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For many years, feminists were considered four crazy women obsessed with a topic and it seemed you weren't going to achieve anything. Did you think you would live to see this moment? I thought not. I was born in '43, and in those years your horizon was to get married and have children. And professionally, you could be a secretary or a teacher, as long as you didn't get married. If when I was 20 years old they had told me that I would see women in Parliament, the first female mayor of Barcelona, or that I myself would be an emeritus professor of Sociology and a councilwoman of Barcelona... I wouldn't have believed it. Another good symptom is that something as buried as gender violence has emerged. When I was director of the Women's Institute in Madrid from '93 to '96 and the police would give me the list of women murdered by their husbands, lovers, and so on, not even the newspapers wanted to publish the news! It was something invisible and invisibilized. Now we can talk about it.
Advertising, political discourse, mentality... have also changed. Yes, but not as much as it seems. Before, the socialization of girls was done through repression: you can't jump, ride a bicycle, study... I was told to wash the dishes while my brothers went out to play, I asked why and we argued. You knew what you were fighting against. Now it's more subtle. They sell you that you have to be very beautiful and thin and wear makeup and be well-dressed and you will succeed. That leads girls to adopt traditional female roles, of a woman as an object, who is only concerned with how others see her. If I were 20 now, it would be very difficult to get out of that, because it's not just the model they give you in the media, but it comes from your friends, boys... How do you oppose getting more likes?
So, we are not yet where we wanted to be. No, not by a long shot.
Even if many people, including women, think we are. What would you tell them? To look at the number of women murdered. We don't have those figures for men, nor do we want to have them! To look at who occupies the discussion spaces on TV. We are in the "hee hee, ha ha," but serious topics like economics or politics are for them. In universities, only 20-25% are full professors. And we still don't appear in textbooks. All of that is sexism.
Sometimes it seems that laws have advanced more than people. Of course! It's easier to sign agreements than to change reality. Reality is made of what culture has transmitted to us; it's much deeper, it comes out at any moment without us realizing it. Women are also sexist because we have been educated in a sexist culture.
After so many years, do you still catch yourself in sexist gestures? Yes, many times. One day a nephew and a niece came to eat at home, and at one point I told her: "Set the table." And I thought: "Why don't I tell both of them?" And then something occurred to me that I recommend: before saying something to someone, ask yourself if you would say the same thing if they were of the opposite sex. We must be able to analyze our mindset and change it, or we will keep reproducing the same things, no matter how many laws there are.
At this historical point, what are the next goals to achieve? To revalue everything that comes from the female gender, such as caregiving. We must give it the importance it has and stop considering it a waste of time in order to universalize it and have men also be a part of it. And it is urgent to change the male gender model. We continue to educate boys to be warriors, strong, to assert themselves, to fear nothing and no one..., when the figure of the warrior is no longer useful in our society.
Women are clear about how feminism would benefit us, but... what about them? They would be freer, they would develop the capacities they wanted, not just those that are now socially accepted. They would even die less from accidents!
Let's stop talking about minimums. Let's think about maximums. What would you like to see in the near future? A woman leading the Government and the Generalitat. And for women to introduce a different way of doing politics: instead of insults and confrontation, collaboration, agreements, and teamwork. If we do the same as men have historically done, we forget all the innovative and useful things we can contribute.
You are the author of Rosa y azul, a book about the transmission of genders in co-educational schools that opened our eyes and showed us the way forward. What should be the role of education today to end the androcentric model? The fundamental thing at this moment is to educate men differently. Girls have already been changing. Notice that my father didn't want me to go to university so that I wouldn't get frustrated because, after all, at most I could be a secretary... Now girls go to university in a higher proportion than boys. So, the female model has opened up. Now we have to change the boys.
What advice would you give to parents and teachers? Not to treat boys and girls differently. That any human behavior, as long as it is ethical, is valid for anyone. We must move towards the disappearance of genders.
Interview: Ana Portolés Photography: Laia Sabaté
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