Jane
Fonda
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to Quotes from Women, Power & Peace
 Jane
Fonda has won two Academy Awards
during her legendary acting career. She is
an activist on issues such as the environment,
human rights, and the empowerment of women
and girls, with much of her work devoted
to the program she founded in 1995, the Georgia
Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention.
Fonda was named Goodwill Ambassador for the
United Nations Population Fund in 994, and
currently is a member of the board of the
Women’s Media Center, which she helped
found in 2004. She is the author of 23 home
exercise videos, 3 audio recordings, five
books, and a best-selling memoir, My
Life So Far.
Something
that Rigoberta said this morning when she used
the word “product” – I was
a product. Products aren’t activists.
I was a product of “be nice”, I
was a product of “please”, and “you
don’t know what you know”, and
you don’t stir the pot. In fact I was
the product known as Barbarella!
And
it was the Vietnam War and discovering what
was going on there that turned me into an activist.
And then I began to not be a product anymore.
We
[women] are supposed to be supportive and malleable
and the woman behind the man. And so I think
when we step out of that product role, I think
that we are really vilified...I sometimes wonder
if it had been Paul Newman, would it have been
quite the same?
Friends.
When things were really, really bad….but
what makes the difference is friends – and
they were all women. And I wasn’t really
a feminist then, but I did have to notice that
it was the women who enfolded me in their wings
and with their heart, and I just sort of knew
that we would go on. Maybe not as individuals,
but as a movement.
It’s
that thing that makes women more fortunate
than men. I think men are at a tremendous disadvantage
because they have a harder time having a heartful,
networking group – they don’t do
that like women do. And it’s great strength
that we have.
So
that’s what I think of what I think of
women, power and peace. I think of living our
deepest, most loving humanity. And every one
of us, no matter what we do or who we are,
we become powerful.
If
we can just hold that when we go home, to live
our deepest humanity, we will be a ripple to
impact other people.
The
importance of really being informed, and trying
to stay as credible – I mean, I’ve
had to work hard to regain some credibility...It’s
hard when you’ve made the kind of mistakes
that I’ve made.
What
you can do changes. You become more patient.
Things are not so black and white – grey
is a good color.
Learning
to listen, and I mean really listen, listen
to your heart to people. People who don’t
agree with you. When someone feels heard, they
are much more apt to hear you.
What
we are talking about a shift in consciousness,
and so we have to change people - inside we
have to change.
I
think one of the big problems with Congress
is that they don’t have any epiphanies...They
don’t have the opportunity to be exposed
to the kind of things we are exposed to.
What
is your one big dream in this lifetime? That
we stop global dreaming...We have to create
a tipping point where we understand that
we’re sh—ting in our kennel – even
dogs don’t do that! That we have to
preserve our life support system, which is
the Earth, and I think that can happen during
my life.
Now,
the other thing, which is patriarchy, that’s
not going to happen during my life….but
we’ve got to keep at it.
I’ve
worked hard in all kinds of different ways – you
only know some of them – to get over
fear of intimacy, and it’s the greatest
thing. And I’m learning how to open my
heart.
I
guess the burning thing that I think about
a lot is – what do we do about our sons? …Doing
everything we can to keep our sons and grandsons
emotionally literate – to keep them connected
at the heart...We have to raise sons who are
capable of intimacy and love and compassion.
When
girls change, everything changes.
When
girls change, boys come along.
…opening
our understanding of why men are turned into
what they’ve turned into, and opening
our hearts to them.
Peace
looks like people living in the situation where
they feel seen and heard and valued and loved.
It’s love, it’s as simple as that,
where people aren’t scared.
Interview with Jane Fonda
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