- Goddess in Everywoman,Bolen
- The Creation of Patriarchy,Lerner
- The Creation of Feminist Consciousness,Lerner
- The Trouble with Islam Today,Manji
- The Spiral Dance,Starhawk
- The Natural Superiority of Women,Montagu
- The First Sex, Davis
- If Women Ruled the World, Ellison
- The Great Cosmic Mother, Sjoor & Mor
- The Bookseller of Kabul, Seierstad
- Women's Mysteries, Harding
- Through the Goddess, Reis
- Silence, Griffin
- Erotica vs. Pornography, Steinem
- When the Drummers Were Women, Redmond
- When God Was a Woman, Stone
- The Maiden King, Bly & Woodman
- The Goddess Energy is Trying to Save Us, Woodman
GODDESSS IN EVERYWOMAN: A New Psychology of Women
by Jean Shinoda Bolen, MD
Jean Shinoda Bolen is a feminist, Jungian analyst and psychiatrist. As a feminist she is conscious of the forces that affect women’s lives. She writes, “The Jungian perspective has made me aware that women are influenced by powerful inner forces or archetypes, which can be personified by Greek goddesses. And the feminist perspective has given me an understanding of how outer forces or stereotypes—roles to which society expects women to conform—reinforce some goddess patterns and repress others. . . As a result I see every woman. . . acted on from within by goddess archetypes and from without by cultural stereotypes.”
Historically, it was the “Great Goddess who was [first] worshipped as the Creator and Destroyer of Life, responsible for the fertility and destructiveness of nature . . . Known by many names—Astarte, Ishtar, Inanna, Nut, Isis, Ashtoreth . . . The Great Goddess was worshipped as the feminine life force deeply connected to nature and fertility, responsible both for creating life and for destroying life.”
Later when invaders imposed their patriarchal culture, the Great Goddess became the subservient consort of their male gods. “As reflected in Greek mythology, the attributes, symbols, and power that once were invested in one Great Goddess were divided among many Goddesses, each receiving attributes that once belonged to her: Hera got the ritual of the sacred marriage, Demeter her mysteries, Athena her snakes, Aphrodite her doves, and Artemis her function as ‘Lady of the Wild Things”
Bolen believes that mythic goddesses “are powerful, invisible forces that shape behavior and influence emotions.” (Bolen uses the term “mythic”, and “mythological” to mean an allegorical figure, i.e., a man or woman who did not live in the real world but who contains real-life significance in explaining human behavior). When a woman “knows which ‘goddesses’ are dominant forces within her, she acquires self-knowledge about the strength of certain instincts . . .” Bolen maintains that these are the underlying forces that affect a women’s relationship with men as well as with members of her family. Not only do the goddesses within affect our relationships but they also endow us with gifts that it is our responsibility to “learn about and accept gratefully”.
The goddesses that Bolen describes in THE GODDESS IN EVERY WOMAN are the six Olympian Greek goddesses—Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Artemis, Athena, and Aphrodite plus Persephone, “whose mythology is inseparable from Demeter’s.” Bolen divides these seven goddesses into three categories: the virgin goddesses (Artemis, Hestia and Athena), the vulnerable goddesses (Hera, Demeter, and Persephone) and Aphrodite, the alchemical or transformative goddess.
Bolen explains that the Greek goddesses “are images of women that have lived in the human imagination for over three thousand years. The goddesses are patterns or representations of what women are like—with more power and diversity of behavior than women have historically been allowed to exercise. They are beautiful and strong. They are motivated by what matters to them, and—as I maintain in this book—they represent inherent patterns or archetypes that can shape the course of a woman’s life.”
Bolen sees the virgin goddess, Artemis, Hestia and Athena, as representing “the independent, self-sufficient quality in women”.(Bolen uses the original meaning of “virgin”, which had no sexual connotation.) In characterizing these Greek goddesses, Bolen draws upon the many mythic stories that describe their behavior in the Olympian world. Bolen explains, “Unlike the other Olympians, these three were not susceptible to falling in love. Emotional attachments did not divert them from what they considered important. They were not victimized and did not suffer. As archetypes, they express the need in women for autonomy, and the capacity women have to focus their consciousness on what is personally meaningful.”
The three vulnerable goddess—Hera, Demeter, and Persephone—“represent the traditional roles wife, mother, and daughter. They are the relationship-oriented goddess archetypes, whose identities and well-being depend on having a significant relationship”.
Aphrodite is in a category of her own. Bolen describes her as being “the most beautiful and irresistible of the goddesses. She had many affairs and many offspring from her numerous liaisons. She generated love and beauty, erotic attraction, sensuality, sexuality, and new life. She entered relationships of her own choosing and was never victimized. Thus she maintained her autonomy, like a virgin goddess, and was in relationships, like a vulnerable goddess . . . The Aphrodite archetype motivates women to see, intensity in relationships rather than permanence, to value creative process, and be open to change.”
It’s important to understand that the “Greek goddesses also lived, as we do, in a patriarchal society. Male gods ruled over the earth, heavens, oceans, and underworld. Each independent goddess adapted to this reality in her own way by separating from men, joining men as one of them, or withdrawing inward. Each goddess who valued a particular relationship was vulnerable and relatively weak in comparison to male gods, who could deny her what she wanted and overpower her. Thus the goddesses represent patterns that reflect life in a patriarchal culture.” As Merlin Stone observed, “We may find ourselves wondering to what degree the suppression of women’s rites has actually been the suppression of women’s rights.”
In the succeeding chapters, Bolen reviews each of the seven goddesses in detail, first giving a brief genealogy and mythology, and their archetypal significance. Then she describes how that particular goddess affects different aspects of a woman’s life: her early years, parents, adolescence, work; adulthood, relationships with women, men; sexuality; marriage; children; middle years and later years. She also describes the psychological difficulties that each goddess archetype can pose for a woman.
Bolen concludes THE GODDESS IN EVERYWOMEN with a chapter called “The Heroine in Every Women”. By replacing the goddess with the heroine Bolen shifts the focus from the goddess as an inner archetype of the unconscious to a more personalized experience of an empowered self. Bolen writes, “There is a potential heroine in everywoman. She is the leading lady in her own life story on a journey that begins at her birth and continues through her lifetime”. In other words, she is no longer being acted on by the goddess archetype but at this point is strong enough to act on her own by making her own choices. Bolen explains, “She is shaped by her choices, by her capacity for faith and love, by her ability to learn from experience and make commitments. When difficulties arise, if she assesses what she can do, decides what she will do, and behaves in ways consistent with her values and feelings, she is acting as the heroine-protagonist of her own myth.”
Jean Shinoda Bolen M.D., GODDESS IN EVERYWOMAN,(Harper Perennial, 1985), Gerder Lerner, a feminist historian, begins THE CREATION OF PATRIARCHY by reminding readers that “Women’s History is indispensable and essential to the emancipation of women”. Unless you understand what happened to women in the past, you cannot fully understand your present situation, or realistically plan ahead to a new future. Lerner admits that this is not a view shared by women in general. She attributes this attitude to “the conflict-ridden and highly problematic relationship of women to history.”
Even more important is the question of “the long delay (3500 years) in women’s coming to consciousness of their own subordinate position in society. What could explain it? What could explain women’s historical ‘complicity’ in upholding the patriarchal system that subordinated them and in transmitting that system . . . generation after generation, to their children of both sexes?” These are questions that Lerner seeks to answer.
Lerner widens the general concept of history to include both the oral tradition of history, passed on from generation to generation, and recorded history that began with the invention of written language in 3100 BC in the Middle East. The oral tradition was the main method of keeping historical record during the time when women were at the forefront of technological and cultural innovations during the Paleolithic and Neolithic eras.
Lerner agrees with other scholars that the earliest Neolithic hunter-gathering societies were basically egalitarian. Both men and women “developed appropriate skills and knowledge essential for group survival”. Although much is said about man’s tool-making abilities, women developed many skills related to mothering and child-raising, including knowledge of plants and their medicinal and food-giving properties, basket weaving for storage and treatment of hides for clothing and warmth, etc.
Hunting and gathering societies were succeeded by horticultural societies. Such societies were an advance because they were able to harvest and store food. It was based on the harvesting of roots and cuttings. Surpluses could be stored for a short time but hunting, fishing, and gathering are still necessary to supplement poor harvests. In this society women take an active role and “matrilineal and matrifocal systems abound”.
In a matrifocal society girls did not leave their mothers when they reached childbearing age. Mothers, daughters and children all lived together. Men lived separately in a lodge or spent much of their time on hunting expeditions. When boys reached puberty, they would join the men where they would learn hunting skills. In such an arrangement women formed a cohesive living arrangement that empowered them and made them less vulnerable to attack. Lerner is reluctant to call this a matriarchal society because she is not convinced that women were in control or had power over men.
Archeologists have uncovered thousands of Neolithic artifacts in clay, marble, bone, copper and gold of small female statuettes emphasizing a woman’s breast, navel and vulva. They seem to indicate that women were highly venerated during this time period. They were probably used not only as an aid in childbirth but also as fertility symbols to ensure success in the hunt and bountiful crops. Such statuettes appear for thousands of years and are found from Israel to Russia, 30,000 alone in southeastern Europe.
Although Lerner is hesitant to attach a specific meaning to such a proliferation of female figurines, she admits that there is strong historical evidence to their religious significance, based on myths, rituals, and creation stories beginning from the 4th millennium forward. She states that the “ Mother-Goddess is virtually universal as the dominant figure in the most ancient stories.” She continues, “the cults of the Great Goddess were based on the belief that it is she, in one or another of her manifestations, who creates life. But she was also associated with death. She was praised and celebrated for her virginity and her maternal qualities. Thus, in the earliest known phases of religious worship the female force was recognized as awesome, powerful, transcendent.”
“The supremacy of the Goddess is also expressed in the earliest myths of origin, which celebrate the life-giving creativity of the female.” Whether it is the Egyptian goddess Nun, the Sumerian goddess Nammu or the Babylonian goddess Tiamat, all “these creation stories express concepts deriving from earlier modes of worship of female fertility . . . snake-goddess, sea-goddess, virgin-goddess, and goddess molding humans out of clay—it is the female who holds the key to the mystery.
A change in the supremacy of the Goddess begins with domestication of animals and a better understanding of the male contribution in the process of procreation. With such an understanding of the male role “the Mother-Goddess [is] associated with a male partner, either son or a brother, who assists her in the fertility rites by mating with her . . . It is still the Great Goddess who creates life and governs death, but there is now a pronounced recognition of the male role in procreation.” From this recognition the Sacred Marriage (hieros gamos) and similar annual rites were celebrated widely in many different societies in the fourth and third millennia BC. It was believed that “not until the Goddess had mated with the young god and his death and rebirth had taken place, could the annual cycle of the seasons begin. The sexuality of the Goddess is sacred and confers the blessings of fertility to earth and to the people who through their ritual observances please her.”
Lerner observes that “The changing position of the Mother Goddess, her dethroning takes place in many cultures and at different times but usually it is the same historical process”. Initially, the Mother Goddess reigns supreme but at a later date she becomes secondary to her consort. Eventually, as men acquired more power a militaristic male, thunder god replaces the Goddess.
The reevaluation and dethroning of the goddesses and replacement by the male thunder god was followed by a similar lost in status of women in society as well. Lerner traces the roots of patriarchy to a time, when men seeking greater power within a matrifocal Neolithic society, learned how to dominate women within their own group. Lerner emphasizes the observation that this later prepared the way for men to apply such techniques for the enslavement of women of conquered tribes and, finally, the institutionalization of slavery.
Lerner makes it clear that the establishment of patriarchy “was not one ‘event’ but a process developing over a period of nearly 2500 years from app. 3100 to 600 BC. It occurred, even within the Ancient Near East, at a different pace and at different times in several distinct societies.”
When societies became organized around agricultural activities, they became patrilineal in response to the greater role men played in plowing, tilling, and herding. In a patrilineal society women leave their mother’s family to live with their husband’s family. This had the effect of weakening the support system that she had enjoyed living with her mother’s family. This meant her husband and her husband’s family could more easily control her. As result she lost much of her former independence and autonomy. Because harvesting the crops required the hands of as many children as she could conceive, she was chiefly valued for her childbearing capacity.
The slow transformation from a matrifocal to a patrifocal society began about the same time that written language was first used to record events and information. Since women were generally excluded from acquiring knowledge of the newly invented written word, a privilege restricted to the priesthood, women gradually lost control over their life and their destiny. Lerner meticulously traces this process of exclusion and lost control that occurred over a two thousand year period, starting at the very beginning of recorded history with the rise of patriarchy.
Another change takes place in the 2nd and 3rd millennium BC when “a new concept of creation enters religious thinking: Nothing exists unless it has a name. The name means existence.” Lerner explains, “Naming has profound significance in the Old Mesopotamian belief system. The name reveals the essence of the bearer; it also carries magic power . . . What is important to observe here is that the concept of creation has changed at a certain period in history from being merely the acting out of the mystic force of female fertility to being a conscious act of creation.” This act of creation is achieved by merely expressing “the name”. . . of what is to be created (italics mine), e.g., “let there be light” (Genesis 1:3). In this simple way the revered creative power of the Great Goddess could be usurped by a male god who had never, like a woman, given birth to anything.
It’s important to note that this change in consciousness appeared at the same time when writing first appeared, and with it history. “Record-keeping and the elaboration of symbol systems demonstrate the power of abstraction. The name recorded enters history and becomes immortal. This must have appeared as magical to contemporaries.” This power of abstraction is nowhere more evident than in the shift to a monotheistic religion. "The movement toward developing abstract concepts, while marking an advancement in human thinking, also made it possible to replace a pantheon of gods and goddesses with one God, an unseen, invisible, unknowable embodiment of the creative Spirit."
When agricultural communities became urban centers and, finally, what is called “archaic” states, many of the former changes introduced by a patrilineal society were institutionalized by strong kings. Lerner describes Mesopotamian women living in this early period: “Women under patriarchal rule . . . do not decide for themselves, their bodies and sexual services are at the disposal of their kin group, their husbands and their fathers” They do not have claim over their children. “The father had the power of life and death over his children. He had the power to commit infanticide by exposure or abandonment. He could give his daughters in marriage in exchange for a bride price even during their childhood or he could consecrate them to a life of virginity in the temple service . . . A man could pledge his wife, his concubines and their children as pawns for debt; if he failed to pay back the debt, these pledges could be turned into debt slaves.”
Lerner describes in separate chapters the social restrains and privileges of female slaves, concubines, stand-in wife, and prostitutes. She also devotes a chapter called “The Patriarchs” which draws comparisons between Biblical law and Mesopotamian laws and the social position of women in Mesopotamian and Hebrew societies.
In a chapter called “The Covenant” Lerner draws attention to the fact that God’s covenant in Genesis spoke only to men in the Bible, women were completely invisible. Women were included in the covenant only through the mediation of men. Lerner is quick to point out that "Here is the historic moment of the death of the Mother-Goddess and her replacement by God-the-Father . . ." Not only is woman no longer able to approach God directly, her role as a mother is also diminished. Lerner, drawing on David Bakan’s highly original interpretation of Genesis, states that the metaphor of the “seed” to depict man’s semen has the effect of giving all the genetic endowment of the newborn child to the male. The woman has been reduced to functioning only as the passive receptacle for the seed.
In the last chapter Lerner sums up the history of patriarchy as being an historical event that took nearly 2500 years to complete. Its earliest form appeared in the rise of the archaic state in the form of the patriarchal family. She emphasizes that “patriarchy can function only with the cooperation of women (italics mine). This cooperation is secured by a variety of means: gender indoctrination; educational deprivation; the denial to women of knowledge of their history; the dividing of women, one from the other, by defining ‘respectability’ and ‘deviance’ according to women’s sexual activities; by restraints and outright coercion; by discrimination in access to economic resources and political power; and by awarding class privileges to conforming women.”
Lerner continues, “For four thousand years women have shaped their lives and acted under the umbrella of patriarchy; specifically a form of patriarchy best described as paternalistic dominance (italics mine) . . . The basis of paternalism is an unwritten contract for exchange . . . In this arrangement dominance is mitigated by mutual obligations and reciprocal rights. The dominated exchange submission for protection, unpaid labor for maintenance.”
Although it may seem counterintuitive, subordination does not always feel like subordination. Lerner observes, “Women always shared the class privileges of men of their class as long as they were under ‘the protection’ of a man . . . In a class society it is difficult for people who themselves have some power, however limited and circumscribed, to see themselves also as deprived and subordinated.” Not only has shared class privileges masked the effects of patriarchy for some women, Lerner sees the harm created by subordination on a much boarder scale. “Women have for millennia participated in the process of their own subordination because they have been psychologically shaped so as to internalize the idea of their own inferiority. The unawareness of their own history of struggle and achievement has been one of the major means of keeping women subordinate”. In other words if women have been denied the knowledge that they have ever been independent and autonomous they will be unable to imagine that they could ever be independent with their own will to choose. "Where there is no precedent, one cannot imagine alternatives to existing conditions . . . Up to the time of the Protestant Reformation no woman, no matter how elevated or privileged, could feel her humanity reinforced and confirmed by imagining persons like her--female persons--in positions of intellectual authority and in direct relationship to God." By being psychologically conditioned Lerner means that you accept your inferiority because you think it is part of being a women rather than something that’s being imposed on you.”
Learner identifies two factors that made it difficult for women to overcome their inferior status: educational deprivation and male monopoly on definition. She asserts, “male dominance over definition has been deliberate and pervasive . . . We have seen how men appropriated and then transformed the major symbols of female power: the power of the Mother-Goddess and the fertility-goddesses. We have seen how men constructed theologies based on the counterfactual metaphor of male procreativity . . . We have seen, finally, how the very metaphors for gender have expressed the male as norm and the female as deviant; the male as whole and powerful, the female as unfinished, mutilated, and lacking in autonomy. On the basis of such symbolic constructs, embedded in Greek philosophy, the Judeo-Christian theologies, and the legal tradition on which Western civilization is built, men have explained the world in their own terms and defined the important questions so as to make themselves the center of discourse. By making the term ‘man’ subsume ‘woman’ and arrogate to itself the representation of all of humanity, men have built a conceptual error of vast proportion into all of their thought.”
To overcome the harmful effects of patriarchal dominance Lerner calls for a shift in consciousness, “The shift in consciousness we must make occurs in two steps: we must, at least for a time, be woman-centered. We must, as far as possible, leave patriarchal thought behind.
“TO BE WOMAN-CENTERED MEANS: asking if women were central to this argument, how would it be defined? It means ignoring all evidence of women’s marginality, because, even where women appear to be marginal, this is the result of patriarchal intervention; frequently also it is merely an appearance. The basic assumption should be that it is inconceivable for anything ever to have taken place in the world in which women were not involved, except if they were prevented from participation through coercion and repression . . .
“TO STEP OUTSIDE OF PATRIARCHAL THOUGHT MEANS: being skeptical toward every known system of thought; being critical of all assumptions, ordering values and definitions.
“Testing one’s statement by trusting our own, the female experience. Since such experience has usually been trivialized or ignored, it means overcoming the deep-seated resistance within ourselves toward accepting ourselves and our knowledge as valid. It means getting rid of the great men in our heads and substituting for them ourselves, our sisters, our anonymous foremothers. Being critical towards our own thought, which is after all, thought trained in the patriarchal tradition. Finally, it means developing intellectual courage, the courage to stand alone, the courage to reach farther than our grasp, the courage to risk failure . . .
“The system of patriarchy is a historic construct; it has a beginning; it will have an end. Its time seems to have nearly run its course—it no longer serves the needs of men or women and in its inextricable linkage to militarism, hierarchy, and racism it threatens the very existence of life on earth.”
Lerner concludes by stating, “As long as both men and women regard the subordination of half the human race to the other as ‘natural,’ it is impossible to envision a society in which differences do not connote either dominance or subordination . . . A feminist world-view will enable women and men to free their minds from patriarchal thought and practice and at last to build a world free of dominance and hierarchy, a world that is truly human.” Gerda Lerner, THE CREATION OF PATRIARCHY,(New York:Oxford University Press, 1986) Gerda Lerner was first brought to my attention by Maureen Flynn in her review of this website in Gallery and Studio Art Magazine.
It would not have been necessary for Lerner to write this book had it not been for eight thousand years of patriarchal hegemony that has “transformed sexual, social, economic relations and dominated all systems of ideas”. Most importantly, patriarchal ideas about gender which assume what is male is the norm and all-powerful and what is female is deviant, inferior and weak.
Lerner argues that this patriarchal perception of women has over the centuries formed the female psyche in such a way “ as to make women collude in creating and generationally recreating the system which oppressed them.”
Lerner points out that both Aristotle’s Politics and framers of the American Constitution recognized certain political rights of slaves but denied any such rights for women. . . . While women were to be counted among the whole number of free persons in each state for the sake of representation, they had no right to vote” (US Constitution Article I, 3). “The Constitutional issue of the civil and political status of women never entered the debate, just as it had not entered the debate in Aristotles’s philosophy two thousand years earlier”
The birth of a feminine consciousness unique to women and not defined by male patriarchal ideas was a very slow historical process. Lerner explores the roots of such a consciousness that go back to the 7th century AD. She writes that such a consciousness first began with an attempt by women writers to create a Women’s History. This first took the form of historical biographies of notable woman whose achievements were thought to be important enough by the female authors to be recorded and passed on for future generations to emulate. The most famous of these historical biographers was Christine de Pisan who in 1405 published The Book of the City of Ladies. However, even this popular work, like so many others like it, eventually sank into oblivion.
Rather than proceeding along a smooth transition from generation to generation in which one generation could build on the accomplishments of another, women’s history followed a pattern that was quite the opposite. Instead, it developed a repetitive, circular pattern with generation after generation of isolated insights of individual women forgotten and then repeated later by others.
This is lack of continuity is emphasized by Lerner throughout her book. It was basically because female writers received little or no support from male writers. In addition, most women were illiterate and could not form a solid reading audience who could support female authors. “Thus women’s progress into historical consciousness was doubly delayed—by educational disadvantaging and by a lack of knowledge of the work of their predecessors.”
Lerner discusses this fitful progress towards a feminine consciousness in chapters devoted to such topics as Mysticism, Motherhood, Education, Bible criticism, and Creativity.
Because women were considered intellectually inferior to men, every woman who believed that she had the ability to write had to invent a rationale that she could use to justify her authority to write. Since the first female writers usually came from convents where they had the opportunity to become literate, they used their mystical revelations to justify their credibility. The 12th century nun, Hildegard of Bingen, who often had many graphic visions, did not have to pretend that she had any special knowledge or ability to reason, she just knew. Because of her power to convince even popes of her sincerity, she “managed to create an entirely new role for herself and other women without, ostensibly, violating the patriarchal confines within which she functioned.”
Likewise motherhood served as another source of authority for later generations. “As mothers, their duty to instruct the young provided them with the authority to express their ideas on a broad range of subjects. Armed with such authority, they could give advice, instruction in morals and even offer theological interpretations. In modern period, women would reason their way to claims of equality based on motherhood and later even to group consciousness.”
Not only were women able to assume the mantel of authority outside patriarchal confines but they also were skilled at “transforming the concepts and assumptions of male thought and subtly subvert male thought so as to incorporate woman’s cultural knowledge and viewpoint” An excellent example of this wit is expressed in the 17th century writer Rachel Speght when she rebuked a male antagonist by claiming “She [Eve] was not produced from Adam’s foote, to be his too low inferior, nor from his head to be his superior, but from his side, near his heart to be his equall….”
In this clever way she did not question the Eve and Adam story; instead, she turned it around to serve the interest of women who have been maligned by male interpretations of it. This was a common practice of early feminist writers commenting on male interpretations of biblical stories disparaging to women.
Learner devotes an entire chapter to Feminist Bible Criticism because there were certain core texts taken from the Bible that were repeatedly used through the centuries to keep women shackled to patriarchal tenets. (Such as I Corinthians 11:7-9, where St Paul uses the Genesis creation story to define the man/woman relationship: “ For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man”). Because the Bible was considered divinely inspire, most people thought that no arguments could be brought against such scriptural texts and therefore had to be accepted without question. “These biblical core texts sat like huge boulders across the paths women had to travel in order to define themselves as equals of men.”
Nevertheless, this did not stop women from engaging in Biblical criticism. After the advent of the printing press, the Bible became readily available for scrutiny. Lerner remarks, “It is amazing to see how woman after woman engaged in such criticism without reference to theological authorities and without apology. . . . Long before organized groups of women challenged male authority, the feminist bible critics did just that.” Lerner describes in detail a long list of women, beginning with Hildegard of Bingen and Christine de Pizan to the19th century critic Sara Grimke, all who challenged the biblical texts used to subjugate women to a morally, socially, and intellectually inferior status compared to men.
Lerner concludes by summarizing the consequences of a history that ignores women’s history. It means that “the female questions, the woman’s point of view, the paradigm which would include the female experience has until very recently, never entered the common discourse.”
She continues by stating unequivocally “the period of patriarchal hegemony over culture has come to an end. Even though in most places in the world and even in Western democracies male dominance in major cultural institutions persists, the intellectual emancipation of women has shattered the solid monopoly men have held so long over theory and definition. Women do not as yet have power over institutions, over the state, over the law. But the theoretical insights modern feminist scholarship has already achieved have the power to shatter the patriarchal paradigm.
“More than thirteen hundred years of individual struggles, disappointments and persistence have brought women to the historic moment when we can reclaim the freedom of our minds as we reclaim our past. The millennia of women’s pre-history are at an end. We stand at the beginning of a new epoch in the history of humankind’s thought, as we recognize that sex is irrelevant to thought, that gender is a social construct and that woman, like man, makes and defines history.”
Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness,(New York:Oxford University Press,1993) Irshad Manji is a Muslim woman who immigrated to Canada from Uganda, Africa with her parents at the age of four. That was in 1972, when Idi Amin had declared Uganda was for Blacks only.
While growing up in Richmond, a suburb of Vancouver, she experienced both the Muslim and non-Muslim world. In order to take advantage of free babysitting, her father first brought her to the Rose of Sharon Baptist Church where she won the Most Promising Christain of the Year Award at age eight.
Her father was not too pleased with such an honor and immediately had her placed in a madressa, an Islamic religious school. From nine to fourteen she spent every Saturday at the madressa learning how to be an obedient Muslim girl. This meant reciting the Koran in Arabic and not asking questions, like “why can’t girls lead prayer?”
On the other hand, she learned that the multicultural shopping mall and her high school “could accommodate just about anybody who expressed initiative”. In tenth grade she ran for student body president and was elected.
At fourteen Irshad asked one to many questions at the madressa and was given the ultimatum “either you believe or get out. And if you get out, get out for good”. She left shouting in defiance, “Jesus Christ”.
One may wonder why “after my expulsion from the madressa I didn’t damn the whole religion and celebrating my ‘emancipated’ North American self?” The truth is, observed Irshad, “most Muslims are Muslims because we’re born that way. It’s ‘who we are’ ”
Instead of rejecting Islam outright, she calls herself a Muslim “refusenik”. She has rejected what Islam is today and is in search of an Islam that was at one time more tolerant and accommodating.
What follows is a bold, detailed, carefully thought out examination of Islam from the perspective of an intellectually honest and inquiring Muslim woman.
In her search for a more benevolent Islam Inshad received an email introducing her to an Islamic practice called ijthad (pronounced IJ-tee-had). Ijthad allowed for independent thinking within the Muslim community. It was in this spirit that a cultural renaissance occurred during Islam’s Golden Age between the 8-13 Century. During this time the Koran could be debated, libraries and religious schools were built, advances in astronomy and mathematics were made and the ancient classical texts were translated into Arabic.
It was not until the Islamic empire began to decline that ijthad fell out of favor. It was during this time a consensus was reached amongst religious scholars to freeze all debate within Islam. This was thought necessary to guard against the threat of shisms that were beginning to develop in the Islamic world. Irshad comments that “we in the 21st century live with the consequence of this thousand year old strategy to keep the empire from imploding”. As a result such codes as Sharia law, formulated by “classical jurist” during the time of empire, are now regarded as holy and not open to question.
Irshad attributes many of the codes of behavior institutionalized in Sharia Law to what she calls, “desert tribalism”. However, to a Western mind Muslim issues of gender governing female behavior and dress, created ostensibly to preserve women’s honor and chasity, seem to be nothing more than an extreme form of patriarchy. Interestingly, Irshad rarely uses the term patriarchy to define the problem, probably because she’s spreading her net beyond gender to include Islamic racial and religious intolerance, as well. This includes what she calls “Jew bashing”, which is endemic in the Muslim world as she sees it.
Irshad’s hope for the future of Islam rest in the revival of the discarded tradition of 12th Century ijthad. She believes that Islamic women should be in the forefront of such a movement. She emphasizes that this can only happen when women feel empowered. Empowerment begins when women are economically free to take control of their lives. Since Muslims have traditionally been skilled in the art of trade and commerce, Irshad suggest that women become business people. Using the proven micro-loan formula pioneered by Muhammad Yunnis in the 1980s, women should be encouraged to start their own businesses. Aside from empowerment, Irshad believes this is a far better way to preserve a woman’s honor and dignity than depending on a man to do it for her.
To make ijthad workable, Irshad insists that women must also become educated. This includes study of the Koran. (See Notes). Since the Koran, like the Bible, can be used to justify many different points-of-view, women will always be held hostage to a particular reading if they can’t counter with an alternate text. Irshad assures us there are plenty of alternate texts to choose from.
The third important ingredient to implementing ijthad is the media. Irshad envisions a coalition of Muslim and non-Muslim endowed women in the Islamic world owning and managing local TV stations, using the Oprah Winfrey model. Or, alternatively, begin by using “the tried and true” radio broadcast. Radio would be a better way to begin because it would “protect identities in the early years”. Irshad knows the power of the media, she has her own TV program.
Considering the plight of Salman Rushdie, Irshad Manji is a very courageous woman. She travels the world delivering her message to anyone who will listen. She is thankful for the freedoms she enjoys in the West that give her the opportunity to speak with an open mind and travel wherever people will listen. She also reaches a large audience at her website: www.muslim-refusenik.com
At her website you can find translations of her book in three different languages which can be downloaded. They include Arabic, Urdu and Persian. Altogether, THE TROUBLE WITH ISLAM TODAY has been translated into 16 different languages.
Irshad Manji, THE TROUBLE WITH ISLAM TODAY (New York:St. Martin's Griffin) THE SPIRAL DANCE by Starhawk has been in publication for over 25 years and has probably been read by many of the viewers of ISISRISING. Nevertheless, I feel that it should be reviewed here for the benefit of those who have yet to make acquaintance with this very important milestone in feminine/feminist literature. But also because this is a Goddess site and THE SPIRAL DANCE is a superb affirmation of the Goddess tradition.
Although Starhawk emphasizes the important of the Goddess for both women and men, she does not exclude the importance of the God. Throughout the book she balances female and male aspects of the Goddesss/God as well as in our own personalities and behavior. She says that she no longer believes that men and women can be stereotyped according to gender: women can be as aggressive as men and men can be as gentle as women.
In the chapter “Witchcraft as Goddess Religion” Starhawk writes: “The importance of the Goddess symbol for women cannot be overstressed. The image of the Goddess inspires women to see ourselves as divine, our bodies as sacred, the changing phases of our lives as holy, our aggression as healthy, our anger as purifying, and our power to nurture and create, but also to limit and destroy when necessary, as the very force that sustains all life. Through the Goddess, we can discover our strength, enlighten our minds, own our bodies, and celebrate our emotions. We can move beyond narrow, constricting roles and become whole.”
Starhawk continues by calling attention the importance of the Goddess for men.
“The oppression of men in Father God-ruled patriarchy is perhaps less obvious but no less tragic than that of women. Men are encouraged to identify with a model no human being can successfully emulate: to be minirulers of narrow universes [the family, business, church] . . . Men lose touch with their feelings and their bodies, becoming the ‘successful male zombies’ described by Herb Goldberg in THE HAZARDS OF BEING MALE.” As opposed to the all-male God, “The symbol of the Goddess allows men to experience and integrate the feminine aspect of self. The Goddess does not exclude the male; She contains him, as a pregnant woman contains a male child. Her own male aspect embodies both the solar light of the intellect and wild, untamed animal energy.”
The Goddess religion also gives us a different view of the natural world. “The image of God outside of nature has given us a rationale for our own destruction of the natural order and justified our plunder of the earth’s resources. We have attempted to ‘conquer’ nature as we have tried to conquer sin . . . The model of the Goddess who is immanent in nature, fosters respect for the sacredness of all living things.”
Starhawk describes in Chapter 5 the many different aspects of the Goddess and how they relate to our present worldview. She strongly believes that the ancient Goddess is as relevant to us today as she was thousands of years ago. “The symbolism of the Goddess has taken on an electrifying power for modern women. The rediscovery of the ancient matrifocal civilizations has given us a deep sense of pride in woman’s ability to create and sustain culture. It has exposed the falsehoods of patriarchal history, and given us models of female strength and authority. Once again in today’s world, we recognize the Goddess—ancient and primeval; the first of deities; patroness of the Stone Age hunt and of the first sowers of seeds; under whose guidance the herd were tamed, the healing herbs first discovered; in whose image the first works of art were created; for whom the standing stones were raised; who was the inspiration of song and poetry.”
When asked if she believes in the Goddess, her reply was “Do you believe in rocks?”
She explains, “The phrase “believe in” itself implies that we cannot know the Goddess, that She is somehow intangible, incomprehensible . . . In the Craft, [Wicca] we to do not
believe in the Goddess—we connect with Her; through the moon, the stars, the ocean, the earth, through trees, animals, through other human beings, through ourselves. She is here. She is within us all.” In other words one does not have to believe in something that you can see, touch and feel with your hands and eyes. That is the difference between an immanent Goddess and a transcendent God.
Starhawk continues with a study of “The Charge of the Goddess” (which can be read at Poems for the Goddess) to help the reader more fully comprehend the Goddess as understood by Wicca and the pagan community. For example, the opening line,'Whenever you have need of anything', she explains, “refers to both spiritual and material needs. In Witchcraft, there is no separation. The Goddess is manifest in the food we eat, the people we love, the work we do, the homes in which we live. It is not considered ignoble to ask for needed goods and comforts.” Again,'as a sign that you are free you shall be naked in your rites' is understood to mean “the naked body represents truth, the truth that goes deeper than social custom.” The line,'For My law is love unto all things', she comments, “[love] includes passionate sexual love, the warm affection of friends, the fierce protective love of mother for child, the deep comradeship of the coven. There is nothing amorphous or superficial about love in Goddess religion; it is always specific, directed toward real individuals, not vague concepts of humanity.”
In addition to providing a comprehensive defense of the Goddess, Starhawk also includes in THE SPIRAL DANCE detailed information that shows the reader how the Goddess religion is practiced in wicca. She describes many of the rituals, invocations, initiation, spells, magic, the different forms of subtle energy and how to work with them. In this regard the most fascinating chapters describe how to induce a trance state and how to raise the cone of power. Each chapter is replete with exercises that the reader can practice to experience the altered states she describes.
Starhawk firmly believes that we are now living in a time when the ancient Goddess is reawakening in the hearts of women and men who are looking for relief from wars and ecological rape. Starhawk, THE SPIRAL DANCE:A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess, 20th Anniversary Edition,(HarperSanFrancisco, 1999) Ashley Montagu believes that women have been the main civilizing force in the world since the dawn of the human race. He attributes this drive to create a humane world to a woman's deeply-felt, maternal relationship to her child. He writes, "The maternalizing influences of being a mother have, from the very beginning of the human species, made the female the more humane of the sexes. The love of a mother for her child is the basic patent and model for all human relationships."
The mother-child relationship has set women in a unique position in the evolutionary development of the human race. "Because women have had to be unselfish, forbearing, self-sacrificing, and maternal, they possess a deeper understanding than men of what it means to be human. . . .By comparison with the deep involvement of women in living, men appear to be only superficially engaged."
From earliest times when women had been learning lessons in cooperative, altruistic behavior, men gradually developed a more hostile, aggressive way of relating to the world. Of the two methods for human interaction, it's quite clear that "as far as the human species is concerned, its evolutionary destiny, its very survival, is linked to the capacity for love and cooperation." It is in their capacity to love that women can demonstrate their superior talent to save a world from falling over the edge. Montague believes that woman's superior qualities come with a higher responsibility. He states in unequivocal terms, "It is the function of women to teach men how to be human."
For this to happen women must realize their inherent power as the mother of their children. In other words, "the hand that rocks the cradle, rules the world." In creating a world fit for human beings to live in, " The greatest single step forward in this direction will be made when women consciously assume the task of teaching their children to be, like themselves, loving and cooperative." It is a theme that is repeated over and over in this book.
Montagu does not accept the feminist view that women need to compete with men or that the task of motherhood places her in an inferior position. He believes that "Women and men should cooperate. That is what they were intended to do by nature and that is what it is their nature to do." For such cooperation to be realized it is necessary to dispel the illusion of men's superiority and women's inferiority. It's also necessary to understand that "cooperation and competition are not mutually reconcilable drives. Either you are a cooperator or a competitor; if you are both, then you are in a state of disoperativeness, of confusion, unreconciled and in conflict with yourself. And this is the state in which most members of Western civilization find themselves; this is the state that is essentially identified with the masculine spirit, the masculine role in society"
The world will not become a more civilized place until men recognize the value of kindness and cooperation. According to Montagu such kindness must extend beyond a man's children, "they [men] must be kind to their wives also, to all women." Nor will cooperation between men and women be fully realized until women are given the right of complete equality as a human being. That means not just by the rule of law but also in "all human relationships on the interpersonal plane."
Montagu makes it clear that by claiming the superiority of women he is not trying to degrade men. He maintains that his only intention is to state the facts in order to correct the myths. "The facts prove that woman is biologically the superior organism, superior in the sense of enjoying, by virtue of her biological traits, a higher survival value than the male. . . . With respect to psychological and social qualities, the facts again, it seems to me, prove that women are superior to men. The proof here too, is by the measure of our test of biological superiority, for women by their greater loving kindness and humanity, tend to confer survival benefits upon all who come within their orbit more frequently than do men."
The biological superiority of women is based on the fact that all women possess two X chromosomes. One advantage this gives women is that it protects them from the deleterious effects of a recessive gene in one of the two X chromosomes. With only one X chromosome, men do not have such protection from the effects of a recessive gene.
THE NATURAL SUPERIORITY OF WOMEN concludes with a paean to motherhood: "Women are the mothers of humanity. . . .What mothers are to their children, so will man be to man . . . Women are the carriers of the true spirit of humanity—the love of the mother for her child . . . . Maternal love is the purest and at the same time the most efficient form of love because it is the most compassionate, because it is the most sympathetic, because it is the most understanding and the least censorious."
"Why," asks Montagu, "cannot we love our fellow human beings as mothers love their children?. . . . It is the way of love in which human beings may live most successfully and happily and in optimum health, and it is the evolutionary destiny of human beings so to love each other. I believe that it is the unique function and destiny of women to teach men to live as if to live and love were one." Montagu sees the "long range of human history. . . groping . . . toward a way of life in which human beings will love one another as mothers love their children . . . Hence, the crucial importance of women in this evolutionary process and the great necessity of becoming consciously aware of what has, for the most part, been attempting unconsciously to realize itself: the love of man for man. . . .Woman must stand firm and be true to her own inner nature." Ashley Montagu, THE NATURAL SUPERIORITY OF WOMEN, Revised Edition(New York: Collier Books, 1952) THE FIRST SEX draws upon two separate ideas. The first is the Atlantean concept that an advanced civilization once excerted a global influence that predates historical time. The second idea is that civilization owes it's earliest beginnings to the genius of prehistoric women. Elizabeth Gould-Davis believes the two ideas merged in ancient times when woman preserved the "germ of the lost civilization" and brought it into its "second flowering."
If the gods and goddesses of today are but the heroes and heroines of yesterday, then Davis reasons, "the goddesses of historical times were but the reflected memory of the ruling hierarchy of a former civilization."
These assumptions may or may not be valid. What's more clear from recent archeological evidence is that at the time "When recorded history begins, we behold the finale of the long pageant of prehistory....The curtain of written history rises on what seems to be the tragic last act of a protracted drama."
Davis visualizes this scene in the context of classical Greek theatre, "On the stage, firmly entrenched on her ancient throne, appears woman, the heroine of the play. About her, her industrious subjects perform their age-old roles. Peace, Justice, Progress, Equality play their parts with a practiced perfection.
"Off in the wings, however, we hear a faint rumbling--the rumbling of the discontented, the jealous complaints of the new men who are no longer satisfied with their secondary role in society. Led perhaps by the queen's consort, the rebellious males burst onstage,overturn the queen's throne, and take her captive. Her consort moves to center stage. He lifts his bloody sword over the heads of the courtiers. The queen's subjects Democracy, Peace, Justice and the rest--flee the scene in disarray. And man, for the first time in history, stands triumphant, dominating the stage as the curtain falls."
From this pivotal time in history when man first usurped the governing authority of woman, the status of women slowly and inexorably deteriorated. "The patriarchal revolution moved slowly westward from the Near East, reaching Western Europe only in the fifth century of our era." In Europe and the British Isle the Celts maintained "the tradition of female supremacy until the fall of Rome, when waves of Germanic barbarians ...met the surge of Oriental Christianity as it spread upward from the Mediterranean." Together these two fiercely patriarchal movements crushed the Celts and the last remnants of a matriarchal civilization.
The end result of these historical events is "two thousand years of propaganda concerning the inferiority of woman. . . .So long has the myth of feminine inferiority prevailed that women themselves find it hard to believe that their own sex was once and for a very long time the superior and dominant sex. In order to restore women to their ancient dignity and pride, they must be taught their own history. . . ."
So begins Davis' critique. She firmly believes that just because it happened thousands of years ago, doesn't mean it has no relevance to our modern dilemma. The threads of history bind everyone to their past. Understanding how these threads were woven into the tapestry of history can make it possible to understand the present inferior status of women and to unravel the ideologies that led to gross miscarriages of justice. Miscarriages that occurred on both sides of the matriarchical/patriarchal spectrum. History has shown that to create a matriarchal society that treats men as inferior is just as unsatisfying as creating a patriarchal society treating women as inferior.
"It seems evident," writes Davis, "that the time has come to put woman back into the history books, . . . and to readmit her to the human race." Davis begins this process of putting woman back into history books by presenting a scholarly study of prehistory, using all the information now available to the modern historian. She devotes chapters to the examination of mythological, archeological, and anthropological evidence that reveal woman's former role in creating viable, civil societies in prehistoric times. The matriarchal societies that founded Catal Huyuk, the cities of Ur, Minoan culture of Crete, and the Etruscan civilization of Italy are all examined giving due credit to the role women played in these enterprises.
Davis also reexamines later historical evidence that details how woman were subjected to a determined patriarchal effort by the Christianized Roman emperors, the papacy, and lastly the Puritians to debase and dehumanize all women. At one point the papacy tried to rule that women had no souls. This measure would have been instituted had it not been for the dissenting vote of the Celtic bishops.
Davis continues by giving a stinging critique of woman's inferior place during the Medieval, Reformation, Enlightment, and Nineteenth century. In regard to the 20th century she calls her chapter "The Prejudice Lingers On". She opens with the indictment that "The traditional belief in the inferiority of women is a doctrine that has been so thoroughly imposed in the past few centuries by the combined weight of law, religion, government, and education that its refutation by history, archeology, anthropology, and psychology will have little effect without extreme measures on the part of established authority."
In the light of centuries of indoctrination Davis admits that "It is small wonder that the average American woman, unaquainted with past history and incapable of plumbing the depths of man's ancient psychopathic complusion to punish her, accepts this image of herself..."
Despite such a gloomy outlook, Davis ends THE FIRST SEX believing the formidable, intrinsic qualities within woman will in the end overcome all obstacles. In the last chapter entitled, "Women in the Aquarian Age" Davis sees woman as "the natural ally of nature and her instinct is to tend, to nurture, to encourage healthy growth, and to preserve the ecological balance. She is the natural leader of society and of civilization, and the usurpation of her primeval authority by man has resulted in the uncoordinated chaos that is leading the human race inexorably back to barbarism."
Davis foresees "woman. . . looking back over the heads of the patriarchs, and she sees herself as nature intended her to be--the primary force in human advancement. . . she counters violence with peace, enmity with conciliation, hate with love. And thus she guides wild and lawless man towards a milder, gentler culture. . . In the new science of the twenty-first century, not physical force but spiritual force will lead the way. Mental and spiritual gifts will be more in demand than gifts of a physical nature. Extrasensory perception will take precedence over sensory perception. . . .She who was revered and worshiped by early man because of her power to see the unseen will once again be the pivot--not as sex but as divine woman--about whom the next civilization will, as of old, revolve."
Elizabeth Gould Davis, THE FIRST SEX, (Baltimore, Penguin Books, Inc.,1973) (Note: THE FIRST SEX is out of print but used copies can be obtained at Books & Borders stores) In many respects this book might seem like a wish list. It is a collection of essays written by women who have been asked to complete the sentence "If women ruled the world...". This is not a trival exercise because change can only begin when one imagines how the status quo could be different. And if the change is going to be initiated by women, then asking this question is the first step in the process.
Americans like to think of themselves as leading the world, but when it comes to women's rights, the truth is much different. Marie C. Wilson, president and founder of the White House Project, writes in the Foreword "United States is 57th in the world in women's political representation (behind Slovakia and tied with Andorra); the pipeline to political leadership in America, the state legislatures, has been hovering at about 20% for a decade; men occupy 86% of Congressional seats, 84% of governorships, and 88% of the seats on top corporate boards. Yet women are more than half of the U.S. population."
What is even more shocking and inspiring, writes Ms Wilson, " 'developing' countries continue to rocket ahead of our pillar of democracy." Marie Wilson recalls the words from women of France, India, Sweden, and Switzerland speaking at a women's conference-- "democracy without women in power is not democracy at all". Infact, Wilson writes of one woman, "a majestic member of the South African Parliament, upon hearing of our nation's failure to trust women with real power and authority, stood before the crowd and promised to stand by her sisters in America as we fight for our rightful place in control of our destiny." Wilson adds, "I could have cried".
Editor, Sheila Ellison, recalls her own awakening call in the Introduction. "Once I married and had four kids or my own, I had less interest in what was going on around me; my world consisted of my home, my family, my friends, my husband's success and what that bought for us. If you had asked me about world hunger or the Cold War-- the issues of the day-- I would have had a vague bad feeling but not much more.
"But then my life changed dramatically: I was suddenly a single mother of four children with no financial support, and my youngest son was diagnosed with autism. My awareness skyrocketed..."
IF WOMEN RULED THE WORLD is written, writes Ms. Ellison, "to engage your mind, heart, and imagination to the point where you feel uniquely called to participate." To encourage readers to take such a step, Ellison has included a "call-to-action" idea after many of the essays.
Ellison admits that many women feel that they aren't meant to rule, "that we should nurture or cooperatively share the power". Her response is that "to get to a place where we are equally sharing the power, we have to assume more leadership positions and believe we have the determination, intelligence, and compassion to rule at all levels."
Some of the topics contained in IF WOMEN RULED THE WORLD include, The Courage to Be Ourselves, The Insight to Build Family, Connecting to Our Communities, Having a Voice in the Business World, The Wisdom to Seek National Solutions, The Compassion to Embrace the World. The title to a few essays range from "We'd Learn to Disappoint Others", "We Would Learn to Love Our Thighs" to such concerns as, "Family Court Orders Would Be Enforced" and "We'd Embrace the Feminine Face of Spirituality". This last essay can be read in Womyn's Wisdom.
Sheila Ellison, IF WOMEN RULED THE WORLD, (Inner Ocean Publishing, 2004) Äsne Seierstad has given us a rare glimpse into the life of an
Islamic family in Kabul, Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban.
Of particular interest is the way the family is structured and how
the lives of women in the family are narrowly defined by the traditions of Islamic social behavior.
Äsne, a journalist from Norway, was given the opportunity to live
with Sultan Khan and his family. Sultan was an educated bookseller in Kabul who had survived the communist book burnings, the Mujahedeen looting and pillaging, and the Taliban's book burnings. When Sultan invited Äsne to his home for an evening
meal, she didn't hesitate to accept. For Äsne, Sultan was a "living history of Afghan cultural history, a history book on two feet."
The Khan family was not a typical Afghan family, they were literate and did not want for food. Sultan and several members in
the Khan family could speak fluent English and could act as interpreters.
After sharing a meal with Sultan's family and finding herself accepted by his mother, his youngest sister, his sons and daughters and two wives, she asked Sultan if she could live with them and live the way they live. Explaining that she wanted to write a book about his family, she was surprised when Sultan said, without hesitating, "You are welcomed."
As a western woman Äsne was able to mingle freely between both the men and the women in the Khan family.She quickly learned that
Sultan had final authority in the family. When he decided to take a second wife after he decided that his first wife was too old to bear more sons, he chose a beautiful young, illiterate girl to be his second wife. Although no one in the family accepted his choice, his will prevailed and no one could dispute it.
Since women in Afghan society rarely say what they feel to strangers, Äsne was in a unique position. The women she lived with learned to confide in her many of the things they would have otherwise kept to themselves. This is especially important when one realizes that "in Afghanistan a woman's longing for love is taboo. It is forbidden by the tribes' notion of honor and by the mullahs. Young people have no right to meet, to love, or to choose. Love has little to do with romance; on the contrary, love can be interpreted as committing a serious crime, punishable by death. The undisciplined are cruelly killed. Should only one guilty party be executed, it is invariable the woman.
"Young women are above all objects to be bartered or sold. Marriage is a contract between families or within families. Decisions are made according to the advantages the marrriage brings to the tribe-- feelings are rarely taken in consideration."
A beautiful or educated woman can refuse a suitor because her family knows they can find others. But a less fortunate woman would not go against family and tradition.
Äsne describes in detail how Leila, Sultan's youngest Cinderella sister, who is the only one in the family who cooks the meals, cleans the dirt floor, serves the men's every wish, and suffers verbal abuse when she does not please properly. Her ambition is to teach English to women in a woman's school. She sees this as her only salvation. Unfortunately, the government beauracy has made such a dream a nightmare of obstacles that she does not have the strength or resources to overcome. When she meets a suitor who could save her, tradition constrains her to respond to him coldly: Äsne, who has the privilege of knowing what was not said, adds, "Leila is irritated that he dares ask about these things. Anyhow, it is Sultan or her mother who decides."
This is but one example how women in Khans family are described repeatedly as deferring their interests to what has been prescribed by tradition and never questioned. To make a break from tradition is to suffer rejection by the family and never be forgiven.
Paradoxically, the Khan saga ends at what is really the beginning. In the epilogue Äsne includes a brief note that the Khan family has split. She writes that Sultan's two wives are the only women still living in the Khan house, along with his sons.
We are left to guess what crisis provoked Leila and Bibi Gul, Sultan's mother who was the matriarch of the family, to defy Sultan and voluntarily leave (or perhaps thrown out) the household. As demanding as the patriarchical family is in Afghanistan and other countries there seems to be a sign of steam beginning to appear inside the kettle of bottled up fustration. The untold story in this book is the fire underneath the kettle. Äsne Seierstad, Bookseller of Kabul, THE GREAT COSMIC MOTHER is a truly heroic literary work, 500 pages long, tracing the history of women's early culture and religion from Paleolithic and Neolithic times to the present. It is a book written under conditions of extreme privation by Barbara Mor, a women who was willing to sacrifice everything for the sake of setting the record straight regarding women’s historical place in the world. Living in a small adobe hut in Taos, working 8 hours daily at a
typewriter set on a wooden spool table, biking 25 miles to Taos once a week in all kinds of weather to get food, supplies and mail, she slept at night in a sleeping bag she shared with her two daughters in a room that she couldn't afford to heat above 40 degrees.
Mor divides THE GREAT COSMIC MOTHER into two parts: the first part includes women's early cultural and religious beginnings and the second part covers the rise of patriarchal culture and religion.
In the first chapter entitled," The First Sex: 'In the Beginning We Were All Created Equal'" Mor introduces a revolutionary idea. Despite whatever the Bible has to say about the creation of women, Mor maintains that speaking from a strictly biological view, women are not derived from men but rather it’s quite the opposite. She quotes Mary Jane Sherfey, M.D. who proposed the inductor theory which states that "All mammalian embryos, male and female, are anatomically female during the early stages of fetal life." This theory has since been modified and is now accepted as facts of mammalian—including human—development.
According to Stephen Jay Gould, another researcher in this field quoted by Mor, "the embryo in its first eight weeks is an ‘indifferent’ creature, with bisexual potential. In the eighth week, if a Y-chromosome-bearing sperm fuses with the egg, the gonads will develop into testes, which secrete androgen, which in turn induces male genitalia to develop. In the absence of androgen, the embryo develops into a female."
Gould concludes: "The female course of development is in a sense, biologically intrinsic to all mammals. It is the pattern that unfolds in the absence of any hormonal influence. The male route is a modification induced by secretion of androgens from the developing testes."
In other words, Mor points out that maleness among mammals is not a primary state, but differentiates in the prenatal state from the original female biochemistry and anatomy.
Mor continues by arguing that the early cultural achievements commonly attributed to men were in fact the product of women. Barbara Mor's main thesis is that it is women not men who contributed to the evolutionary process which led to the rise of civilizations and human culture. We have been led to believe that it was men who hunted and provide the main food supply for the community, it was men who first invented tools and that the increased sophistication of these tools attests to his evolving intelligence. In this scenario Mor observes, woman is not comprehended as an evolutionary
or evolutionizing creature. This despite woman's substantial food gathering activities,
this despite woman's digging sticks that were the most primal tools ever found in ancient sites, this despite the known fact that women were the first potters, the first weavers ,the first textile-dyers and hide tanners, the first to gather and study medicinal plants (i.e., he first doctors).
These advances in human development did not happen in a vacuum. Mor explains, "To approach our human past-- and the female God-- we need a wagon with at least two wheels." One wheel is based on historical-archaeological evidence. The second is based on biological-anthropological evidence. The first wheel, the historical track, has been studied in depth by many writers. The other side of the wagon has "almost no wheel or track: not because there is no important place to go in that direction, but because the physical-cultural anthropologists are off somewhere else, busily mapping the evolution of Tarzan. There is no body of anthropological work based on the evolution of female biology."
These evolutionary changes of the female body include:
(1) Elimination of the estrus cycle, and development of the menstrual cycle [which] meant that women were not periodically in heat, but capable of sexual activity at any time...Among all other animals, the estrus cycle determines that copulation always results in pregnancy, and has no other than a reproductive purpose.
(2) Development of the clitoris and evolution of the vagina.
(3) The change from rear to frontal sex.
(4) Development of breasts.
Mor refers to a book by Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove called, THE WISE WOUND:
Menstruation and Everywoman, to emphasize the importance of such an evolutionary change. "THE WISE WOMAN shows how the human female's menstrual cycle was the critical evolutionary advance that initiated human society and culture....This shifting of sexual-hormonal action led to increased alertness of the brain and its electrical activity; i.e., women have sexual energy at our disposal separable from reproductive energy. For woman biology is not destiny in the narrow reproductive sense, even if patriarchy has tried, through the dogmatic suppression of our autonomous sexuality, to reverse this evolution. (Patriarchal religion is, in this sense, a primate religion, trying to pull the human female back from her evolutionary advance over other primates; for in this one aspect alone does human sexuality differ from primate sexuality....) The sole function of the clitoris is sexual pleasure, and it is the only organ in the human body devoted to pleasure alone....This means that woman's sexual capacity is enormously enhanced and multiple. And it is present in us from birth to death, clitoral sensation being determined neither by puberty nor menopause. When freed, woman's autonomous sexual capacity is a great source of psychic, productive, creative, and magical powers. It was at the origins of human culture, and it is necessary to any further human evolutionary advance."
Mor firmly believes that "women have got to understand the importance of the switch from primate estrus to human menstrual cycle, because this was the mechanism of female evolution (italics mine). It is also the target of patriarchy. Female sexuality and female evolution are-- have been, for 2 or 3 millennia at least-- in a lethal deadlock with patriarchal ideology, religious, economic, and political. This is because patriarchy, as a system, wants to enforce and maintain male primate power-dominance-control over our species."
This, however, is getting ahead of our story of human development. Having laid the groundwork for women's contributions to the civilizing forces that later were to shape the Neolithic period, Mor devotes succeeding chapters to early women as culture creators, women as the first creators of verbal speech, women as the first mother, and women as creators of an organic religion.
As the first culture creators Mor writes, "The evidence is there, quite tangible. When we realize how many basic life industries were the inventions of women—cooking, food processing and storage, ceramics, weaving, textiles and design, tanning and dyeing, everything related to fire…the medicinal arts, language itself and the first scripts and glyphs, grain domestication, animal domestication, religious imagery and ritual, domestic and sacred architecture, the first calendars and the origins of astronomy, inventions. They are still all around us today, they constitute our world."
One only need to look at the process of bread-making to realize the intelligence of early women to create the means for their survival: the planting of the seed, the careful harvesting, grinding the grain into flour; then the correct combination of water, yeast, and fire to obtain from the seed, bread for human survival.
Pottery was another inventive art that proves the intelligent ingenuity of early women. This can be appreciated when one realizes that a temperature of 600 degrees is required to fire the clay, no small feat in those days. The pots were used not only for daily use but also for religious rituals. The designs and glyphs used to decorate the pots became the precursors of artistic designs, symbolic communication and written language.
Whether the first Goddess, Mother Earth, was a human concept or the sign of a human response to an experienced fact, it's clear that the religious beliefs, the mysteries and rites developed by ancient women grew organically out of women's roles as cultural producer, mothers, and communicators with the spirit world. "The primal mysteries of all religions emerged from women's direct physical and psychic experiences of these mysteries: in bleeding, in growing a child, in nursing, in working with fire, in making a pot, in planting a seed."
Mor explains that "The male God–Father making human beings from clay, or dust. . . is stolen without shame from earlier Sumerian and Babylonian Goddess creation stories. Such a patriarchal version of a creation is very recent; the facts of women's experience of life are primordial. It is woman who goes through the sacred transformations in [her] own body and psyche—the mystery-changes of menstruation, pregnancy, birth, and the production of milk . . . Woman's awe at her capacity to create life is the basis of mystery (italics mine). . .Numerous Paleolithic figurines of women representing the pregnant Goddess go back over 30,000 years. . . If the mystery of birth is the origin of religion, it is to the woman that we must look for the phenomenon that first made her aware of the unseen power." Mor sees woman's early Mother Earth religions as "organic, a unity of body and spirit, of daily life tasks and cosmic meaning."
Later in the Neolithic era (5000-4000 B.C.) "the women drew on their daily practical experiences as agriculturalists to create elaborate new myths of cyclic birth, death and resurrection. . . Always a connection was made between the miraculous growth of the plant from a seed buried in the earth, and the dead body, planted also in the earth, with the hope of regeneration through her womb-powers."
An elaborate symbolic language associated with the Neolithic Great Goddess developed during this time. They included such objects as the horned altar, the sacred pillar, the cosmic snake and egg, the labyrinth, the world tree, the dove, the swastika, the sacrificial double-ax or labrys, the bee, the butterfly and chrysalis. Mor emphasizes that "Ancient people believed that power resided in images themselves—or rather in the resonance between the image and the thing imaged—and this belief still lives in all of us; symbols continue to have great power over the human mind and heart." Mor uses succeeding chapters to explain how these symbols played an important role in defining the sacred mysteries of the Goddess religions. Her description of Avebury and Stonehenge is especially compelling owing in part to the time she lived in that area and made it her home.
In the second half of THE GREAT COSMIC MOTHER, Mor describes the advent of the patriarchal God-Father and how it replaced the Earth-Mother. From a religious viewpoint the basic difference between the two concepts is that the Mother Goddess created the earth, and the Creation is of the same substance as her, the whole Creation is divine, and divinely related; whereas, the God-Father, being a man, could not create anything out of his body. Consequently, the whole attitude of humans towards the God and Creation had to be altered.
This basic contradiction of a male God creating humans explains the elaborate patriarchal system that was devised over the centuries to hide, obfuscate, deny and finally destroy the Goddess religions. "In the Bronze Age creation now comes to be seen as evil—the creator is above and apart from his creation, and while he is perfect, the world is flawed. And so the idea of Original sin can be conceived, for the first time, to rationalize the unnatural new relation between the human soul and the aloof God. This lays the basis for all further alienated relationships--between people and God, between people and people, between people and the natural world. Between rulers and ruled. For now the primary relation is not that we share the same divine substance, but that we share the same material corruption. And the entire priesthood exists to "redeem" us from the "sin" of being born from the Great Mother [Eve]." By comparison God is seen as perfect, good, transcendent, and disembodied Spirit, totally freed from matter, i.e., free from the Great Mother.
The Great Mother Goddess had been all powerful but under patriarchy she was virtually turned into a sex-slave "by isolating each individual woman, keeping her under total control within the male-dominated and defined family household—where she is never allowed freedom of movement, of thought, of desire--where her body, her mind, her labor, and her children are seen as property, [as]
wealth belonging to the man."
Between Confucius' (circa 600 BC) "Three Obediences" (to father, husband, and sons), and Adolph Hitler's "Three Spheres of Women: Children, Christian Church, and Kitchen" lies a simple fact: In the 2,500 years that separate these two men, a patriarchal society was built and maintained, worldwide, entirely by the exploitation of women's biological creation and physical labor.
Mor ends her indictment of male patriarchal suppression by touching the Achilles heel of male patriarchal religion, namely the separation of the sexual and spiritual powers. "Male mystics, within patriarchal cultures and systems, can never reach a true fusion, in the depths of their beings, of the sexual and spiritual powers. Patriarchy's pejorative definitions of sexuality, and abstract definitions of spirit, prohibit this fusion. Patriarchal mystics are out of resonance with the earth spirit, with ecstasy, and with the dead. Most of all they are out of contact with female energy—their patriarchal worldviews are based on a biophobic denial of this creative female energy in both women and men. . . Union, or fusion, cannot happen within patriarchal terms. It is patriarchy, after all, which deliberately set out to banish and destroy ecstasy."
"What is ecstasy? It is our original state of being. It is the conscious expansion of the universe into a multitude of interconnected dimensions and forms. It is her dance of being, from which all of us were born . . . It is the human female who was designed by evolution itself as the link between sexuality and spirit, between biological energy and the cosmic soul. It is the human female, as the leading edge of earthly evolution, who was specifically, neurologically structured for the experience of ecstasy. For this reason the first religions on earth were designed by women, for women, and in celebration of femaleness. For this reason matrifocal cultures had no reason or need to deny 'the Other'—for all 'otherness' was part of the Mother. In ecstasy, all 'otherness' becomes the self, the One." Monic Sjoor & Barbara Mor,THE GREAT COSMIC MOTHER: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth, (HarperSanFranciso, 1991) In a certain land, in a certain kingdom, there was a merchant whose wife died, leaving him with an only son, Ivan. He put his son in charge of a tutor, and after some time took another wife;and since Ivan, the merchant's son, was now of age and very handsome, his stepmother fell in love with him. One day Ivan went with his tutor to fish in the sea on a small raft; suddenly they saw thirty ships making toward them. On these ships sailed the Maiden Tsar with thirty other maidens, all her foster sisters. When the ships came close to the raft, all thirty of them dropped anchor . Ivan and his tutor were invited aboard the best ship, where the Maiden Tsar and her thirty foster sisters received them; she told Ivan that she loved him passionately and had come from afar to see him. So they were betrothed.
The Maiden Tsar told the merchant's son to return to the same place the following day, said farewell to him, and sailed away....The next day the ships sailed close to the raft and cast anchor; the Maiden Tsar sent for Ivan, asking him to hasten to her; but he was sound asleep."
Thus begins the Russian folk tale of the Maiden Tsar. THE MAIDEN KING combines the wisdom and insights of both a poet and a psychologist. Robert Bly, the poet, and Marion Woodman, a Jungian analyst, examine the story as a type of literature which conveys its message through metaphor rather than direct statement. Both Bly and Woodman guide the uninitiated reader through the rich metaphorical language so that s/he can discover a vision of the powerful feminine, in the form of the Maiden Tsar. It's an energy our contemporary, patriarchal world has not yet been able to receive.
Bly and Woodman, each in their separate ways, show how we ,too, like Ivan cannot receive or sustain the powerful energy of the feminine and like the young hero, fall asleep.
"The powerful feminine, grounded in the divine, does not always wait for the masculine to wake up. It has its own life. The story says that the goddess takes the love that she once had for the masculine and buries it in a series of containers. The containers include an oak, a hare, a duck and an egg inside the duck, all images traditionally rich in spiritual meaning."
Unlike Campbell's HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES, Ivan, the hero in this story, does not rescue but is rescued. The first step on his journey is a visit to Baba Yaga, the fierce old crone of Russian folk tradition. He is greeted by her little song:
After feeding the boy she asks him a trick question: "Did you come of your own accord, or did someone send you?"
Ivan very cleverly answers, "I'd say my own will accounted for about 60% and other people's will about 140%."
Ivan having evaded the trap is embolden to ask a question himself.
"Now, Grandma, is it time for me to ask you a question?"
"Go ahead"
"Do you know where the Kingdom Three Times Nine Plus Three is?"
By remaining polite and non-aggressive, Ivan is able to extract the information he needs from each of the three fearsome Baba Yagas he meets in his quest to find the Maiden Tsar.
"THE MAIDEN KING presents a map of the sorrow both men and women feel today in relation to each other and it provides a guide to their eventual reconciliation. Ultimately by the end of the book, both masculine and feminine find a place of intersection where they can discard their false projections of each other.
The story says that none of this reunion or reconciliation of men and women can be done without Baba Yaga, the One Who Both Feeds and Eats, a figure whom the church has kept out of our mythology for centuries. THE MAIDEN KING will be read for decades as a daring investigation of themes that lie beneath the surface of our culture, laying out new ways of moving toward maturity." (excerpts from dust jacket) THE MAIDEN KING by Robert Bly and Marion Woodman, (New York: Henry Holt and Company,1998)
I would say the goddess energy is trying to save us. If we go on with our power tactics, we're going to
destroy the earth. That's why we haven't got a long time to evolve. We're either going to make a leap in
consciousness or we aren't going to be here. Sophia, Shakti, by whatever name we call her, is that wisdom
deep down in all matter, pushing her way into consciousness, one way or another. We have to be aware of
earthquakes and hurricanes. What are their rumbling trying to tell us?
I don't know if there's any change coming in patriarchy. It's war here, war there and power everywhere.
And yet the Berlin Wall is down. It's down! What happened in China, in Tianamen Square, tragic as it was,
was a push for freedom from patriarchy...
Power is no longer going to work, except destructively.
That's also clear between men and women. We've been brought up on power; our parents and grandparents
were brought up on power. We use power when we don't know we're using it, even people who want to do good.
It can happen in psychotherapy--therapists who want to do good and have an image of what their clients
should be. They think it's love that is motivating them as they tell their clients what to do. But that's
power, not love. We do not know another person's destiny.
Love mirrors the other person, tries to see the soul of the other. Mind you, it's very hard to
see because the soul long ago learned that if it shows itself it will get knocked down. When the child's
soul tries to say something, the parents say, "That's not what you should say, that's not what you think."
Or the teacher says, or the boss says, or the husband says, or the kids say, "That's not who you are."
Gradually the soul goes underground. You see this in dreams where the dreamer is told to go and find what
is buried in that black box in the back shed or some other hidden place. And sure enough this marvelous
little creature is right there. I remember one dream where the woman puts her hand in that box and when
she pulls her hand out she has a pet bird she loved as a child. It's just a little bird but it's still
alive. She holds it on her hand and she's smitten with guilt because it's starving. But her tears falling
on the bird transform it into a radiant little boy who says, "I only wanted to sing my song." That sort of
dream can change your life--if you can remember you once had a song to sing.
CONSCIOUS FEMININITY: Interviews with Marion Woodman,(Inner City Books, 1993),pp97,98
Note: Marion Woodman is a widely read author, leader in women's spirituality and feminine
consciousness, and a Jungian analyst. Internationally acclaimed for her work as a bridge-builder
between the male and female worlds, she is the best-selling author of many books, including Addiction
to Perfection, The Pregnant Virgin, Conscious Femininity, and Bone: Dying into Life.
Suppose that every gesture one made--every work, every act, signal, motion, a smile, a frown, a wave
of a hand, a shout, a scream, a kick, a rush of words--each and every expression of one's psyche were
ignored. Suppose that in a company of people, every time one opened one's mouth to speak, one's own
words were drowned out by other words. Or suppose that if one finally spoke into waiting silence,
one encountered no response, no dialogue but instead simply a stillness, as if nothing had ever been
said. Along with defamation of being, this is the single most comon experience that a woman has of
her own real presence in the pornographic culture.
And now let us suppose that, outside of the image of nonbeing, a woman suspects that she has a being.
She is, of course, timid. What else can one expect? This is a being which has been described variously
as ridiculous. murderous, grotesque, overwhelming. (A being which makes men "flinch.")But even so, the
force of her own soul drives her past her own shyness to some expression. She speaks. Or she acts. She
does something and so, visible, becomes herself in the world. She has been taught all her life, since
childhood, that to be a woman is to be nothing. But now, despite the same voice within her, she rebels.
She takes courage. She exists. And what, then, does she discover? Silence.
For this is the other way by which a woman is reduced to nothingness. She is ignored by culture. She
is made invisible. Her presence is simply not recognized. In the case of an act of history (such as
the fact that it was primarily women who brought down the Bastille), this act is simply not reported.
It is erased from the history books. In the case of a woman who speaks, who writes, her work goes
unrecognized. Thus, Cristine de Pisan, [who]wrote a book called The City of Women in the
Middle Ages, is forgotten. And now if a woman has felt inside her the loss of self, which is a feeling
of emptiness, when she acts and is not recognized for acting, she begins to believe that the pornographic
mind is correct. She begins to believe that her identity is nothingness. That in her essence, she does
not exist. Even her attempt at expressing herself ends by proving that she does not have a self....
And whenever we lose a female poet to obscurity, silence, or premature death, every woman loses words
from her own language. So little of real female experience has ever been expressed. We have no familiar
images with which to speak of our lives or our identities, or through which to voice our feeling. One
writer tells us of Marilyn Monroe that because she lacked an education, she was "able to speak only
from her own sensitivities" and that "she did not know how to express herself in the conventional way."
But there is no educated nor any conventional way to describe real female experience. If we have felt
numb, the word which culture has given to us is "frigid." If we have felt desire and longing, we are
given images of submissiveness, and an idea of "sighing and simpering" with which to express this force
of longing....
If to know oneself is to have somewhere an image of ourselves, and we have been deprived of the words
and images, how are we to have our own identities?
(Susan Griffin, Pornography and Silence, pp.242-245)
Just as we had begun to separate rape from sex, we realized that we must find some way of separating
pornographic depictions of sex as an antiwoman weapon from those images of freely chosen, mutual sexuality.
Fortunately, there is truth in the origin of words. Pornography comes from the Greek root
porné (harlot, prostitute, or female captive) and graphos (writing about or description
of). Thus, it means a description of either the purchase of sex, which implies an imbalance of power in
itself, or sexual slavery.
...In short, pornography is not about sex. It's about an imbalance of male-female power that allows
and even requires sex to be used as a form of aggression.
Erotica may be the word that can differentiate sex from violence and rescue sexual
pleasure. It comes from the Greek root eros (sexual desire or passionate love, named for
Eros, the son of Aphrodite), and so contains the idea of love, positive choice, and the yearning
for a particular person. Unlike pornography's reference to harlot or prostitute, erotica
leaves entirely open the question of gender. (In fact, we may owe its sense of shared power to the
Greek idea that a man's love for another man was more worthy than love for a woman, but at least that
bias isn't present in the word.) Though both erotica and pornography refer to verbal or pictorial
representations of sexual behavior, they are as different as a room with doors open and one with doors
locked. The first might be a home, but the second could only be a prison.
The problem is that there is so little erotica. Women have rarely been free enough to pursue pleasure
in our own lives, much less to create it in the worlds of film, magazines, art, books, television,
and popular culture.
And the problem is there is so much pornography. This underground stream of antiwoman propaganda
that exists in all male-dominant societies has now become a flood in our streets and theaters and
even our homes. Perhaps that's better in the long run. Women can no longer pretend pornography does
not exists. We must either face our own humiliation and torture every day on magazine covers and
television screens or fight back.
...Why is pornography the only media violence that is supposed to be a "safety valve" to satisfy men's
"natural" aggressiveness somewhere short of acting it out?
The first reason is the confusion of all nonprocreative sex with pornography. Any description of
sexual behavior, or even nudity, may be called pornographic or obscene (a word whose Latin derivative
means dirty or containing filth) by those who insist that the only moral purpose of sex
is procreative, or even that any portrayal of sexuality or nudity is against the will of God.
In fact, human beings seem to be the only animals that experience the same sex drive and pleasure at
times when we can and cannot conceive. Other animals experience periods of heat or estrus. Humans do not.
Just as we developed uniquely human capacities for language, planning, memory, and invention along
our evolutionary path, we also developed sexuality as a form of expression, a way of communicating
that is separable from our reproductive need. For human beings, sexuality can be and often is a way
of bonding, of giving and receiving pleasure, bridging differentness, discovering sameness, and
communicating emotion.
...No wonder the very different concepts of "erotica" and "pornography" can be so confused. Both
assume that sex can be separated from conception; that human sexuality has additional uses and goals.
This is the major reason why, even in our current culture, both may still be condemned as equally
obscene and immoral. Such gross condemnation of all sexuality that isn't harnessed to childbirth (and
to patriarchal marriage so that children are properly "owned" by men) has been increased by the current
backlash against women's independence...
Defending against such repression and reaction leads to the temptation to merely reverse the terms
and declare that all nonprocreative sex is good. In fact, however, this human activity can be
as constructive or destructive, moral or immoral, as any other. Sex as communication can send messages
as different as mutual pleasure and dominance, life and death, "erotica" and "pornography."
...From the origins of the words, as well as the careful way that feminists working against pornography
are trying to use them, it's clear there is a substantive difference, not an artistic or economic
one. Pornography is about dominance. Erotica is about mutuality.
...In fact, the obstacles to taking on pornography seem suspiciously like the virgin-whore divisions
that have been women's only choices in the past. The right wing says all that is not virginal or
motherly is pornographic, and thus they campaign against sexuality and nudity in general. The left wing
says all sex is good as long as it's male'defined, and thus pornography must be protected. Women who feel
endagered by being the victim, and men who feel demeaned by being the victimizer, have a long struggle
ahead. In fact, pornography will continue as long as boys are raised to believe they must control or
conquer women as a measure of manhood, as long as society rewards men who believe that success or even
functioning--in sex as in other areas of life--depends on women's subservience.
But we now have words to describe our outrage and separate sex from violence. We now have the
courage to demonstrate publicly against pornography, to keep its magazines and films out of our
houses, to boycott its purveyors, to treat even friends and family members who support it as seriously
as we would treat someone who supported and enjoyed Nazi literature or the teachings of the Klan.]
But until we finally untangle sexuality and aggression, there will be more pornography and
less erotica. There will be little murders in our beds--and very little love. (--1977 and 1978)
(Gloria Steinem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions,pp.220-230)
Here is an invitation to discover a past that has been buried by millennia of Judeo-Christian myth and corresponding social order. Merlin Stone tells us, in fascinating detail, the story of the Goddess who, known by names such as Astarte, Isis, and Ishtar, reigned supreme in the Near and Middle East. There she was revered as the wise creator and the one source of universal order, not simply as a fertility symbol as some histories would have us believe. And under the Goddess, societal roles differed markedly from those in patriarchal Judeo-Christian cultures: women bought and sold property, traded in the marketplace, and inherited title and land from their mothers. How did the shift from matriarchy to patriarchy come about? By documenting the wholesale rewriting of myth and religious dogmas, Merlin Stone describes an ancient conspiracy in which the Goddess was reimagined as a wanton, depraved figure, a characterization confirmed and perpetuated by one of modern culture's best-known legends-- that of Adam and the fallen Eve. (Notes taken from back cover) Merlin Stone says in her introduction, "I am not suggesting a return or revival of the ancient female religion. As Sheila Collins writes, 'As women our hope for fulfilment lies in the present and future and not in some mythical golden past...' I do hold the hope, however, that a contemporary consciousness of the once widespread veneration of the female deity as the wise Creatress of the Universe...may be used to cut through the many oppressive and falsely founded patriarchal images, stereotypes, customs and laws that were developed as direct reactions to Goddess worship by the leaders of the later male-worshiping religions." Ms. Stone insists that this is not intended to be an historical document but rather "an invitation to all women to join in the search to find out who we really are, by beginning to know our own past heritage as more than a broken and buried fragment of a male culture." Insightful and thought-provoking, this is essential reading for anyone interested in the origin of current gender roles and in rediscovering women's power.
When God Was a Woman, Merlin Stone, (Harvest/Hardcourt Brace,1976)
Redmond describes not just the history of the frame drum as it was first used by women as early
as 6000 BC but also the historical record of the goddess from ancient to modern times. She writes,
"Women are on a tremendous spiritual search...Behind this surging feminine energy is a yearning
to understand who they are and what their purpose in life is. They long to live meaningful lives
in harmonious rhythm with the sacred energies of the earth and heavens. Many have an underlying
intuition that women have been dispossessed of a heritage, tradition, and sense of identity that
was once uniquely their own.They suspect that women's real history has been disguised and distorted."
When the Drummers Were Women, Layne Redmond, (Random House,1997) Patrica Reis is a sculpturer and has degrees in depth psychology and literature. In THROUGH THE GODDESS she attempts to show how the ancient Goddess images relate to present-day women's experience. Coming from a Jungian background she believes that the "only concept that will allow me to explain the relationships between ancient images and everyday reality is the archetype." She describes the book as a "rich tapestry called feminist archetypal psychology." Reis is also interested in the body. She calls the body "the site where biology and culture meet. We cannot understand the body abstracted from our social and cultural arrangements. But we can begin to understand how our thinking about the body is structured and influenced by our social and cultural arrangements." Equally important is how our thinking about the body has changed since prehistoric times. Reis reminds us that "From earliest times, there existed in the human imagination a creatrix, a great Goddess who brought forth all living things....The tremendous potency of Goddess imagery is demonstrated by the continuity of these symbols through time. The prehistoric female figures, with their sacred signs and symbols, have persisted in the religious and mythic imagination of our ancestors since Paleolithic times. They continued to be made for more than 20,000 years... This is evidenced by more than thirty thousand female images, signs, and symbols that have been found throughout Old Europe. The ancient images of the great Goddess give evidence that our early ancestors understand the inherent sacredness of the female body. As in the imagery from the Paleolithic era, each image depicted some part of her story, telling us of a highly refined and sophisticated culture and a rich mythical imagery, complete with cult and ritual." "It is helpful for us to know that in our human history there was a primordial Goddess creatrix. How she developed through time, and what her stories and images were, is important to us as modern women, because her history and development are intimately linked with our own heritage. Her story becomes ours, and in the process of experiencing our own creativity, we consciously or unconsciously reenact her mysteries." Reis approaches the body from another perspective in her chapter "Recovering Aphrodite". She observes,"As I work with women and listen to their bodies speak, I have come to believe that there is a seamless connection between the body, the psyche, the soul, and the Self. They are all one reality, speaking different languages....The body has a wisdom, intelligence, and memory. All the feelings of joy, love, well-being, and pleasure; all of the terror, pain, and abuse that we have endured; all of our capacities for ectasy; and all of our unfinished and unresolved grief and sorrow are encoded on a cellular level in our bodies.... This is the truth of the body, which does not lie." In the chapter "Facing Medusa" Reis underscores this truth by repeating the words of the French writer, Helene Cixous, when she exhorts us to return to the body, the body that must be heard, the body from which the "immense resources of the unconscious spring forth." Reis ends the chapter "Facing Medusa" by pointing to the use of ritual as a pathway to renewal. "Ritual is the vehicle for remembering and renewal. On a collective level, there seems to be an urgent necessity to return in some way--to remember, recollect, and reunite through the ritual of the creative process--with those banished aspects of the female psyche. By reaching back through the layers of personal and collective history and prehistory, women can begin to revitalize those images that have been lost to memory. This is done for the purpose of creative renewal and the process of self-becoming." For Reis "self-becoming" means becoming oneself or becoming a virgin. This interpretation of virginity may not be immediately apparent but Reis explains "virginity means belonging to no man--being complete unto oneself." She quotes the Jungian analyst Esther Harding, "The woman who is virgin, one-in-herself, does what she does--not because of any desire to please, not to be liked, or to be approved,--not because of any desire to gain power over another, to catch his interest of love, but because what she does is true-- As virgin she is not influenced by the considerations that make the nonvirgin woman, whether married or not, trim her sails and adapt herself to expediency--she is what she is because that is what she is." Reis adds the remarkable assertion that this virginity is renewable. "This is incredibly important for a woman to know. Many women who have been used and abused sexually, or misused their sexuality, need to know that, like Aphrodite, we may, through various rituals and ceremonies, renew our sense of intactness and integrity--our virginity." Such rituals can take the form of bathing (like Aprodite), or making women's visits to the hairdresser. Reis laments "how much more meaningful it would be if women were able to understand this need more consciously, incorporating times of 'virginity' into their daily lives. Indeed, anytime we are not engaged sexually is ours alone to be virginal, complete unto ourselves. Then, each time we consent to open ourselves to another sexually can be 'the first time.' " THROUGH THE GODDESS: A Women's Way of Healing, Patricia Reis (New York: Continuum,1991) Mary Esther Harding approaches women's mysteries from a Jungian perspective. For her "the myths and rituals of ancient religions represent the naive projection of psychological realities. They are undistorted by rationalization, for in matters which deal with the spirit realm, that is, the psychological realm, primitive people and the people of antiquity did not think; they perceived by an inner or intuitive sense..." She believes that these myths and rituals contain psychological material which is uncensored by a rational mind and therefore of value to us today. Since many of the earliest rituals were created by women in prehistorical times, they represent for us a window into how women perceived themselves before a system of patriarchical beliefs and cultural practices were developed. Many of the rituals which Harding examines concern the effect the moon had on late Paleolithic and Neolithic men and women. Her chapter headings tell the story: "The Moon as Giver or Fertility", "The Moon Cycle of Women", "The Inner Meaning of the Moon Cycle", "The Man in the Moon", "The Moon Mother", "Priests and Priestesses of the Moon". The moon played a central role in the life of early people. Harding makes it clear that "In primitive communities the moon is frequently called The Lord of the Women. For the moon is regarded, not only as the source of woman's ability to bear children, but also as the protector and guardian of women...For it is generally thought that only women can make things grow, because they alone are under the direct guardianship of the moon whose power to make things grow and increase is delegated in some measure to them." Because women swell up like the moon when it becomes full and experience their menstrual cycles in rhythm with the cycles of the moon, this correspondence between woman and moon was taken as "absolute proof...they are of like nature" This close relationship between women and moon, women and a celestrial body was further reinforced by the belief that it was the moon or a ray from moonlight that made a women pregnant. Since there is a nine month interval between conception and birth, the role of intercourse was not understood until much later. From such an association between the moon and woman it is only a short step to personifying the moon in the form of a Moon Goddess. Harding discusses the myths of the Moon Goddess with the intention of showing how they represent "the inner subjective reality of feminine psychology " She explores two such myths in detail: Ishtar as well as Isis and Osiris. Harding ends by stressing how important the wisdom of the ancient religions is for an understanding of ourselves in the modern world. "In the image of the Mother Goddess--ancient and powerful--women of olden times found the reflection of their own deepest feminine nature. Through the faithful performance of the ritual prescribed in her service those faraway women gained a relation to this very Eros. Today, the goddess is no longer worshipped. Her shrines are lost in the dust of ages while her statues line the walls of museums. But the law or power of which she was but the personification is unabated in its strength and lifegiving potency. It is we who have changed. We have given our allegiance too exclusively to masculine forces. Today, however, the ancient feminine principle [Eros] is reasserting its power. Forced on by the suffering and unhappiness incurred through disregard of the Eros values, men and women are turning once again towards the Moon Mother, not, however, through a religious cult, not even with a conscious knowledge of what they are doing, but through a change in psychological attitude. For that principle, which in ancient and more naive days was projected into the form of a goddess, is no longer seen in the guise of a religious tenet but is now sensed as a psychological force arising from the unconscious, having, as had the Magna Dea of old, power to mold the destinies of mankind." Woman's Mysteries Ancient and Modern, M. Esther Harding, (New York, J.P. Putnam's Sons, 1971)
THE CREATION OF PATRIARCHY
by Gerda Lerner
THE CREATION OF FEMINIST CONSCIOUSNESS
by Gerda Lerner
THE TROUBLE WITH ISLAM TODAY
by Irshad Manji
THE SPIRAL DANCE
by Starhawk
Mother Goddess is reawakening, and we can begin to recover our primal birthright, the sheer, intoxicating joy of being alive. We can open new eyes and see that there is nothing to be saved from, no struggle of life against the universe, no God outside the world to be feared and obeyed; only the Goddess, the Mother, the turning spiral that whirls us in and out of existence, whose winking eye is the pulse of being—birth, death, rebirth--- whose laughter bubbles and courses through all things and who is found only through love; love of trees, of stones, of sky and clouds, of scented blossoms and thundering waves; of all that runs and flies and swims and crawls on her face; through love of ourselves; life-dissolving world-creating orgasmic love of each other; each of us unique and natural as a snowflake, each of us our own star, her Child, her lover, her beloved, her Self.”
THE NATURAL SUPERIORITY OF WOMEN
by Ashley Montagu
THE FIRST SEX
by Elizabeth Gould Davis
IF WOMEN RULED THE WORLD:How to Create a World We Want to Live In--Stories, Ideas, and Inspiration for Change
by Sheila Ellison, Editor
BOOKSELLER OF KABUL
by Äsne Seierstad
"You know I cannot answer you," she says.
"But what do you want?"
"You know I cannot have a desire."
"But do you like me?"
"You know I cannot answer that."
"Will you say yes when I propose?"
"You know it is not me who answers"
"Will you meet me again?"
"I can't"
"Why can't you be a bit nicer? Don't you like me?"
"My family will decide whether I like you or not."
THE GREAT COSMIC MOTHER: Discovering the Religion of the Earth
by Monica Sjoor(artist) & Barbara Mor
THE MAIDEN KING
by Robert Bly & Marion Woodman
Since I've picked up the smell
Of a Russian boy--
Oh joy, joy, joy!
And now his little bones
Come on their own
THE GODDESS ENERGY IS TRYING TO SAVE US
by Marion Woodman
SILENCE
by Susan Griffin
EROTICA vs. PRONOGRAPHY
by Gloria Steinem
WHEN GOD WAS A WOMEN
by Merlin Stone
WHEN THE DRUMMERS WERE WOMEN
by Layne Redmond
THROUGH THE GODDESS:A Women's Way of Healing
by Patricia Reis
WOMEN'S MYSTERIES ANCIENT AND MODERN
M. Esther Harding
