Meryl's Speech given at "What Women Want" hosted by Marie Claire and the Home Shopping Network on May 4, 2006 at The Hudson Theatre, New York City

This story burned a hole in my heart when I found out about it.
What can we do to help the women of Afghanistan?

I've thought a lot about the power of empathy. In my work, it's the current that connects me and my actual pulse to a fictional character in a made up story, it allows me to feel, pretend feelings and sorrows and imagined pain. And my nervous system is sympathetically-wired, and it conducts that current to you, sitting in a movie theatre. And to the woman sitting next to you, and to her friend, so that we all feel that it's happening to us at the same time. It's a very mysterious and valuable resource of the human species. And women, I think, access it most effortlessly. We cry at sad movies: we don't feel we lose face or stature or position doing it. We see a news story that enrages us and we write letters through tears, our hearts pounding. I've often, I used to wonder why human beings developed these *inconvenient* and embarrassing responses: this sniffling, choking, wet obstruction, you know? The thing that physicians and soldiers and stock traders and journalists and fashion models and politicians and news commentators and venture capitalists all must suppress in order to work most efficiently. I thought "what possible value, function could it serve in the Darwinian scheme of, you know, survival of the fittest and the strongest and the most heavily armed?" No, seriously, I thought, "Why? and how did we evolve with this weak, and useless passion in tact within the deep heart's core?" And the answer as I've formulated it to myself is that empathy is the engine that powers all the best in us. It is what civilizes us. It is what connects us to these women who live enshrouded and muffled and beaten down and broken, in cities and towns so far away from us as if to be in a different galaxy. It enables us to feel their despair and their anguish as if it were our own. The reality of the lives of the women of Afghanistan used to resemble our own. They used to look like us, work like us, they were half the doctors, teachers, civil servants in their country. That reality has been ripped away from them. And they've been entombed in a nightmare: denied access to medicine, books, laughter, and the sun on their faces. It came home to me when I saw this video that exposed no more of them than the heartbreaking sight of their hands.

How would we feel if these were our sisters? Our daughters? Our mothers? If eleven and a half million people of any ethnic group in the world were similarly stoned, incarcerated, denied basic human rights today: would the world sit idly by and ignore this apartheid? If an earthquake buried 11,500,000 people, would we not dig them out? The Taliban have ordered the windows and buildings that house women to be painted black so they can't see out and we can't see them, but we know that 11,500,000 women have been buried alive in Afghanistan. Is it because they're women that it just doesn't seem that urgent to the world? Where is the global reaction?

Last weekend I watched Ken Burns' documentary on PBS called Not For Ourselves Alone that was about the early days of women's rights movement in this country. I tried to get my daughters to watch, but it seemed like old news. They dressed funny and it was crusty and fusty and boring to them. It had no relation to the exuberant, silly, vivid, noisily-optimistic life they are lucky enough to live, but I watched it. My husband wandered in. I knew he wanted to watch the golf, but I think he felt bad because the girls had shot me down. And the first night was a little dry. It was a little informational, the music was elegiac, but by the end of the second night both of us were in tears. He turned to me and said "It's as if Jefferson and Lincoln had been left out of the history books." In the middle of the last century here in New York City, when the house I'm staying in tonight was built, a woman had no right to own or inherit property. Her money and goods, her wedding ring and the clothes on her back belonged to her husband. If he beat her or her children, she could leave with nothing but she couldn't take the children, because he owned the children. She could not vote. She was not allowed into any institution of higher learning. She could not sit on a jury, or testify on her own behalf in a court of law. She was not deemed "competent" to do that. She wore restrictive, voluminous clothing that restricted her freedom of movement and her actions. A man incarcerated in what they used to call "a lunatic asylum" in those days had more rights than the most privileged lady in the land. This was America, a little over 100 years ago. In the 40,000 years of human history, that's a heartbeat away. And so, Afghan women are closer than we think. These rights have been hard won all over the world in a relatively short space of time. And the glowing understanding that we own these basic rights, that they can never be taken away is chilled and killed by what we see happening in Afghanistan tonight. As women, as empathizers, I think we have a memory very deep in our bodies of the repression and an inchoate understanding of the fear that we never thought would be ressurrected again. When the compact between men and women is broken, we will never go back to those days (speaking for the group I'm saying that). But they are us, and we are them. And we must speak and and we must act on their behalf, because they can't. And by God Almighty we can.

So what can we do for the women of Afghanistan?

Take the pen that they gave you on your seat. Write the little petition, but also remember this phone number: 888-WE WOMEN, they will connect you to the campaign against gender apartheid. They will send you an action packet. They will tell you who to write to. Who is investing in Afghanistan: Saudi Arabia, and the UAE countries that support Afghanistan. You will make a difference. It made a difference in South Africa when America mobilized and I have confidence that these women will see their smiles. Thank you Glenda Bailey and Marie Claire. Thank you to the Shopping Network too for putting their money where our mouths are.

Thank you very much.