The Time Factor

- Gloria Steinem (b. 1934- )

 This essay analyzes how lack of social power, whether due to economic deprivation, gender, or race, impairs the ability to plan for the future.

A person is able to plan according to his social class. The rich and the middle class plan for future generations, but the poor can plan ahead only by a few weeks or days.

The women, regardless of their class, also can’t plan for their future. The writer herself has the experience of lacking the power for career planning despite her college education. She had to adapt herself to the priorities of her husband and children. She also lacked savings, insurance and basic pieces of furniture in her apartment. Her friends had also no-good condition.

Powerlessness is also the result of one’s ‘caste’, i. e. the unchangeable marks of sex and race. Time-sense and future planning have not attracted the attention of many as discrimination. But women have begun to struggle with them, consciously or unconsciously.

The culture has punished women by getting them habituated to the living in the present and getting bored of talking about the future. But feminists want brave women to break this tradition and have control over their own lives.

The feminist writers and theorists have sufficiently criticized the present and the past. Now, pragmatic planners and visionary futurists are needed. Women need to extend their time-sense though most of them are struggling for the present.

The ability to live in the present, to tolerate uncertainty, and to remain open, spontaneous, and flexible are all culturally female qualities. These qualities are absent in many men. Men can develop patience and flexibility in them if they spend more time raising small children.

Both men and women are wasting their time by limiting themselves to particular traits. Women are always reacting to the present, and men are always controlling and planning for the future. Instead, they must share these traits with one another.