Another story: in 1994, I attended the United Nations Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, Egypt.The previous year there had been the United Nations Earth Summit conference in Rio. I was there and so was Bella Abzug and a whole lot of women.The thing is, though, that the women weren’t part of the official delegation where the Plans of Action that result from these international conferences are drawn up.Apparently, women, like all the other non-governmental organizations, were viewed as a special interest group that didn’t really have a place at the table.

Bella and her army of women began to study how the United Nations worked—where were the cracks and crevices, and how could they widen them and get themselves inside the next time?

The next time was the Cairo conference and its purpose was to figure out how to create sustainable development and stabilize population growth.The previous such conferences, like the one in Mexico City, had had Plans of Action written by men and female ventriloquists for the patriarchy and they focused on contraception and quotas.

Bella, by now, had figured out the UN. She had mobilized her troops, she had the support of a powerful but vagina-friendly man named Tim Wirth, former Colorado senator.

For the first time in the history of such UN conferences, women were organized and at the table, drafting the Plan of Action. These were women from all over the world. One hundred eighty-four countries were represented. They were the women who lived this issue of population and development. They were the front-line workers.The entire organizing aegis for the conference was gender. The message was, “If you want to eradicate poverty and create sustainable development, you—the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the United States Agency for International Development and all other governments and NGOs—you have to view everything you do through a gender lens: Does your project help women and girls? Does it make their lives easier? Does it empower them? Is your structural adjustment scheme going to make it harder for women to get loans to start their own businesses? Is your proposed dam going to make it harder for girls to fetch water for their families?

Everywhere in the developing world it is women and girls who plant the seeds, till the land, harvest the crops, fetch the water, cook the food, bear the children, take charge of the family’s health, spend whatever monies they can scrape up on the family’s well-being. They are already stretched to their human limits and beyond. Make it worse for them and everything gets worse. Make it easier for them and everything gets better.

You want to reduce population growth, you have to stop thinking about contraception alone. Contraception is vital but it’s not enough. In some places, if a woman tries to use contraception she risks being beaten or even killed. In other places she needs all the children she can bear in order to have any status at all, in order to have enough hands to do all the work.

So—do you really want to reduce population growth? Try educating girls. Educated girl don’t want big families, they can read the labels on medicine bottles, they have the confidence to talk to the male doctors and really understand about heath risks.

Help girls and women start businesses or become wage earners. I visited a non-governmental organization in Cairo that teaches the daughters of the city’s garbage collectors (who live in the most unspeakable poverty) how to make things out of recycled garbage and it earns them $17 a month.When a girl brings home even this paltry amount, everything changes; the parents suddenly see that perhaps the girl is worthy to go to school after all.The girl feels empowered enough to say, “No, I will not be married off at thirteen to someone of your choice. I want to finish school, get a better job and marry who I like … and I don’t want a lot of children.” The simple fact of earning an income changes everything. That, of course, is why the same mind-set that opposes a woman’s right to reproductive freedom also opposes women working. Both of those are battles about power—not about the personhood of the fetus.

The year after the Cairo conference, there was the UN Women’s Conference in Beijing, China. I was there, too. And I returned the following year to visit family planning clinics and was told that the conference had had a profound effect on women in China who hadn’t even been to the conference.“Why?” I asked, and it was explained to me that the statement “Women’s rights are human rights” had leaked out and spread around the country and Chinese women had received this like, “Oh, my God! Our rights are human rights.” It had never occurred to them.

Okay. I carry within me now, all these stories and more, these concrete examples of what it means for the planet to move to the feminine. I need these things within me—I need to understand, for instance, that the entire framework of psychology up until the 1970s was based on a male-centered definition of what is normal and, as a result, women end up feeling there is something terribly wrong with our more relational, more feeling way of doing and seeing. Finally, our way is validated, put into a theoretical framework by this new wave of women psychologists.

I need to own this. You know why? For the times when patriarchy attacks and makes the criticisms that we are so vulnerable to. Hey, the Male Role Belief System hasn’t been around this long because it’s stupid. Well, it is stupid, but it’s not dumb—it knows our Achilles heel: “Oh, those women, they’re so fuzzy-headed, so impractical, so out of touch, so lacking in strategy.”And we internalize that and think it’s true, but it’s not true.We all need to hold that inside our bodies, have it anchored within us by our own examples, by our own stories that remind us that what is going to save people everywhere in the world is moving away from the paradigm that “might makes right” and that “power is all, ” to the balanced yin and yang, love, compassion and forgiveness existing along with the male qualities of efficiency, goal orientation and strength. No one can deny what patriarchy has done to our earth.

We have to understand that it is a belief system that is the enemy, not men.We have to understand that empathy is revolutionary— empathy for women, for men, for ourselves.We need to work to create a movement that is like a volcano which will erupt when the time is right, in a flow of soft, hot, empathic, breathing, authentic, vagina-friendly, relational lava that will circle patriarchy and smother it so that men and women, boys and girls, can be whole again, head and heart united.