[T]he most grievous wrong ever inflicted on woman has been in the Christian teaching that she was not created equal to man, and the consequent denial of her rightful place in Church and State. –Matilda Joslyn Gage, Woman, Church, and State, 1893, page 1
I do not approve of their [referring to Gage and Stanton] system of fighting the religious dogmas of people I am trying to convert to my doctrine of equal rights to women. –Susan B. Anthony to Olympia Brown, following the disputed merger of the radical National Women’s Suffrage Association with the conservative American Women’s Suffrage Association in 1889
Most readers of Feminism and Religion know that Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were leaders in the nineteenth century struggle for women’s rights. Fewer will know that Matilda Joslyn Gage was widely understood to be Stanton’s equal as a theorist and Anthony’s equal as an organizer. The fact that Gage’s contributions have been lost to history can be attributed to Susan B. Anthony’s bargain with the devil.
If Anthony’s bargain had affected only the reputation of Matilda Joslyn Gage, that would be bad enough. But Anthony’s decision to merge the NWSA with the AWSA signaled that the women’s rights movement would cease and desist from its policy of naming and indicting Christian dogma as the source and cause of women’s subordination in the law in Christian countries. This decision meant that feminists would no longer have a clear understanding of the forces they were reckoning with. Continue reading “Susan B. Anthony’s Bargain with the Devil by Carol P. Christ”
Fifteen years ago, I bought my dream home in Molivos, Lesbos, one of the most stunning villages in the world. Over the next two years I renovated a listed Neoclassical house that had been neglected for over thirty years, restoring it to its original beauty. One of my friends who visited exclaimed that it looked like a movie set. Someone else said that the final result was “more Greek than Greek.” I thought this would be my forever home. But, as I have discussed in an earlier blog, I came to feel isolated in a small village.
Two years ago, I followed my heart to Crete, renting a lovely apartment in Heraklion, followed by a house near the sea. Then back to Lesbos, travel to the US and Canada, and Crete again after Christmas. I would have been happy to move back to the apartment I had rented the previous year, but this time I would bring my little dog. The apartment under my friend’s house outside Heraklion seemed like a good compromise, but the drive to Heraklion proved treacherous and parking difficult. Continue reading “Endings, Beginnings, and Dreamings by Carol P. Christ”
Modern Western culture despises aging. Aging women are held in particular contempt. Menopause is meant to be something embarrassing and uncomfortable. The pharma industry peddles hormones and other drugs meant to mask our symptoms. Few women see menopause as something to even talk about, let alone celebrate. But some women are reclaiming the dignity and transformation of menopause as a passage to power. Author and herbalist Susun Weed portrays menopause as a spiritual awakening. She likens the fierce waves of heat traveling upward to our brains to the Eastern concept of a Kundalini awakening that ultimately leads to enlightenment and spiritual liberation. Whether or not you agree with this, you will not make it through menopause without some kind of radical change taking place inside you.
I’ve experienced menopause as an initiation by fire. Having chosen not to have children, menopause has proved the most intense and radical embodied experience and transformation I’ve undergone since menarche and puberty. When a hot flash seizes me, I can no longer continue my train of monkey-mind thinking or be an efficient worker bee of global capitalism. All my old ingrained thought patterns are interrupted and come to a halt as I’m forced to focus on the embodied experience of burning up from within. What if this internal fire is literally burning through old ways of thinking and being that no longer serve me? Maybe we’re supposed to be rattled and disturbed so we can change. It’s even called The Change. So many tired old patterns are falling away from me, because I can’t keep up with them anymore. There’s this profound deepening. A sense of what truly matters.
I resist change so much. I long to remain in the comfortable old rut of the familiar, but menopause makes that impossible. It’s a take-no-prisoners wake up call to the reality of passing time and impermanence. It forces me to reexamine my values, where I truly want to spend the remaining time I have on earth. I’ve always been spiritual, but menopause has deepened my commitment to daily spiritual practice. It’s also taught me to embrace my own fierceness. To say what I mean and mean what I say. Menopausal women might find themselves losing the superficial prettiness of youth. We can no longer pass as objectified eye candy in male-stream culture. With our wrinkles and gray hair, we become something scary but also powerful. Crones and witches. We truly do become wise women if we answer the spiritual call of menopause. If we resist the lure of male-stream medicine to brainwash us into reframing this profound transformation and path of power into a disease that must be treated with hormones and face lifts. While some women benefit from hormone therapy and allopathic medicine, I’m against the generic medicalization of the natural processes in women’s lives.
Pregnant women give birth to new souls. Menopausal women give birth to their wiser selves. Like motherhood, menopause sidelines us on the relentless march towards capitalist achievement and forces us to reexamine our true priorities. We live in a 24/7 culture that expects us to be switched on and working at maximum efficiency every day of the year, as if the cycles of the seasons, sun, and moon didn’t exist. Menopause is an invitation to live in harmony with the tides and seasons of our lives. To claim our time and attention and take our lives back.
If older women truly knew how fierce and powerful we were, we could change the world.
Mary Sharratt is on a mission to write women back into history. Her most recent novel Ecstasy is about the composer Alma Schindler Mahler. If you enjoyed this article, sign up for Mary’s newsletter or visit her website.
Disclaimer/Trigger Warning: This post includes content about rape, sexual assault, domestic abuse, violence.
The recent, meaningful discussions on this forum about how so many of us feel broken due to our own personal histories have fortified and inspired me. I’ve marveled as women have spoken up so honestly and even brutally about the effects of trauma, rape, cold and dismissive mothers, abusing fathers and so on.
Some of you know my own story. I am a survivor of my father’s childhood abuse and then a rape at knifepoint in my early twenties. I carry a deep and abiding sense of shame. This feeling has always flummoxed me. Why should I feel shame when I didn’t do anything to create my own abuse? Shouldn’t my father have felt the shame? The rapist? Why did I get saddled with it? I was the victim (and survivor), not the perpetrator. But shame is indeed the feeling I carry and I’m not alone. Why is this feeling so pervasive? I don’t have all the answers, but I do have some clues about where to look.
“The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy.”-bell hooks
Like many academics, my “in the box” dream was to be a professor. The full-time, tenured kind. Like many queer feminist academics, I know that such dreams are rarely reality. When you’re also an artist and activist with a strong penchant for wanderlust, these dreams are simply unattainable fairytales. Never one for “in the box” living, I left the traditional academy and traditional church years ago, wandering over the garden’s walls with Lilith as my intrepid guide. I’ve told the story before. My wife and I left our jobs, sold our home, traveled full-time with our toddler, and turned the Holy Women Icons Project into a non-profit while building an off-grid tiny house on the television show Tiny House Nation in Hawai’i. It’s become old news. But since we’ve been doing this for several years now, those faraway dreams are finally starting to become reality. The academic classroom, the activist’s platform, the artist’s studio, the feminist’s megaphone, and the farmer’s orchard are fusing into one creative, life-giving, empowering space for teaching. The Holy Women Icons Project’s first academic course, “Embodied Ecofeminism and the Arts,” is actually happening. Seminarians and doctoral students from Berkeley join us in January. They’re soon followed by undergraduates from New York and seminarians from Atlanta. And I’m reaching out to more and more schools interested in creatively, subversively, and sustainably decolonizing the classroom with us for one week on the Big Island.
Today is my mother’s birthday and although she has been dead for more than a decade I still think of her almost every day. At the time of her death I had not seen her for twelve years. Not by choice. After my father’s sudden demise my mother chose my children, her two adult grandsons to be her protectors, and dismissed me from her life, permanently.
When she died, my mother divided her assets evenly between my children and me, forcing her only daughter to live beneath the poverty level for the remainder of her life.
The final betrayal.
At the time of her death I was teaching Women’s Studies at the University.
Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf has reopened at the Public Theater in New York City to rave reviews.
A scene from the new production of for colored girls
I first saw for colored girls in 1976 after my friend Carolyn Broadaway, who was visiting me in the city, insisted that we must see it.
Here is what I wrote about that experience:
Each of the three times I saw for colored girls performed on Broadway and each of the many times I read it or heard it performed [on the original cast album] on my stereo, I have felt chills of recognition up and down my white woman’s spine—shocks of recognition that tell me that something deep within me has been unlocked as I hear my experience voiced. (103)
Donald wakes up too early. Feeling confused and disoriented, he looks around the room. His bed has disappeared! He seems to be lying on the floor. Why? he asks himself, how’d I fall off my king-size bed? The floor (uncarpeted??) seems to go on around him forever, sans furniture, sans TVs, sans his solid gold toilet, sans even the doors and windows. It’s all a great big blank. All around him. Where am I? he asks himself.
He had disturbing dreams all night, and not just last night, but for…well, awhile. Since the subpoenas. He keeps seeing big, strong, silent men wearing jackets with initials on the back carrying big boxes out of his various offices. All of them. All over the world. In one repeating dream, a man dropped a box. It fell open, scattering papers filled with names and numbers. The men picked everything up, put the papers back in chronological order, and resealed the box. They kept carrying the boxes out to black vans that didn’t have names painted on them.
I feel deeply fortunate to be able to travel regularly to southern Morocco. In Taroudant in the Souss Valley, and further south in the Anti-Atlas Mountains, my groups of students have the chance to discover women’s cultural traditions including music and dance, weaving and embroidery, household and healing rituals. In the seven years I have been leading these tours, women have joined me from a dozen different countries and as many different faiths, and most of them end up feeling at home here just the way I do.
What makes southern Morocco so special? Many threads come together to create the extraordinary ambience which permeates this part of the country. First of all, there is the Berber influence: a large percentage of Moroccans in the South are Berbers, and many elements of ancient North African Berber culture, with roots in Neolithic times, remain percepible beneath the relatively recent overlays of Arabic culture and Islam.
This time of year, the general public tends to pay more attention than usual to witches. Much of it is lighthearted – halloween costumes and memes about where to park your broom. Some of it is spiritual – adherents of the modern religions of Wicca and neopaganism discussing symbolic and supernatural beliefs. And some of it is historical – analyzing the witch trials of past centuries and wondering how they apply, ethically, to modern day intolerance and violence.
Within all these discussions, usually unnamed and unexamined, is the framing metaquestion: what should we fear? And what should we do about that which we fear?
Historic witch trials (from a time when witches were believed to be evil agents of Satan) reveals how we humans always try to externalize badness and goodness, so we can exterminate badness and excuse ourselves for our lack of goodness. So we have heroes and villains, neither of them very human, but rather idols and symbols of our fears. I honestly think the patriarchy’s fear of females is as strong as it ever was. When the most popular videos on the most popular internet porn sites are of ****TRIGGER WARNING RAPE, INCEST**** raping a stepsister, or doctors raping a teenage girl in the hospital for cancer, or of border agents raping a pregnant young refugee, and these sites are visited by 98% of the men in our society, what does that say about us as a species? Or a culture? As Tallessyn Grenfell-Lee says, “Scary, scary vaginas!”
Fifteen years ago, I bought my dream home in Molivos, Lesbos, one of the most stunning villages in the world. Over the next two years I renovated a listed Neoclassical house that had been neglected for over thirty years, restoring it to its original beauty. One of my friends who visited exclaimed that it looked like a movie set. Someone else said that the final result was “more Greek than Greek.” I thought this would be my forever home. But, as I have discussed in an earlier blog, I came to feel isolated in a small village.
Feminism and Religion 