EMPOWERMENT
16.What does the word empowerment mean to you?
17.In a dream, a wise old woman told Kidd: “Your heart is a seed. Go, plant it in the world.” How are you compelled to plant your heart in the world? What deep impulse in your feminine soul needs to be expressed? What holds you back?
18.“All journeys of soul lead us to the smallest moment of the most ordinary day.” What does it mean to embody Sacred Feminine experience in your daily life? How can it become a seamless part of how you relate, work, play, and go about your life?
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1.Nisa, “From Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman,” The Norton Book of Women’s Lives, ed. Phyllis Rose (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993), 637.
2.Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life: The Diaries of Etty Hillesum 1941–43 (New York: Washington Square Press, 1981), 35.
PART ONE: AWAKENING
1.Maxime Kumin, “The Archeology of a Marriage,” The Retrieval System (New York: Viking, 1978).
2.Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), 149.
3.Jenny Joseph, “Warning,” When I Am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple, ed. Sandra Haldeman Martz (Watsonville, CA: Papier-Mache Press, 1979), 1.
4.Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype (New York: Ballantine Books, 1992), 10.
5.Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life (New York: Ballantine Books, 1988), 20–21.
6.Madonna Kolbenschlag, Kiss Sleeping Beauty Good-Bye: Breaking the Spell of Feminine Myths and Models (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979), xiii.
7.Quoted in Peggy Taylor, “Rediscovering the Wild Woman,” New Age Journal (Nov.–Dec. 1992), 63.
8.See Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan, Meeting at the Crossroads: Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development (New York: Ballantine Books, 1992).
9.Statistics from Lori Hesse, World Watch Institute, and the United Nations Report on the Status of Women, as quoted in Christiane Northrup, Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom (New York: Bantam Books, 1994), 5.
10.Sue Monk Kidd, “Sleepwalking,” South Carolina Collection (Fall 1991), 40–48.
11.For a discussion of the mother tongue and father tongue, see Ursula K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 147–63.
12.Elizabeth A. Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (New York: Crossroad, 1993), 27.
13.Carol P. Christ, Diving Deep and Surfacing: Women Writers on Spiritual Quest (Boston: Beacon Press, 1980), 13.
14.Anne Wilson Schaef, Women’s Reality: An Emerging Female System in a White Male Society (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981), 27.
15.See Peggy Orenstein, Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem, and the Confidence Gap (New York: Doubleday, 1994).
16.Polly Young-Eisendrath and Florence Wiedemann, Female Authority (New York: Guilford Press, 1987), 2.
17.Quoted in Alice Ostriker, Writing Like a Woman, Michigan Poets on Poetry Series (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1983), 126.
18.C. G. Jung, “On Psychic Energy,” Collected Works, vol. 8, par. 100 (Princeton Univ. Press, 1978), 53–54.
19.Christiane Northrup, Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom (New York: Bantam, 1994), 4.
20.Naomi Wolf, Fire with Fire (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1993), 141.
21.Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), 4.
22.Children’s Letters to God, compiled by Eric Marshall and Stuart Hample (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967).
23.Le Guin, Dancing, 151.
24.“A Self of One’s Own: An Interview with Alice Walker,” Common Boundary (Mar.–Apr. 1990), 17.
25.Northrup, Women’s Bodies, 19.
26.Barbara Walker, The Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983), 603, 610.
27.This story is related in Sue Monk Kidd, “Going Back for Mary: A Protestant’s Journey,” Daughters of Sarah (Fall 1991), 28.
28.Referred to in Carol P. Christ, Laughter of Aphrodite: Reflections on a Journey to the Goddess (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), 130.
29.See Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life, 11–31.
30.Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), 12.
31.See Le Guin, Dancing, 157; Kolbenschlag, Kiss Sleeping Beauty Good-bye, 23.
32.Sylvia Brinton Perera, Descent to the Goddess: A Way of Initiation for Women (Toronto: Inner City Books, 1981), 12.
33.Quoted in Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life, 109.
34.Lerner, Creation of Patriarchy, 5.
35.June Singer, Boundaries of the Soul: The Practice of Jung’s Psychology (New York: Doubleday, 1972), 240.
36.Sherry Ruth Anderson and Patricia Hopkins, The Feminine Face of God: The Unfolding of the Sacred in Women (New York: Bantam Books, 1991), 184.
37.Virginia Woolf, “Professions for Women,” Women and Writing, ed. Michele Barrett (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1990), 59.
38.Jong, quoted in Judith Warner, “Fearless,” Mirabella (June 1994), 42.
39.Gail Godwin, A Southern Family (New York: William Morrow, 1987), 51.
40.Muriel Rukeyser, “Kathe Kollitz,” No More Masks: An Anthology of Poems by Women, ed. Florence Howe and Ellen Bass (New York: Doubleday, 1973), 103.
41.Schaef, Women’s Reality, 4.
42.Jane Wagner, The Search for Signs of Intelligence Life in the Universe (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 18.
43.Anne E. Carr, Transforming Grace: Christian Tradition and Women’s Experience (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), 136.
44.Schaef, Women’s Reality, 162–63.
45.Elizabeth Dodson Gray, Patriarchy as a Conceptual Trap (Wellesley, MA: Roundtable Press, 1982), 19.
46.Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982).
47.For instance, an article in my local newspaper on Jan. 27, 1995, reported that researchers at the brain behavior laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania have found several dimensions of brain function that correspond to differences between men and women. They found the brains of men and women identical except in the region that deals with emotional processing. The part of the brain controlling action-oriented responses was more active in men, while the part controlling more symbolic emotional responses (like words) was more active in women. It is not known, however, whether we develop brain chemistry because we act a certain way, or we act a certain way because of brain chemistry.
48.Margaret Starbird, The Woman with the Alabaster Jar: Mary Magdalen and the Holy Grail (Sante Fe, NM: Bear, 1993), xix.
49.Quoted in Joanna Macy, “Awakening to the Ecological Self,” in Healing the Wounds: The Promise of Ecofeminism, ed. Judith Plant (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1989), 202.
50.Rosemary Radford Ruether, “Motherearth and the Megamachine,” in Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion, ed. Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979), 48–49.
51.Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random House, 1979), 63.
52.Carr, Transforming Grace, 46–48.
53.Cullen Murphy, “Women and the Bible,” Atlantic Monthly 272, no. 2 (Aug. 1993): 41–42.
54.Johnson, She Who Is, 26.
55.Nelle Morton, quoted from the film of her life, Coming Home.
56.Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life, 15.
57.Joy Harjo, “The Blanket Around Her,” in That’s What She Said: Contemporary Poetry and Fiction by Native American Women, ed. Rayna Green (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1984), 127.
58.Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House, The Wild Duck, The Lady From the Sea, trans. R. Farquharson Sharp (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1958), 68–69.
59.Estés, Women Who Run, 13.
60.Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Woman
’s Bible (New York: European Publishing, 1895).
61.May Sarton, The House by the Sea (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 224–25.
62.Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), 255–58.
63.Kabir, The Kabir Book, trans. Robert Bly (Boston: Beacon Press, 1977), 41.
PART TWO: INITIATION
1.Carter Heyward, Touching Our Strength (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989), 29.
2.Penelope Washbourn, Becoming Woman: The Quest for Wholeness in Female Experience (New York: Harper & Row, 1977).
3.Karen A. Signell, Wisdom of the Heart: Working with Women’s Dreams (New York: Bantam, 1990), 75, 40.
4.May Sarton, The Reckoning (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 90.
5.Jean Shinoda Bolen, Crossing to Avalon: A Woman’s Midlife Pilgrimage (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994), 108.
6.Christin Lore Weber, Womanchrist: A New Vision of Feminist Spirituality (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), 36–37.
7.Nelle Morton, The Journey Is Home (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), 153.
8.Starhawk, Truth or Dare: Encounters with Power, Authority, and Mystery (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), 67.
9.The picture can be found in Erich Neumann’s The Great Mother (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1963), 332, plate 180.
10.Naomi Wolf, Fire with Fire (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1993), 23.
11.Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life (New York: Ballantine Books, 1988), 92.
12.Jean Baker Miller, M.D., “What Do We Mean by Relationships?” Work in Progress, no. 22 (Wellesley: The Stone Center Working Paper Series, 1986), 3.
13.Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), 31.
14.Charlene Spretnak, Lost Goddesses of Early Greece (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), 17–38.
15.Joseph Campbell, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Myth as Metaphor and as Religion (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 55.
16.Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life, 62–63.
17.Bolen, Crossing to Avalon, 163.
18.See Robert Graves, The Greek Myths (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1955), 1:293–95 and 2:400.
19.Buffie Johnson, Lady of the Beasts: Ancient Images of the Goddess and Her Sacred Animals (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1988), 296.
20.Sylvia Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath, ed. Ted Hughes (Garden City, NY: Dial Press, 1982), 176, 177.
21.Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life: The Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941–1943 (New York: Washington Square Press, 1981), 222.
22.Starhawk, Truth or Dare, 66.
23.Marian Woodman, with Kate Danson, Mary Hamilton, and Rita Greer Allen, Leaving My Father’s House: A Journey to Conscious Femininity (Boston: Shambhala, 1992), 31.
24.Cynthia Eller, Living in the Lap of the Goddess: The Feminist Spirituality Movement in America (New York: Crossroad, 1993), 202.
25.Charlene Spretnak, “The Unity of Politics and Spirituality,” in The Politics of Spirituality, ed. Charlene Spretnak (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1982), 351.
26.Joseph Campbell, with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth, ed. Betty Sue Flowers (New York: Doubleday, 1988), 150.
27.From the discussion of entelechy in Edward C. Whitmont, Noetic Sciences Review, no. 31 (Autumn 1994): 11–18.
28.Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 394.
29.Jean Shinoda Bolen, Gods in Everyman (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989), 260.
30.Nancy Qualls-Corbett, The Sacred Prostitute: Eternal Aspects of the Feminine (Toronto: Inner City Books, 1988), 73.
31.I have ambivalent feelings about the inner masculine in a woman’s life, because it has come to be defined so stereotypically. I’ve seen it written, for instance, that if a woman asserts herself in the world, it’s not her own feminine self doing this but the masculine within her, suggesting that the feminine has no attribute of assertion and autonomy but must go through the masculine to get it. I do not accept this view, but I do acknowledge a masculine aspect within women, one that can be both positive and negative. When negative, it criticizes, judges, limits, undermines, and oppresses a woman. There was an undeniable connection between my struggle to speak, create, and act and the images in my dreams of crippled or tyrannical men. When the inner masculine in a woman is positive, it supports her and helps her manifest her vision, voice, and soul into the world. But I don’t see the positive inner masculine as her intellect, her logic, her spunk, her independence, her authority, her strength, or her ability to have an opinion. I see all of these things inherent in her feminine self. Her positive masculine is a conduit, an enabler that helps to manifest these things.
32.George B. Hogenson, “The Great Goddess Reconsidered,” San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal 10, no. 1 (1991): 24.
PART THREE: GROUNDING
1.See Marija Gimbutas, The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1982), The Language of the Goddess (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989), and The Civilization of the Goddess: The World of Old Europe (San Francisco: Harper-San Francisco, 1991).
2.In addition to Gimbutas, Civilization of the Goddess, see historian Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986); art historian Merlin Stone, When God Was a Woman (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976); art historian and professor Elinor Gadon, The Once and Future Goddess (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989); scholar and attorney Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987).
3.Ntozake Shange, for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf (New York: Macmillan, 1976), 63.
4.Janda J., Julian: A Play Based on the Life of Julian of Norwich (New York: The Seabury Press, 1984), 99.
5.Sallie McFague, “God as Mother,” Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality, ed. Judith Plaskow and Carol Christ (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989), 141.
6.Anne E. Carr, Transforming Grace: Christian Tradition and Women’s Experience (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), 140.
7.Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture, ed. Robert C. Kimball (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964), 53–67.
8.Carr, Transforming Grace, 141.
9.Nelle Morton, “The Goddess as Metaphoric Image,” in Weaving the Visions, ed. Plaskow and Christ, 116.
10.Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), 19.
11.McFague, “God as Mother,” in Weaving the Visions, ed. Plaskow and Christ, 139–40.
12.McFague, “God as Mother,” in Weaving the Visions, ed. Plaskow and Christ, 141.
13.Nelle Morton, “Goddess as Metaphoric Image,” in Weaving the Visions, ed. Plaskow and Christ, 111.
14.Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, ed. Patrick Gaffney and Andrew Harvey (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), 164.
15.Carol P. Christ, Laughter of Aphrodite: Reflections on a Journey to the Goddess (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), 100.
16.Morton, “Goddess as Metaphoric Image,” in Weaving the Visions, ed. Plaskow and Christ, 111–12.
17.This story was published in a slightly different form in Sue Monk Kidd, “Reclaiming Lost Altars,” Encore 2, no. 5 (Jan. 1995): 35–36.
18.Stone, When God Was a Woman, 1.
19.Elizabeth A. Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (New York: Crossroad, 1993), 47.
20.Rosemary Radford Ruether, “Sexism and God-Language,” in Weaving the Visions, ed. Plaskow and Christ, 154.
21.Ruether, “Sexism and God-Language,” in Weaving the Visions, ed. Plaskow and Christ, 153.
22.References to Wisdom/Sophia can be found sprinkled throughout the Bible, especially in Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Job, and two apocryphal works, Sirach and Wisdom of Solomon. For amplification, see Susan Cady, Marian Ronan, and Hal Taussig, Wisdom’s Feast: Sophia in Study and Celebration (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989)
. Also, a good summation can be found in Feminine Aspects of Divinity (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill Publications), pamphlet 191.
23.Proverbs 8:22–23, 27, 30.
24.C. G. Jung, Answer to Job (1958; reprint, Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969), 86.
25.Cady et al., Wisdom’s Feast, 44–45.
26.Cady et al., Wisdom’s Feast, 45.
27.See Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random House, 1981).
28.Pagels, “What Became of God the Mother?” in Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion, ed. Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979), 109.
29.Pagels, “God the Mother,” in Womanspirit Rising, ed. Christ and Plaskow, 110.
30.Pagels, “God the Mother,” in Womanspirit Rising, ed. Christ and Plaskow, 110.
31.Ruether, “Sexism and God-Language,” in Weaving the Visions, ed. Plaskow and Christ, 153.
32.Johnson, She Who Is, 4.
33.Deepak Chopra, Perfect Health (New York: Harmony Books, 1991), 132.
34.Beatrice Bruteau, “Deep Ecology and Generic Spirituality,” Silence in the Midst of Noise: An Ecumenical Approach to Contemplative Prayer, ed. Beatrice Bruteau and James Somerville (Pfaffrown, NC: Philosopher’s Exchange, 1990), 105.
35.Sallie McFague, “God as Mother,” in Weaving the Visions, ed. Plaskow and Christ, 143.
36.Nancy Passmore, as quoted in Charlene Spretnak, “Toward an Ecofeminist Spirituality,” in Healing the Wounds: The Promise of Ecofeminism, ed. Judith Plant (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1989), 129.
37.Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), 227.
38.This experience was published in a slightly different form in Sue Monk Kidd, “Weeping with Dolphins,” Pilgrimage: Psychotherapy and Personal Exploration (May–Aug. 1993).
The Dance of the Dissident Daughter Page 30