4.0 A POLICY PERSPECTIVE FOR CCLOW

4.1 A Vision of the Future

"First, our consciousness and ethics now need to be crystallized into a clear vision of what we want society to be like, and what we want for women. This does not mean an attempt to impose a uniform ideology from the top. Rather, we feel that the debate around the real, hard issues of development, peace, and equality has only just begun, and we need to reflect together on what we have learned from the diverse richness of our experiences." (48)

What does equality mean? How will we know when we get there? One important component of our interviews involved asking questions designed to find out. Our sample was not random. Women who were interviewed all had some involvement in adult education and training for women and most had had some previous contact with CCLOW. They did however, come from all areas of the country and work in a wide variety of positions in the public, private and voluntary sectors. Among the 25 women we interviewed however, a striking degree of agreement emerged regarding vision. The conclusion of our interviews is that there is a clear feminist vision to draw on in developing its positions and recommendations and that that vision is widely shared by women across the country for whom issues of education and equality are important. Our interviews and the accompanying research for this study have convinced us that there is a need for vision and that that vision must come from within CCLOW and other women's organizations. It may take some courage, as it did for many of our interviews, to make that vision, where we stand now in relation to it, and how we can bridge the gaps between here and there, public. However, without public discussion, it is difficult to see how women's organizations can make an effective contribution to facilitating and monitoring movement toward that desirable future. The summary of interviewee responses that follows is meant to provide a starting point for that discussion.

"My hopes and dreams had always centered on the movement to a society whereby my daughters' struggles for self would not be as great or as painful as mine or my mother's before me ... (although if I was to be truly honest about my vision at this point in time it , would include children who were toilet-trained at birth, high chairs with a self-cleaning mode and floors that peeled off to be disposed of after feeding) ..." (49)

"It would be a peaceful world..."

(interviewee)

The starting point for this discussion of vision is the premise that the world in which we want to achieve equality in, is not the world we live in now. Simply to have 'half of everything' in the world as it is, is not enough.

For women we interviewed, one central feature of that redefined world was choice:

"Gender should be no more important than the color of the shoes people wear in determining whether they're fit to do a certain job.. ."

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