Oct. 24, 2005 issue - On the center shelf, over the filing cabinets, sits the dictionary, the thesaurus, the copy of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, the complete works of Shakespeare and the Bible: in other words, the essential equipment of the workaday writer. But at one end is a paperback, pale ocher with age. It's the copy of "Sisterhood Is Powerful" I bought right after I graduated from high school.

White cover, red female power symbol, an artifact. Much of it is rad arcana, although there's a dispiritingly contemporary quality to parts of the chapters on birth control, the Roman Catholic Church and the politics of housework. And some of it is a total galvanizing hoot—the guerrilla theater at the bridal fair, the nude-in at Grinnell to protest the politics of Playboy. Who would have thought, when feminists famously disrupted the Miss America Pageant in 1968, that it was the pageant that would eventually collapse beneath the weight of irrelevancy, relegated to a cable channel, while many of the goals of the women's movement would become cultural norms?

It's a chronicle of a time and a place but mainly of a feeling, the feeling of being devalued and dismissed outsiders in a social and political system that was broken. Thirty-five years after publication, some of the outsiders have gotten inside—inside the corporations, the churches, the publications, the statehouse, the Congress. But many of the institutions are still broken, and if they are ever to be fixed women have to keep that outsider perspective even as they sit in the big chairs, make the big deals, hold the big jobs.

By its very nature women's leadership was about redefinition, while men's leadership has been about maintaining the status quo. That's how it works when one group has all the power and wants to keep it, and another has none and wants some righteous parity. Take that dichotomy down the road most traveled, however, and what you eventually wind up with is a new status quo, jealously protected by a new power structure that includes female leaders working with the psychological equivalent of ties and wingtips.

That would be a tragic missed opportunity. The insiders have simply made a hash of things, and everybody knows it. From corporate malfeasance to a political system deeply disconnected from everyday realities, the powers that be have ceased to derive their authority from the good will of the people.

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