“What we need is nothing less than a transformation of consciousness. That transformation threatens historic —almost mythic —concepts, but it promises liberation for us all.”
Our Quote of the Week resonates this week as people around the world celebrate Easter, Passover, and the changing of the seasons.
Sargent Shriver spoke these words during his Address at the Women’s Leadership Conference Luncheon. The year was 1975 and he was campaigning to be the Democratic presidential candidate. Shriver’s focus in the speech is on equality between women and men. And the point he makes with these particular words is central for understanding his approach to changemaking: for significant and sustained progress to come about, we must transform how we think. We need to be more open than constrained, more resourceful than complacent, more focused on solutions than on problems. Sargent Shriver embodied this openness and a capacity for embracing change, and as a result, he proved to be one of the great changemakers of his generation.
We can see from the way Shriver speaks about the “transfomation of consciousness” that he is asking his audience to challenge the systems that allow inequality between women and men to persist. He says:
“That’s why equal pay for equal work, and aggressive enforcement of rules against discrimination, are everyone’s issues. And that’s why I suggested this Thursday, not to a women’s group, but to a mostly male group of union leaders, that the long-standing and total exclusion of women from our highest financial institutions, from the Federal Reserve Board on down, might have something to do with our anti-human economic policies—and with the feeble Fed regulations supposedly intended to broaden the availability of credit to women. But a woman on the [Federal Reserve] Board ...and stronger rules for sexual equality in the credit market—represent only the smallest beginning. From medicine to engineering, the professions have too long been male bastions. My own profession, the law, suffers from too few women —from the neighborhood law office to the Supreme Court of the United States. And, until law partnerships and judicial and legislative positions are as open to women as they are to men, we can expect law itself to tilt toward men—all the way from rape legislation, to rules about maternity leaves and part-time work. So long as working women pay as much as their husbands for Social Security but receive less when they retire, we can be sure our legal system needs change. I will seek that change.”
Throughout his life, Sargent Shriver cultivated in himself and in others the notion that change begins within each one of us. May this week of transition and holy days inspire us to challenge the “historic—almost mythic” concepts that keep us from being free, and may we each find ways to seek liberation for our human family.
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