women's GROWTH

COOPERATIVE

AUTHORITY & HIERARCHY

by Mary Ann Huckabay

This month I would like to talk about the relationship between two concepts: authority and hier. archy. I will give my own definitions of these words, and then I will talk about some of the ways in which our conditioning in hierarchical systems has affected our notions of authority. By authority, I do not mean Authority as in formally elected or chosen officials, like cops and mayors. I mean a pattern that goes on all the time, around us and inside us. That pattern is the give and take, the flow of casual and informal influence..who we respect, who we're willing to listen to, what we repeat of what someone else has said-in short, who and what we digest into our own private sense of the world. By hier. archy, I mean the way of ordering the world so that ups and downs, that is, the vertical dimension, is the most important ordering; hierarchies always position people above and below you. I mean the way societies get shapes like a triangle in their distribution of resources, so that a few on the top control more people and resources than those below them, who control more below them, etc. An Egyptian pyramid is an example of a hierarchy of stones, and a family tree is a hierarchical way of ordering blood lineage. The notion of hierarchy is ancient, and it has some excellent applications. It has been a very useful way of ordering some things. It is proving to be a literal disaster to the human species to order other things, like people, hierarchically. Hierarchy is ultra-stable, with its wide bottom flat on the ground. It is therefore fixed and very difficult to overturn. Its glue, that is, what holds it together, is the fact that all its parts are relative to one another. These parts only have meaning as they relate to each other. This means that the most widely accepted definition of who I am is the composite of my various identification labels that position me somewhere in the social hierarchy.. I'm a white (not of color) fémale (not male), age 30 (not older or younger) and so on. To most people and to all institutions this is all I am.

So what are some of the implications of hierarchy for our notions of authority? First of all, hier archy continually depletes our sources of self. esteem because it uses the concept of scarcity as

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one of its mainstays. We are taught to look up to a few good leaders, and god knows, there can't be many because it upsets the shape of the triangle! We are conditioned to believe that there is a scarcity of wisdom so there's got to be someone smarter than us. There is always someone to whom I am willing to

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relinquish my power to define my situation for me. All of which leaves me feeling powerless and stupid. Our first heavy dose of conditioning comes through 18 years of exposure to the hierarchical parent-child relationship. Our notions of authority are so tainted by hierarchical thinking that even in groups of women committed to ending patriarchal hierarchy, we regularly surrender the power to define what's to be done or what's going on to some woman who regularly exercises that power, not because she. always has a better handle on things, though sometimes she may. In short, we assume fixed, perma. nent leadership, and we define ourselves as onedown to it, just like good little hierarchticians.

Secondly, we kill off the energy and potential

of those women who are already daring to define their own reality because we deprive them of the opportunity to learn and to be influenced in their own definitions of the world. We do this by our erroneous assumption that they must know more and by our resulting silence. Generally, the killing off of leaders (people who dare to make their defini. tions of things public) is not intentional. Sometimes, however, it is. We would sooner silence such women than confront in ourselves the challenge they present: to transcend our hierarchical conditioning and to risk speaking our own truths about how we see things.

This leads to a third implication of hierarchical conditioning. Since hierarchies are premised in every part being relative to another part (either up or down), we are robbed of the experiences of nonrelation, that is, aloneness, from which all consciousness, creativity and self-esteem spring. To speak our truth means to be alone for that moment. It means we must forget about who's above or ahead of us while we put our work together through our own faltering words. Hierarchies literally capitalize on our existential fear of being alone by tempting us to sell out to the silent security of knowing that we fit in somewhere, even it that fit feels bad.

These are just a few of the implications and con. sequences that stem from our conditioning in hier. archical systems. It is critical that we, as women, learn and understand the ways in which these dyna. mics operate in the society as a whole as well as in our own heads. Without such an analysis, the crea tion of non-opprssive social forms is impossible.

save your ass as a feminist

Contributed by Patricia A..Dorner

"Save your own ass as a woman that's the real reason to be a feminist!" exhorted Phyllis Chesler, feminist psychologist, during her lecture June 10th at Cleveland's 1977 Community Mental Health Institute. But we're told, she continued sarcastically, "that it is so unladylike to say it that way.' Dr. Chesler's speech, titled "All about men and their impact on women", made quite a few unladylike" points. She feels that men suffer from "uterus envy', that equal pay for equal work as an isolated concept is "the female shuffle", and that the idea of motherhood as a valuable and worthwhile role for women is mere cultural lip service.

"If motherhood is considered so valuable,"she scoffed, where is it in the Gross National Product?" She went on to explain that the basic unit in patriarchial culture is mother and child; and as a result, "anyting that goes wrong is the fault of the mother."

Mothers/women are always taught to blame themselves for anything that goes wrong with children or the family. "Perhaps we're too pushy-perhaps we've sinned maybe we have penis envy. we

always blame ourselves," she said. "There was, in contrast, a great silence about fathers....nobody wanted to look (at them) too closely until the feminist movement.'

Even if a woman is a "fantastic" mother, even if she does everything "right". "Where's her promo tion?" asked Chesler, "To Grandmother?''

Men envy and desire the capacity to be a "mother", to procreate, she explained. “Men in anguish over their own mortality, decided to take over birth, so that there would be children only via marriage via marriage men have ownership of their sperm." It's no accident that doctors, especially obstetricians and gynecologists, are men, or that birth is treated as a disease that must be monitored and taken care of in a hospital. Men took over the birth process by these methods.

Chesler, author of Women and Madness, also made references to women and psychiatry. "Psych iatry has been the agent of power in our culture,' she said, and "the standard for mental health is male...If (a woman) evidences the slightest rage or aggression that's schizophrenic behavior." There continued en page 10

July, 1977/What She Wants/page 3