Activist rethinks thinking

by Mark Schaaf

Daily Lobo

Since childhood, Sonia Johnson

said she always felt like an

alien in society.

"I was a hungry child," Johnson

said. "I was full of a deep longing

that I didn't understand."

As an adult, she discovered

there's more than the current

model of human thinking, which

she said is created and controlled

by men.

The author and activist spoke

in the Cherry and Silver Room

in the SUB on Thursday about

her experiences outside that

way of thinking.

About 30 people - almost all

of them women - attended the

talk.

Graduate student Elaine

Baumgartel said Johnson's

speech made her think about how

people are taught to think.

"She talks about how what we

experience in the world is so closely

related with what we're taught

to see," she said. "But sometimes

the bubble pops open."

A former Mormon housewife,

Johnson was ex-communicated

from the church in 1979 for criticizing

the church's stance against

the Equal Rights Amendment,which would have guaranteed

equal rights for each gender but

never made it into the U.S. Constitution.

After that, she turned to activism

for women's rights. She fasted

in the Illinois Legislature for nearly

50 days because women were

"hungry for justice," she said. She

was also a U.S. presidential candidate,

representing the Citizens

Party in 1984.

But she came to believe she

should stop living in the current

system of thought and live in a

women's world.

Sometimes she would get a

glimpse of that world, and others

told her stories that reaffirmed her beliefs.

She shared some of those stories,

all of which go against conventional

thinking for limits on

human life, she said.

They included an anti-gravity

story of a woman moving without

her feet touching the ground, a

story of women not needing male

fertilization to reproduce, and of a

woman who could control her own

temperature and never needed a

coat.

"Those are some of the glimpses

I have had into a world I have

been homesick for so very long,"

she said.

Johnson said men have created

the way of thought, one of escalating

violence and one that massacres

women who try to think outside

it.

Johnson said she tried to change

the way men think, including her

three sons, but said it cannot be

done.

In the late 1980s, Johnson said

she was also told of a culture that

believed, at one time, everything

in the world was female until an

"explosion of maleness."

But a time would come when

that "maleness" would pass - and

the culture believed that time was

now, Johnson said.

"I believed it," she said. "I had

to believe in something or I would

die, and I mean that literally."

Janet Cramer, associate professor

of communication and journalism,

said Johnson is a prophet

for a new way of living.

"I think her vision is for a better

world," Cramer said. "I think she's

beautiful in that regard."