Dawson discusses what she means when she says “the struggle is the victory.” She also explains a “spiral theory of history” that she learned from her mother and that has allowed her to continue to fight for social change even when times look bleak.
TRANSCRIPT:
There was hope that everything we had been doing in the seventies was going to lead to something specific and concrete in the US Constitution. And of course, that didn’t happen.
But I think the fight for that is an example of things that you and I have talked about, too. The struggles themselves may not have been victorious, but the struggles themselves were victories.
Being a part of national mobilization around women’s rights didn’t— even though we didn’t get the ERA—history is not a direct line from bad times to good ones.
It’s like my mom used to say: it’s a spiral. And sometimes, as we’re going up the spiral, we’re going what looks like backward. Because it is—but we’re still moving forward.
And as we do that, we need to recognize that whole spiral—not knowing where it began, but knowing it began a long time ago; not knowing where it’s going to end, but knowing what the goal is: that it ends in a world where everyone, and the planet itself, are shared with love and dignity.
There are going to be people on all points of that spiral around us all the time, and we just need to be aware of all of that as we deal with the things we’re dealing with now.