female friendship

“Girl . . . You’re Gonna Make It” by Carol P. Christ

https://vimeo.com/82884853

Why did this song,* this program, this woman mean so much to Oprah and Michelle, to you, to me?

Because Mary Tyler Moore was one of our first role models of cheerful independent womanhood.

Why does this song still bring tears to my eyes?

Because I had never learned that a girl could make it on her own.

Because I feared that I couldn’t and hoped that I would.

And guess what, I did.

Lots of us did.

With help from our friends.

Mary showed us that too.

The Mary Tyler Moore Show was broadcast on Saturday nights.

Many of us were home alone, watching faithfully.

We do not forget.

*The above version of the song is from the first season, the words “you’re gonna make it after all” were changed to “you’re gonna make it on your own” in season two.

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Be among the first to order A Serpentine Path, Carol P. Christ’s moving memoir of transformation. Carol’s other new book written with Judith Plaskow is Goddess and God in the World: Conversations in Embodied Theology.

Carol is a leading feminist theologian and historian of religion who wrote the first Goddess feminist theology, Rebirth of the Goddess as with Judith Plaskow co-edited the path-breaking Womanspirit Rising and Weaving the Visions.

Join Carol on a Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete in 2017. Save $200.

For Strong Women… by Marie Cartier

This month I had planned to write a long column of finding joy in the midst of pain, or rather enjoying what you can still enjoy. I know you all will be reading this the day after Thanksgiving…I want to be grateful and I am… for so much. I want you to find what you are grateful for and hold onto it.

But, I am also scared and desperately raging and deeply upset that Standing Rock and the protesters there were recently hosed with freezing water, hit with rubber bullets and assaulted…

I am not even going to hotlink here the things that I am deeply and grievously upset by regarding Trump’s new “President-elect” status. As a confirmed and unapologetic sex predator, he will never be my President. I embrace the social media hashtag #NotMyPresident.

I am stunned by the fact that Hillary has closing in on 2 million more popular votes than him. I am #StillWithHer. I am grateful that she is considered the #ThePeoplesPresident.

But here we are with Trump in place, set to be inaugurated in January. I am doing everything I can to Flip the Electoral College. If you want more information about the electoral college and an opinion on why it isn’t working right now you can start here. If you want to know how to write letters and or call the electors to see if they can be persuaded to change their minds you can start here.

I am trying, in the midst of this time, as we approach the holidays to be grateful. I am a strong woman. I have been nurtured by strong women in the feminist movement. And that is what I want to give you, FAR family, this Thanksgiving—a poem for strong women. This is by one of my favorite writers, Marge Piercy. Continue reading “For Strong Women… by Marie Cartier”

Caring as Resistance and Sisterhood by Vanessa Rivera de la Fuente

sisterhood

Every week, the women participating in my workshops easily share their experiences in the social, political or community world. However, it is difficult for them to talk about themselves. Several of them face complex situations: A divorce or a long layoff, illness of a relative whom they are caretakers, raising a disabled child. They are ashamed to speak up about how they feel; this should not be so. We women have the right and the duty to speak openly about what ails us in our private lives. The idea that the personal is political has to be a perfect circle.

Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi says that the lack of attention to physical, emotional and spiritual needs of women has become one of the weak points in the work of feminists. In our own social and institutional spheres where we work, the combined effects of the strong reactions against women’s movements, harassment on social networks, cultural and religious fundamentalisms, the pressures for leadership and the challenge of finding a balance between multiple spheres of life make it difficult to conserve energy.

While activisms mean resistance to the hegemonic system, some dynamics could reproduce patriarchal control’s devices on women’s emotions and impact us negatively: The expectation of renunciation and silent sacrifice as supreme feminine virtue. Sadness, illness or emotional distress are political issues and a way to control us with them is through the imposing or adopted silence about. Continue reading “Caring as Resistance and Sisterhood by Vanessa Rivera de la Fuente”

Gender, Friendship, Collaboration, and Unacknowledged Authorship by Carol P. Christ

In recent weeks Judith Plaskow and I have been revising the manuscript of our new book Goddess and God in the World in preparation for sending it to the publisher. Yes, we have a publisher. We signed a contract with Fortress Press a short time ago. The book should be out in 2016.

We have been hard—and I mean very hard—at work revising the four chapters in the book that are jointly written. The versions have been going back and forth and forth and back as we revision what we want to say and revise each other’s revisions of the drafts we have. We both want the final manuscript to say things just right and it is very hard not to make one more set of (alleged) improvements.

In the process we have realized that while we often disagree on words and wording, we have come to think alike on a wide variety of issues to the point that it becomes hard to say who had the ideas first. In addition we have both become so familiar with each other’s positions that we can each easily articulate both sides of our dialogue on the issues on which we disagree.

All of this has gotten me to thinking again about authorship and co-authorship and original and shared ideas. This train of thought led me back to the subject of Judith’s and my first essay together originally titled “Against My Wife” but published as “For the Advancement of My Career: A Form Critical Study in the Art of Acknowledgement.” We discussed 5 formulaic tropes used in acknowledgements to wives in academic books, ending with “the wife as unacknowledged co-author.” Continue reading “Gender, Friendship, Collaboration, and Unacknowledged Authorship by Carol P. Christ”