Carla de Ruiter, editor in chief:
You are a great example for many women and you are a pioneer to me. You inspired me with your work and I am proud that you were my teacher once. I am curious, what is your definition of a pioneer?
Thank you, Carla. Me inspiring you means a lot to me. As an American, the idea of a pioneer as someone who breaks new frontiers is very much part of our mythos. My definition is a little different. I would say that a pioneer is an agent of history. By this I mean that she sees her life in a larger, historical picture. Doing so she makes her decisions to bring forward love, justice, beauty, and truth in her lifetime and with her talents.
She is grounded in the deepest care for Life and embraces Eros, the aliveness at the edge of what we can create or know.
I often think about the quote that Martin Luther King is given credit for: The moral arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice. Pioneers help bend that arc because they realize and respond to the historical demands of their time and take action towards justice.
That is a beautiful and refreshing definition of a pioneer! Just by putting it this way, I can feel the urgency to take action and be honest about where we are as women.
What are the demands of our historical moment, right now?
We are living in an extraordinary time—in bad and good ways. Think about it: fifty years ago, just as scientists were first discovering that climate change was underway, women began to agitate for equal rights. Women have begun to enter the public sphere—work, politics, academics—just at the point that a big shift in how we think about life and how we are living needs to happen. For the first time, we can see that we are part of one globe, one world, and yet we are fragmented in so many dangerous ways. At the same time, multinational capitalism has grown in strength so much that nations bow to the banks and finance systems that keep so many in debt while the gap between rich and poor is growing.
We women bring to life each new generation. How much do we think about where we are as a species and where we need to go?
It’s a very big picture. What can we do to simplify our life, explore new cooperative ways of living, or develop new ideas for breaking down the disunity between us? So often, thinking t? There are a lot of books engaging with these topics—can we come together and read them, and discuss what steps we can take? Our children are not going to live in the same world we are living in. If we want to help prepare them for their future, we need to be informed and active.
While I have not been in the Netherlands for a few years, from what I have heard the Dutch have changed since the murder of Theo van Gogh. The perhaps naïve tolerance to differences, particularly in relation to immigrant Muslims, has changed to something much more harsh. This is a problem all over Europe: naïve “let’s all get along” progressives are being replaced by more rigid nationalisms that look back to traditional, racial definitions of citizenship. The critique of the progressives makes sense—we are different, not just across religions, because there are different worldviews and values in conflict with each other. But the answer is not to try to return to the past. This rightward movement also wants to end women’s reproductive freedom and return to more traditional arrangements between women and men in life and marriage. How can we recognize differences and neither be naïve nor racist? What do we teach our children? Women could be much more involved in these questions and in finding solutions.