This Inaugural Assembly was borne of women speaking up often and persistently after the 2009 PWR in Melbourne where women realized how few women were plenary speakers and workshop leaders. The Inaugural Women’s Assembly gathered 3000 women plus interested men from 9 to 5 before the opening ceremony of the Parliament at 6:30 that evening. The Assembly was described as providing “an important opportunity for women to address and discuss two areas of vital interest: the responsibility of the world’s religions to affirm women’s dignity and human rights, and religious and spiritual inspiration for women’s empowerment.”

Perhaps a hundred of SHEROES drummed us into the Inaugural Assembly, moving through the crowd and ending up on the stage. Self-described: A SHERO is an ordinary Woman that finds the STRENGTH to Endure and Preserve in SPITE of Overwhelming Obstacles. A Role Model to those around HER. With their rhythmic heart beat drumming, they invited us into a women-energized space.

Throughout the morning plenary, we heard from diverse women from around the world, each from a different faith expression. Each woman spoke from her heart for five minutes, sharing the microphone equally, a hallmark of each of the PWR’s plenaries. What I report here is a mere shadow of what was spoken; I took incomplete notes, often lost in what I was hearing. I encourage you to Google: PWR Inaugural Women’s Assembly or Women’s Initiative or Focus on Women to explore the sites that interest you. Here I will paraphrase the points I jotted down.

An Indigenous Grandmother with the Intercontinental Indigenous Peoples Delegation: We are all indigenous to the earth. What will you say when you are asked by the next generations: what did you do to help save the earth, air water?

Ilyasha Shabazz, Malcom X’s daughter: This is a time for building bridges, a growing up time. Children need to understand purpose and power.

Mallika Chopra: State your intention and believe it will happen.

Diana Butler Bass: Women can be spiritual revolutionaries. Rules keep us from being fully human. Look it up for ourselves to encounter God for ourselves. See more beautiful ways.

Maori Grandmother, Dr Rangimarie Turuki Ankirangi Rose Pere: We are the sowers of the sacred seed of knowledge and peacekeepers. Live the Four Directions. The Divine Source is unconditional Love. You are me and I am you. I come in from the future. Separation and division are our worst enemies.

Jean Shinoda Bolen:I feel the heartfulness that fills this room. We can become who we want to be by becoming one with ourselves on a deeper level within. We are the displaced within religious communities. Hillary Clinton said 20 years ago at the Fourth World’s Conference on Women that “Women’s rights are human rights and human rights are women’s rights.” Circles, like campfires, offer the possibility that each person is equidistant from the others and offer a spiritual center and a place to tell your story. The spirituality unites; religions divide.

Ruth Messinger: 70% of the extremely poor are women; one in four has been or will be abused; fourteen million women are force into early marriages. One in three women are assaulted. These assaults are soul damaging and deadly. We have a broken moral compass. In 1948 the UN proclaimed Women’s Rights. How we treat women is the way we treat the earth. When we uplift women, children thrive.
To be continued