BLOG (Cate Burns): Why The World Needs a Womens’Maslow Hierarchy of Needs

I was sitting at a feast table. Not a Thanksgiving dinner, but 10 tables of 5 women each. We’d just marched the Sisters in Spirit March for Murdered and Missing Aboriginal Women. An estimate of 600 or so women in a few decades. The feast was at Genvra House, a YWCA safe house for domestic abuse.

We are the survivors. Collectively we are not seeing it that way. I am thinking of Stephanie, found murdered a year ago in Garson, my daughters school chum. I am thinking of Connie, my school chum, found murdered in her 1st week of nursing at U of Toronto in 1972. Generational murder.

I’m thinking, this is happening on such a huge scale. To quote Gloria Steinheim, since the year 2000 there are more women in their graves in the USA than all the soldiers killed in all their wars, plus 911. No honor guard saluting these women.

I was raised, as were we all on Cinderella. The Disney variety of a blond girl in white dress, with a pumpkin coach and twinkling sugar stars. Her Prince Charming comes to the rescue. Sends chills down my spine now.

I forget how I phrased it, but I said to the young women at my table (was I too strident?) that we need another womens’ story. Young women need a different story than romantic love and marriage. In fact romantic love is a killer.

The reaction at my table was swift. NO! they agreed. We love falling in love! We love the chase! We love/hate our men! One middle aged, really nice lady related travelling abroad, hitchhiked in Spain with unknown men, and if she hadn’t taken chances, she wouldn’t have felt she had truly lived. It was life at its best.

I was a minority.

Yet here we were. The Prince Charming fairy tale has become a real Nightmare on Elm Street for many.

The only way I can make sense of this serious and sordid mess, is to insist on a Womens’ Maslow Hierarchy of Needs. Why is it necessary to gender differentiate a Maslow Hierarchy of Needs? Because when it’s applied to women under the Prince Charming Patriarchal  system under which we live, Maslow reads like an Anarchist Doctrine. In ascending order we have

1. PHYSICAL NEEDS – In a Womens’ Hierarchy of Needs, she will be a property owner, having equal rights, married or unmarried, so she can help make community decisions and control over her destiny in as much as possible
2. SAFETY – Is her RIGHT. Violence at present is imparted mostly by men and their laws to protect men. Women will take an oath and training to help protect each other
3. LOVE AND BELONGING – This would banish common derogatory slurs women and her children fact each day, terms such as “slut bitch, whore, bastards, illegitimate etc etc”
4. SELF ESTEEM -  Which under a Womens’ Hierarchy of Needs will eliminate targeting young women with underweight images, and retarded ads and movies with semi-clad women. Self esteem and pornography are diametrically opposite
5. SELF ACTUALIZATION – Absolutely unchartered territory as the above needs have yet to be met. Herstory hasn’t yet begun.

When a Womens’ Hierarchy of Needs is implemented both in Canada and abroad, will I say the Prince Charming paradigm is credible. Ever. Please feel free to annotate and add to The Womens’ Maslow Hierarchy of Needs