Marilyn Waring - 1 Way 2 C The World: Writings 1984-2006

1 WAY 2 C THE WORLD:
WRITINGS 19842006

Internationally acclaimed author Marilyn Waring is highly regarded as a public intellectual, feminist leader, environmentalist, and social justice activist. Elected to New Zealands Parliament at age twenty-three, she quickly rose to prominence on the political world stage. Since leaving Parliament in 1984, she has published numerous books and articles. This collection of essays, a selection of her popular journalism as well as new material, reflects on many important issues of our time. Here Waring provides incisive and illuminating commentary on a wide range of topics such as human rights, gay marriage, globalization, the environment, and international relations and development.

At home and abroad, Waring is a lively travel guide and astute observer, whether she is discussing global warming, womens rights, or life on a farm in New Zealand. Her work has stood the test of time: her accounts of being in India when Indira Gandhi was assassinated and in Ethiopia during the 1984 famine remain as vivid and relevant as her more recent writings on the post-9/11 world. Brimming with Warings characteristic wit, compassion, and insight, 1 Way 2 C the World is bound to fascinate and inspire.

MARILYN WARING is a professor in the Institute of Public Policy at the Auckland University of Technology.

Writings 19842006

Marilyn Waring

Marilyn Waring 2009

www.utppublishing.com
Printed in Canada

ISBN 978-0-8020-9034-8 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-8020-9375-2 (paper)

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Waring, Marilyn, 1952
1 way to C the world: writings 19842006/Marilyn J. Waring.

Updated, revised North American ed. of: In the lifetime of a goat.
ISBN 978-0-8020-9034-8 (bound). ISBN 978-0-8020-9375-2 (pbk.)

1. Waring, Marilyn, 1952. 2. Women in politics. 3. World politics.
4. New Zealand Politics and government 1972. I. Title.

AC8.W37 2009 081 C2008-906921-8

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

For my dear Canadian friends
Terre and Gerry and Peggy
and
Joanna and Brettel and Ange

Canada has been a very special country for me. It embraced my early work Counting for Nothing/If Women Counted in school and university curricula, and in the National Film Board of Canada documentary Whos Counting? Marilyn Waring on Sex, Lies, and Global Economics. I have been invited to and spoken in a good deal more of this beautiful country than most of its citizens get to in their lifetime. I have developed deep lifelong friendships there, and I have been given the opportunity to think and work with many people in Canada. Significant new work collected in this book had its birth in Canada, and the books dedication is to a group of very special Canadians.

I began writing in 1984 when David Beatson, then editor of the New Zealand Listener, asked if I would like to write a fortnightly column for the magazine after my retirement from the New Zealand Parliament. I didnt want to commit myself to anything at all. But, he reasoned with me, you may find you need the place for political catharsis, and you could probably do with the money, small as it is.

He was right on both counts. I never knew how many short essays would appear over the next five years. Much to the chagrin of the subeditors (who complained with increasing intensity over time), many of them were hand written and faxed from far-flung places on the planet, arriving marginally before deadline, still needing to be typed and set. I never kept copies of what finally numbered more than 100 pieces.

I had also written columns for a brief time for the editor of the Wellington daily newspaper, the Evening Post. Computer literate by that time, I had retained these scripts.

Neither the Listener nor the Evening Post ran footnotes or citations. I have done my best to recover or find many of these, but some have completely evaded my memory or more recent search engines.

The University of Toronto Press sent the text of this work to North American readers whose feedback on what they enjoyed influenced the major cull: what was in or out, and in what order.

Many other people have provided different sorts of material for my comments over the years. Some of them have been happy when they have recognized themselves, others have been offended. Most were just fellow citizens of the planet with whom I shared a moment and a place in time.

Portions of this book first appeared in the New Zealand Listener as part of the series of columns Letters to My Sisters. Several pieces were published in the Evening Post, and one in the Waikato Times. The essay Civil Society: Community Participation and Empowerment in the Era of Globalisation was published as an Occasional Paper for the Association of Womens Rights in Development (AWID) when I was a visiting scholar in their Toronto office in 2004. The essay on The Pacific Region was first published in the book Voix Rebelles du Monde by French NGO ATTAC in 2007. Most of the essay Do Unpaid Workers Have Rights? was also published in Managing Mayhem: Work-Life Balance in New Zealand, edited by Marilyn Waring and Christa Fouch (Wellington, NZ: Dunmore Publishing, 2007).

Marilyn J. Waring
Aotearoa/New Zealand
February 2008

1 Way 2 C the World

The previously published writing in this collection appeared in the New Zealand Listener as Letters To My Sisters between mid-1984 and early 1989. Sometimes there were stories behind my story, but ones I dared not tell at the time because of my circumstances. I could never be sure about the security of the public fax that relayed the fortnightly writing to Wellington, whether in India when Ghandi was assassinated, or in Ethiopia at the height of the 1984 famine. I have taken the liberty of adding some of this previously unpublished material.

Series One collects five essays from very different contexts providing some guidance for the way I see the world, and perhaps some of the reasons why my lens is focused, as it is, on New Zealand and the South Pacific region. The pieces include elements of my childhood in the 1950s and observations of another childhood some forty years later. I explore my feeling of belonging to Aotearoa/New Zealand as a fourth generation Pakeha. I remember the feminist politics of the seventies and the outrageous discrimination in womens lives. The series also includes the letter that began the Listener columns, written in 1984 while I was still a Member of Parliament, and from a place and experience that would forever shift my perceptions of power, politics, abuse and feminism. Indeed the adaptation of the letter form was a deliberate response to all that. I was prepared to write of how it had been for me there, but I made no apology for addressing a selected audience as My Dear Sisters. I did not care to bother to explain myself to men anymore. The last essay in this series is on the Pacific a region of patriarchal violence and endemic corruption a region where few outside of it can name the countries of which I write.