the future might look like for women s rights movements. gloria, welcome. thanks for speaking with bbc 100 women. how are you? well, how am i? i would say i m like eight out of a possible ten. pretty good. that s amazing. so what is life like these days? well, i am not travelling. maybe that s the biggest difference between most of my life and now, partly because of the pandemic, which, you know, put us all in our houses, and partly because now there s so much opportunity to communicate online. so i m happy to be in my neighbourhood. i m still now hyper conscious of how great it is to be here. so, gloria, we re sitting here, it s 2023, almost 50 years after you founded the women s action alliance, which was a group that helped women fight sexism in the us. how do you feel about where the feminist movement is today? i feel proud of the amount of invention and rebellion and humourand. she chuckles ..community among us. at the same time, i m living in a country where a female hu
mm. and some argue that western feminism hasn t been inclusive enough. would you agree with that? well, that s probably true. i mean, we re dealing with racism in this country. we have always generally tried to say, ok, if the group we re starting with doesn t look like the country, then we should wait until it does. you know, do our individual or small group best to represent all the women who are affected by a particular issue. now, let s talk about me too, the me too movement. it exposed, here in the us, it exposed some of the most powerful men in hollywood as sexual predators and abusers. do you think that the me too movement has done enough for women outside of hollywood, and even outside of us, to come forward and speak up
i mean, we were still mimeographing and phoning each other, you know. i actually wish we could continue that and have a big satellite in the sky that we control. but would you do anything differently today? get inspiration. do you get any inspiration from the gen z and what they re doing at the moment? oh, yes. no, absolutely. tell me about that. well, a movement is inspired by people moving, you know, so that younger women have the courage to dress as they wish, resist adjectives, not have children or have children with or without marriage. that s all a step forward. what do you think about actually using the internet and online as a space for activism? or do you still believe that things happen when you go on the streets and march? we ve added the internet to our various forms
when to have children, not to have children. you know, whatever it is about our physical selves because that s where our difficulty begins, because we happen to have wombs. and the desire to control wombs is very central to authoritarian systems. so, you know, it s clear that controlling reproduction is crucial. yet when we talk about politics, we don t usually start there. let s talk about gen z, the generation z. their oldest are entering their 20s, some of them are still in their teenage years. when you look at their kind of activism, how much does it differ from your kind of activism and when you started? would you do anything differently now? well, of course, we have online communication, and that is a huge, huge difference.
move to different parts of the island. for everybody, keep the folks in hawaii in your thoughts and prayers. we are amassing support to be able to help them through what will be a pretty comprehensive rebuilding out of this. the worst is not over yet unfortunately. you don t think of wildfires when you think of hawaii. the islands are small. it s not like a wildfire can run around without touching people. there are entire communities being destroyed right now. let s pivot to this topic i guess about another disaster that goes by the name of joe biden. see how i did that? that is why i am sitting here. you don t have to applaud. we will meet to later. i have some things i need fixed. what are your thoughts on his weather channel appearance? it was interesting as he was talking about the existential threat of climate change. i saw an interview that tony