Subscribe to WRAP
(Women in Radio & Audio Production)
   

Keynote Speech to the Grassroots/AMARC-NA conference August 22, 1999:

I'm Frieda Werden. I produced my first radio program in 1973 -- a syndicated series about the women's movement in Texas. For more than 13 years, I've been doing the syndicated series "WINGS: Women's International News Gathering Service," heard on English-language radios around the world. In between I've worked for National Public Radio, volunteered in community radio in a number of cities, and was the radio editor of "Current" public broadcasting newspaper
in Washington DC. I currently serve as the North America representative to the Women's International Network of AMARC -- the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters.

Last summer at the World Conference of Community Radio Broadcasters in Milan, Italy, the delegates from AMARC passed a resolution. OK, we passed a lot of resolutions . . . but almost at the point when the incredibly lo-o-ng, teeedious meeting ended, with the translators in the booth actually starting to revolt and defect, and most of the delegates already gone to take a nap or start drinking, Margaretta D'Arcy's resolution
came up to a vote. And it passed  unanimously.
Now, for any of you who don't know Margaretta D'Arcy yet, I have to say, you have missed a treat. But if you don't actually know her, you still may have heard of her, under the sobriquet Galway's Radio Pirate Woman. I hope she will forgive me if I say she is perhaps the oldest member of AMARC -- and also the most energetic. I stayed up all one night of the conference helping her draft her resolution and round up translators, but I think Margaretta stayed up all night EVERY night, talking a mile a minute in between cigarette puffs, and tape recording everyone's conversation with her crappy
little recorder that she has to hold practically in your mouth to get any decent sound.

Now, mind you, Margaretta is legendary not only in community radio, but also as a treasured Irish dramatist, a global peace activist, and as a member of
the Women Count Network -- which in my opinion is just about the most radical and subversive element of the global women's movement. The Women Count women brought a new idea to the United Nations World Conference on Women in 1985 and successfully got it into the official document, from a cold start right there in Nairobi -- and if you know anything about the UN, you know that was a major miracle.  And the other major miracle is that by very skillful lobbying, they've kept governments from sneaking this idea OUT of the UN platforms for women. In fact, the Women-Count lobby has actually brought some governments to the point of implementing it.

The idea is this:  Measuring and Valuing Unwaged Work.
OK, let me digress for a moment. Around 1970 or so, I saw Buckminster Fuller speak. You know, he was one of
those recognized geniuses, the inventor of the geodesic dome.  Bucky rambled on and on, but he had one graphic with him -- a slide of a line drawing of a triangle. And after we'd looked at it and wondered for the better part of an hour, he pointed to it with a stick, and he said -- and this was to an audience of social science educators -- he said, "We teach children that a triangle has 180 degrees. ... But that is only the INTERNAL angles of the triangle."

Measuring and Valuing unwaged work is an idea like Bucky's triangle. We teach each other, over and over, that value equals MONEY.  The higher paid a person is, the more respect they are usually receiving, and the more authority they get over others. And this becomes a self-fulfilling concept: George Bush raised more money in a shorter time than his competitors, so he is the unbeatable candidate for President of the United States...Or, if the husband is the breadwinner, he gets to tell the wife what to do, eh? ... Or, vice versa: Mugabe is the President of Zimbabwe, so he can take as much money out of the country as he wants to...
Or, here's one I witnessed around National Public Radio in 1983: the then-nearly-bankrupt NPR hires a new President -- a guy fresh from the US State Department's Information Service, actually -- and the board decides to pay him the maximum a federal employee can earn, which is the same amount as a Congressman. So, they're showing this guy off for the first time at an independent Producers' conference held in Washington DC. Being a troublemaker, I ask from the audience, "How come you're offering this administrator so much money you don't even have, when over here you have Jay Allison, one of the best radio producers in the system, and he's saying 'if I could just make $7,000 a year I could stay in radio,'?"  -- so this well-paid lawyer on the Board says, preening himself, "It would be disrespectful to offer him -- meaning President Bennett, of course, and not Jay Allison -- any less."

What does this mean?  Jay Allison, who was producing radio as much for love as for money, was in effect making a gift of much of the value of his labor, to National Public Radio, to support a bureaucrat who no matter how much he may have "loved" public radio could not possibly be asked to make any sacrifice in terms of money, -- because that would be "disrespectful." But is it possible that respect, and maybe more than respect, is owed in the other direction in a hierarchy?

One of my favorite radio stories of all time is a piece by Maria Gilardin, a former volunteer at KPFA Radio in Berkeley, and now the independent producer of TUC Radio in San Francisco.  Every year since the death of WINGS co-founder Katherine Davenport, I've awarded the DAWN prize -- the Katherine Davenport Award for Women's News -- to the "hottest" women's radio news story of the year. The first year, 1993, the prize went to Maria's  story about Fuerza Unida. They are the laid-off garment workers who say that when Levi Strauss closed their San Antonio plant and moved the jobs to Costa Rica, they never compensated a lot of injured workers, and absconded with most of the pension fund some women had paid into for many years. My favorite part of Maria's story is when we can hear those old Chicana ladies walk up to the door of Levi Strauss corporate headquarters in San Francisco and call out for the President of the company. It's Christmas time, and they say, "we're here to deliver you a bundle of coal and switches, because you've been a really really bad boy." They call him by his name, leaping over that social gap that is supposed to render them invisible to him, they say they personally made profits for that company, and they
hold him personally accountable for his actions. Of course he didn't come down to greet them. But perhaps he heard about what they said. And if he didn't, at least all the people who heard that story on community radio got something to think about.

This I consider the highest use of Community Radio -- to open a space for voices and ideas that are not ordinarily much heard, if at all, where media is normally operated by and for corporations or governments.

This summer, I heard a speech by a scholar from India who has become one of the leading figures in the field of deconstructionism. Her name is Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and she is best known for a single rhetorical question: "Can the subaltern speak?"
What she means by this seems to be: is it possible for someone who is not in the ranks of the privileged class or caste to make her or his position heard and understood? Or will they always be hidden because the terms of speech are controlled by the privileged class? I think it's a great responsibility and a great potential of community radio -- to let the persons who have been invisible, the subalterns speak.

I can give you a great example, told me by Elizabeth Karonga of Zimbabwe, who's a board member of AMARC. She says that the professional media women's
organization in Zimbabwe realized a few years ago that rural village women were never being heard on the radio. So they started taking tape recorders out to the villages, recording what the women there had to say, then taking
the women's questions to government officials if there were questions that needed to be answered, and putting the whole thing on the radio. The village people listened to the radio, actually taped their own responses, those tapes got picked up and put onto the radio, and so forth. These "radio listening clubs" have now been organized all around Southern Africa.  And a similar project is being carried out by members of AMARC in India as well. According to Elizabeth, one of her proudest moments was when new groups started saying "don't send us any paid journalists as trainers -- just give us the equipment and show us how to use it -- we can do the rest ourselves."

"Just give us the resources -- don't condescend to us." A lot of what non-privileged people say when they're really heard boils down to that. And yet so much of the machinery of the privileged, the "women in development"
projects or whatever -- amount to smoke screens for the privileged to micro-manage the resources and control the flow of them, using again the reverse logic that says those who are paid the most must set the rules.

I remember discovering around 1970 that the welfare system in Texas was deliberately set up so that the amount paid was too small to live on, but if the recipient got any more money anywhere she was breaking the law and could go to jail. So the whole class of people living on Aid to Dependent Children was a de facto criminal class, and that kept them from telling the truth about their needs in public.

Contrast that with this pretty example:  at the AMARC conference in Milan, I interviewed two very young women who produce for Radio Orakel, the women's radio station founded in Norway in the 1980s. One of the women happened to have a child, and she was enabled to produce radio because the Norwegian government gave her three years of paid maternity leave. She said she was really supposed to be looking for a job now, but that she went down to the welfare office and said, "look, I'm doing all this unwaged work for the good of the community at the radio station, so why don't you just let me collect unemployment benefits?" and the social worker said OK!

Interestingly, the Scandinavian governments were the most active in trying to get the counting of women's unwaged work repealed from the global agenda. Their reasoning was "If we count the work, women will want to be paid for it." Only in Scandinavia, I think, is the social policy sufficiently close to that point for the government to take such a threat seriously. But perhaps it's not an idle consideration -- early conservative estimates suggest that the value of unwaged work is at least 40% of the productivity of the world, and depending on what wage equivalency you measure it by could be much more.

Now the Wages for Housework movement, which spawned the Women Count Network, actually says they want for housewives to be paid, and they want them to be
paid out of the military budget of the world's governments. But another feminist theorist, Genevieve Vaughan, says instead that we should be trying to get off of the "exchange economy," where money becomes the general equivalent and stands in for other values, and should instead recognize and re-orient to the "gift economy," in which we see each other's needs and simply meet them.* And by the way, just a few months ago Margaretta D'Arcy came to Austin, Texas, where Genevieve Vaughan lives, and I witnessed one of the most interesting arguments or discussions I've ever seen, between these two women activists and theorists over whether it's right to measure and value unwaged work in money terms. I was just a fly on the wall in that instance, but I do have an opinion of my own. And that is that even discussing unwaged work creates terms in which to talk about it, and to let the needs of unwaged workers be heard. From there, I think we need to move to unwaged workers being accepted as a part of decision-making about how resources are to be allocated.

The reason Margaretta was in Austin, by the way, was to promote the Global Women's Strike for a Change, to be held on International Women's Day, March 8, 2000. The idea is for women to take off work if they can, and/or do other things to visibilize their labor. One of my favorite ways to visibilize the labor is to "turn in a bill" for your unwaged work. This doesn't have to be a bill in money -- it can be a bill of particulars, to say in as much detail as you care to all the things you do unpaid or underpaid.

AMARC has committed itself -- in that resolution I mentioned -- to promote the Global Women's Strike for a Change and to cover it. I'd like community radio workers to take this one step further. How about, on or near March 8, turning in our own bills for unwaged work at our radio stations, and reading them to the community on the air? This would be a good way to show what volunteers are worth to our stations and communities.**

------------------------
* Genevieve Vaughan's book is called "For-Giving: A Feminist Criticism of Exchange." You can find it on the internet in its entirety, and it's published in paperback by Plain View Press in Austin, Texas, USA.
** By the way, Marty Durlin, founder of Grassroots Radio, points out that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting used to give U.S. community radio stations a sum of matching money for each hour of volunteer labor recorded, but CPB has now stopped this practice.