Women's Organizational Leadership

Women’s Organizational Leadership in Crisis

by Robin M. Chandler, Ph.D.

The challenge of the 21^st century is the challenge of the ‘gender line’. That ‘line’ is being eliminated because humanity’s destiny is justice. Politically and socially, women’s organizational leadership is at the crossroads where a new civilization is unfolding. Statistical and qualitative research for many decades suggests that a shift to women-centered leadership and organizational management provides transformative insights for a new world order and those with spiritual insight can see it coming like a speed train not stopping at any stations.

The qualities reified by a male-dominated patriarchy provide ample evidence of outmoded patterns of behavior across nations and among some of our most humble local organizations on the planet. In my own work as a gender specialist in many countries the narrative of women’s empowerment is a beacon of more humane approaches to principled action. It is already becoming a ‘welcoming partnership’ among those who embrace the essential equality of men and women after centuries of patriarchal failures.

In Liberia the story of AFELL (Association of Female Lawyers of Liberia), documented in my book Women, war, and violence: Personal perspectives and global activism explains how the principle of the independent investigation of truth lead to female-inspired strategies for reducing gender based violence. A judicial system, male-dominated and backward thinking, that failed to recognize rape as a crime drove women attorneys to break away from the Liberian Bar Association to form AFELL. What resulted was sweeping consciousness-raising, innovation, and social change-not that the fight is over there. This occurred because women’s political thinking, when energized by an inherently female empowerment, is different from men’s. However, the spiritual qualities that drove AFELL to novel thinking were empathy, moral courage, endurance, and a willingness to engage female austerity measures to get things done. The combination of substantive self-worth, a belief in gender equality, and spiritual approaches to change is straight out of Mandela’s playbook. Recognition of the oneness of humanity is not just a policy phrase, but also an actionable weapon in the battle against mediocrity and complacence. Confronting the accepted mythology that rape was not a crime, even among credentialed, cosmopolitan judges in Liberia, opened the path for decentralized reporting stations around the country, elemental human rights education for women and men, and legal representation for those targeted by endemic crises of sexual assault and GBV. The change narrative extends to the nation’s controversial rape law making it a bailable offense. Under the female leadership of former President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, elected on a platform of reducing GBV and government corruption, women lawyers, market leaders, and emerging local leaders around the country were emboldened within the empowerment enterprise. Even the streets of Monrovia, lined with giant billboards and signage such as ‘Real men don’t rape’ or a depiction of a rape with a giant “X” overlay became part of the gender equality climate necessary when a country is under siege and ripe for change.

By 2019 the OECD’s SIGI (Social Institutions & Gender Index) reported a tough climb regarding discrimination in the family, restricted physical integrity, restricted access to productive and financial resources, and restricted civil liberties. These same categories of high-medium-low performance metrics are necessary metrics in the fight for gender freedom in many nations.

In Brazil, Irmandade da Boa Morte (“Sisterhood of the Good Death”) emerged as an elder women’s community-based organization in Bahia as slavery was ending in 1888 and was an organizational retention from ancient African women’s pre-colonial social organizations. Women everywhere have always been organizing. Through syncretic religious practices that preserved cultural identity and an empathic service mission to maintain family unity by buying the freedom of non-manumitted family members, the sisters formulated a structural and strategic code that was centered in spiritual practice and community service.

Many countries are now modeling new and systemically significant thought and behavioral shifts that demonstrate the real possibilities of social justice and peace when women step up their game. Each provide lessons on a brand of conscienscious spirituality that has animated women’s identity for centuries, sometimes latent, other times local legend.

In the final analysis, the persistence of retaliation from old school hyper masculinity will continue to ignite the flames of misogyny. That is a fact. The weaponization of masculine modes of aggressive authoritarianism is resilient, mindlessly vengeful, and a ‘blind imitation’ of normative, unexamined masculinity. But women have always fought back; the stories just got silenced. Sometimes those battles were collaborations with men of insight and understanding. Now our terrain of battle is pointing towards the future, the distant horizon, glimmering and radiant. My personal idols are a small group of school children from Jaipur, India I have blogged about (http://peacedoors.blogspot.com/). They became a relentless and united team of child activists - girls and boys - who pursued the freedom of a classmate doomed to early marriage, clear evidence that we can be an admirable species and that when women and men are on the same page, the results are magical.

During the 2020 Covid crisis women public health workers and women political leaders have lead spiritually and have done so by simply being women of moral courage. We must make these stories legendary. We must make women and girls proud to women, not by emulating men, but by attacking the messaging that women and girls have less inherent value than men and boys and that they/we are incapable of power. Removing ourselves from entrenched ‘gender tracks’ will not be easy or swift. We must invest all of our resources, spiritual and economic, in gender equality. By redefining glory and power as service to humanity, girls and women can and do turn the course of history toward social justice and peace and freedom is the prize. The spiritual shift is already happening, perhaps imperceptively, but justice will exist and equity is emerging from under the ‘yoke of oppression’.

Being human(e)

Can it be that our CITIZEN-ship is under siege? Are we at our best when we are being humane, or just being human? I've thought about this often. As humans high up on the food chain we bear a responsibility to life, to the earth, and to one another. I recently hosted a dinner for World Boston. My guests were from Albania, Argentina, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Cambodia, and Romania. In a follow-up email to our "amazing" conversation that evening, one guest said that, before coming, he was hoping to meet someone beyond a "straight business-like mindset". What he encountered was a different perspective from a different American.  It is true-I am different. After traveling on six continents working in international development, I've seen a lot. I've learned a lot. It started at the hands of remarkable parents who sent me for travel to Colombia, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico when I was 16 because they didn't want me to grow up thinking 'America' was the center of the earth. They were so smart to set my path in this way. Who knew that this would shape an incipient global citizenship in me? Who knew that, as an elder in her 70th year, this craving for the deep end of the 'difference pool' would become my beloved sandbox.
I am also ending a spectacular experience as the Inaugural Distinguished Artist-Scholar in Residence at Bunker Hill Community College (2018-19). What an extraordinary and humbling experience! More on that 'year-of-living-
gloriously' in my next blog!

Our connections with one another must be more than human; they must be humane, honest, and passionate. How else will we survive the transformations of one dying civilization being replaced by another that we will build together? Be more than human. Be humane.

Saving Jesus from nyaope - Full documentary - BBC Africa Eye

This example of servant leadership, courage, and accompaniment is a model for us all.

Losing our sisters, gaining grace

There are so many ways to mourn girls and women whom we've lost to violence, chronic and terminal disease, or just dying before their time. However, as I sit in Southern California at a conference preparing a panel presentation with scholars and social justice practitioners generations younger than I, there is the possibility of renewal, hope, and humility. I really need to see myself reproduced before I retire, but the realities of gender inequality are clear. From birth to death, it's a risk to be born a woman of color in both the Global North and South. Makiya Walls, the 12-year old 

California girl shot on Wednesday inside her home, the ‘Highway of Tears’ (the 18 young Indigenous women murdered/disappeared along the Trans-Canada Highway in British Columbia since 1969), and Maryam Mirzakhani, the 40-year old prize-winning Iranian American mathematician who died of breast cancer in July. Who knows but Makiya might have been the future research scientist whose independent investigation of truth might have uncovered a cure for cancer redeeming Mirzakhani’s death or been a social policy advocate for violence against women. Can we remember them and the legions of women and girls who have been devalued in female infanticide, gang raped in country after country, women activists, journalists, and politicians who've been murdered, preadolescent girls who have died in child marriages to grown men, and the millions of girls who've been trafficked, prostituted, become victims of STDs and died. This is an impossibly long list, a never-ending list that documents the girls and women we will never know, the girls deprived of childhood and choice, those women imprisoned for defending themselves against chronic abusers, and the perpetrators we are never able or motivated to bring to justice.  We can, at another time, chronicle the resilience of women who have resisted, innovated, sacrificed, raised children in the face of poverty and natural disasters through female austerity practices, and been warriors for social justice. That girls survive birth, childhood, adulthood and grow to become wise elders, we are witnesses to your empowered lives whatever you may have achieved and wherever on earth you live and breath. But today we need to decide to turn this corner at which misogyny, human devaluation,  beatings, educational underdevelopment, dysfunctional laws and policies, and psycho-social intransigence playfully ignores women as  sidebar of history. We also call out in praises, the men and boys who love us, work with us, fight for us, and see us as their spiritual partners in building spaces in which the equality of men and women is hammered out with love and an ethic of caring for one another. It will  not be easy.  We need more men, those who see themselves as decent, to step up their game, and play to win the race to social justice that leads to peace. The spiritual and emotional damage to all of us, women and men alike, so systematically perpetuated and socially sanctioned through violence against women and the patriarchal traditions that have falsely mythologized gender roles will one day lead to the true grace of a transformed masculinity when America 'leads all nations spiritually.' I leave you with this guidance as a promise of gender equality: "If long-cherished ideals and time-honored institutions, if certain social assumptions and religious formulae have ceased to promote the welfare of the generality of mankind, if they no longer minister to the needs of a continually evolving humanity, let them be swept away and relegated to the limbo of obsolescent and forgotten doctrines. Why should these, in a world subject to the immutable law of change and decay, be exempt from the deterioration that must needs overtake every human institution? For legal standards, political and economic theories are solely designed to safeguard the interests of humanity as a whole, and not humanity to be crucified for the preservation of the integrity of any particular law or doctrine." [Shoghi Effendi, The World Order of Baha'u'llah:41-42]

SUPERHEROES!! Conscientious spirituality in KIDZ!

Real Superheroines and Superheroes exist. If you want insight into what will make the "real men" and the "real women" of a divine civilization of the future, go to Jaipur. In the spirit of social justice, camaraderie, and non-violent direct action, seven  boys and six girls at an informal school there pursued an absent 16-year old classmate who had been a victim of child marriage at 11 years. They knew what kind of society they wanted, believed in gender equality, and took positive collective action to 'practice what they preached' to protect the safety of a friend. By seeking help and being conscientious, they had their friend returned to school soon after! Can you hear the late Robin Williams in the background singing "You ain't never had a friend like [us]"

Conscientious Spirituality (CS) requires an awareness of the "divine embryonic order from within"and the "cataclysmic forces from without". It suggests a deeper awareness of what is moral and ethical and how to safeguard the human rights of all by acting in unity. There is always a sacrifice to be made, always fears to be overcome. Yet these kids were like a storm on a  mission of mercy and justice, engaging their spiritual qualities. Conscientiousness is a continuous dimension of human personality, rather than a "type" of person. Many of the behaviors of conscientiousness fall into the category of 'emotional intelligence'. In times of indecision or a crisis like this one, an emotionally intelligent person will ask themselves several questions: Why do I feel outrage? How can I empathize with my neighbor or friend? How can I independently investigate truth? And how can I act in unity, with others, to defend the victim(s) of oppression? The battle between the rational soul that is constantly evolving and the physical body that is finite is always testing our ability to have a longer view, a broader perspective, a deeper love of who we are as humans. These KIDZ went to that 'crossroads' spoken of by the Sioux shaman Black Elk, that "good road and road of difficulties" that is a sacred space for all who travel there. And....BOOM!!

What has Baha'u'llah said about conscience, a sense of shame, and the force and power of spiritual qualities?
Sooner or later, most of us figure out that life is an obstacle course. We realize that there are 'cataclysmic forces' operating in our neighborhoods and in the real world. Child marriage is a 'cataclysmic force' from the world of adults that these 13 children confronted. The vision and desire for equal education and gender equality superseded the injustices and brutalities of child marriage that is a reality in their societies. Their superhero clock was ticking, and they avoided the stereotype of 'dis-empowered kids'.
Childhood and choice are twin concepts I use regularly in speaking to groups about why we must protect the stages of growing up and prepare children and youth for a better world. Girls and boys must have choices while, at the same time, ensuring the haven that the family unit represents. We need to ensure that their childhood is protected, that the education they'll need as global citizens is delivered, and they they comprehend the role of developing spiritual qualities to make that better world that is the vision of the future civilization we all dream of. Baha'u'llah has spoken of the four things He loved to see manifest in people:1-"enthusiasm and courage", 2-"a face wreathed in smiles and a radiant countenance" 3-"they they see all things with their own eyes and not through the eyes of others" and 4-"the ability to carry a task, once begun, to its end"['Ali Akbar Furutan, Stories of Baha'u'llah]
These 13 spiritual warriors had these qualities in spades.
So, superheroes! Take a right at Hollywood, bypass Bollywood, and neglect Nollywood, forget CGI and special effects, opt for the spiritual technologies (service, prayer, meditation, fasting et al) we all have access to in the real world of human culture and the Baha'i Teachings. The 'heavenly training' 'Abdu'l-Baha has written about is exemplified in these young people as "purified, severed, and illumined souls."
'To infinity'!!
-DrC
Read the full article below
http://www.hindustantimes.com/jaipur/rescued-by-classmates-rajasthan-child-bride-returns-to-school/story-l1I3VMfLH69pIaBdKLuCmO.html

Standing Rock still stands and is rock solid!

Visiting and hearing about our ongoing struggles at Standing Rock for human rights, social justice, environmental sustainability, and non-violent direct action is a spiritual peace0building journey.
We hope that our plans to build the first "Peace Door" on Native land in the U.S. will launch our wider mission-to  build justice, peace , and unity in every nation. Amidst global struggles, civil wars, governmental instability, corruption, and violence, it's important to recognize the causes of these seemingly never-ending crises that now plague every nation on our planet.
Standing Rock is, in fact, a centuries-old resistance movement that re-affirms the oneness of humanity, unity, and the sacrifices we must make to create a more peaceful world. From Boston, we have been involved in sending material support through the North American Indian Center of Boston  to the "water protectors" who have their eye on the prize-environmental sustainability!

LITTLE GIRLS DESERVE A CHILDHOOD

Little girls deserve to be little girls. Forced to become women before their time, 'child marriage' girls miss out on normal human development in social, psychological, and emotional ways. The girl-to-woman pipeline is a critical transition in shaping the future development of the girl child, the family, community, and nation. Cultural, religious. and economic justifications for marrying off girls is an obsolete and paternalistic form of repression and a weak excuse for denying girls what little boys are entitled to by those who really don't like either like or value girls. Child marriage stunts the growth of families when girls are denied education. What do you say?

Pakistan's slow but steady progress on ending child marriage http://t.co/dMxfIhseCg
— Global Development (@GdnDevelopment) June 2, 2014