"The original languages didn't even have he and she. They didn't have concepts of masculine and feminine."

"People were people. And the whole idea was that we were in a circle together, not in a hierarchy together."

Said Gloria Steinem, in an Esquire interview. That quote struck me, having just read an article by Jane Kramer in The New Yorker called "Road Warrior/After fifty years, Gloria Steinem is still at the forefront of the feminist cause," which shows how central this idiosyncratic anthropology has been to Steinem. Steinem went to India for a 2-year fellowship after college and says she did her "first organizing there." She returned to India in 1974 and:

She had trekked to villages cordoned off by the government because of caste riots, and watched, at night, as the villagers emerged from mud huts to sit in circles, lit by kerosene lamps, and tell their stories of burnings, murders, thefts, and rapes, “with fear and trauma that needed no translation” but with the relief that came from talking and being heard. In her road book, she calls it “the first time I witnessed the ancient and modern magic of talking circles, those groups in which anyone may speak in turn, everyone must listen, and consensus is more important than time.”

Also:

[Wilma] Mankiller had been the first elected chief of the Cherokee Nation, and she and Steinem had been close ever since she joined the board of the Ms. Foundation. Over the years, Mankiller had become, for Steinem, a kind of spiritual guide.... It was Mankiller, she says, who continued her education in the “deep history” of matrilineality, and the communal talking circles that expressed it. “We have always started our ‘history’ with when hierarchy, patriarchy, and nationalism started,” Steinem told me. “But democracy did not come from Greece. It is much, much older, and it came from women and men together.” She added, “The Iroquois Confederacy had circles of consensus—it was matrilineal.”

Before Mankiller died in 2010, she was working on a writing a book with Steinem, and Steinem wants to continue the project:

“I want to contribute our idea that most of human history was very different from what we have today, with our monotheistic patriarchies and their ‘pyramid’ structures of authority from the top,” [Steinem] said. “Many peoples were—and some still are—not gender-based in their languages. And there was rarely a single chief. There was always a chief for peace, and a different one for war. Their societies were not polarized, and not violence-based.” The jury is out on that. Many archeologists and anthropologists would disagree. But, as an organizing principle for Steinem, and for the feminists she has brought together, the evocation of an ancient tradition of talking circles for sharing stories, bridging differences, and coming to acceptable common solutions has been a remarkably effective tool.

Many archeologists and anthropologists would disagree.... but it's not science, is it? It's mythology. Mythology is a different process. When Steinem says she "witnessed the ancient and modern magic of talking circles," we're witnessing the ancient and modern magic of mythology.

By the way, this fascination with the imagined better world of India and the Cherokee and the Iroquois is stereotypical of the 1960s. The hippies had the same dream. Steinem is not a hippie. Her cultural stream diverged from the hippie philosophy. I remember when that divergence occurred. At the time I thought the Ms. Magazine people were retro, missing the zeitgeist, the counterculture. If we were shedding "concepts of masculine and feminine," getting together and loving one another, why heighten the sense of the differentness of women, why talk about the oppression of the kinds of families our parents lived in — we were already free — and why go on and on about careers — when the point was to drop out?

ADDED: That line "the villagers emerged from mud huts to sit in circles" made me think of the old Camille Paglia lines: "If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts" and "Trying to build a sex theory without studying Freud, women have made nothing but mud pies."