women’s journeys – Feminism and Religion

Poems for Season by Sara Wright

In late November I first snowshoed our woodland trails to include the little balsam that I lit to honor all evergreens throughout the winter months. Every day when my little dog and I circled the tree I told her I loved her and called her ‘Lightbringer’. This daily encounter never lost its magic. The Goddess Lived during the darkest winter nights!!

The rest speak to the subtle changes that occurred from late winter into spring. My writing naturally follows both seasonal and intraseasonal shifts that might not be noticed unless a person is paying close attention.

(1) Lightbringer

Will she still
be there
shining
after the storm?
Moon Bear
is on the rise.
I peer through
white flakes
at dawn
light
pierces
her powdery
fringed shawl
Love lights
the darkest
Night.

Steadfast Balsam
cloaked or not
Ever-green,
Tree of Life.
Heartlines flow
crystalline
waters
pour down
deep sleep
oh,
Daughter
of the Night
Daughter of
The Light,
Light -Bringer
Life -Bringer
The Miracle
Is that
You Live.

Of Duct Tape and Dementia by Elizabeth Cunningham

I’ve climbed on a stool (which I swore I wouldn’t do again after having a bad fall while helping a friend paint a bathroom ceiling) and up onto the washing machine. A cabinet door just above has come unhinged (not unlike this author). I have considered unscrewing it and taking it off, have located the proper screwdriver, but the screw will not budge, no matter how I contort my body in this small space. If I can’t get the cabinet door to stop flopping open, I will not be able to load the washer. My hope and salvation is…duct tape. So my husband stands holding the cabinet door more (or less) still while I tear off and attach pieces of duct tape, which will more (or less) serve my purpose, till someone more skilled can do a real repair.

“Do you remember,” I ask, “when I used to say, Douglas, fix it! Whatever needed fixing.”

“No, I don’t remember.” His response to most such queries. “I don’t remember that at all.”

Into Me I See: The Sacred Torch of Feminine Heat by Jsabél Bilqís

There’s that throbbing again! In the slit center of me. Spreading vehemently, devouring, insatiable, red like blood and warm like body. They say I’m Jezebel because I like it when she purrs.

𖦹

‘Now you can get pregnant.’

I became a woman but all my mother saw was a dirty girl. Like the wombs before and around me, scorched by estranged origins, I got in bed with shame and became disembodied, found myself in hell.

‘Virgin or Harlot?’, they asked me at the gates.

Sensing my fullness, I looked Illusion in the eyes.

‘Both.’

Engulfed in the flames, I chose all of me and it purified every thing that was not free.

The Legacy of Intergenerational Violence/ Silence, part 2 By Sara Wright

Part 1 was posted last week. You can read it here.

I also came to understand the role Intergenerational Silence played in the dance between my mother and father. My mother controlled through silence, a perfect correlate to her husband’s explosive rages. Silence and Rage make grotesque bedmates, and both destroy relationships.

My mother’s story remained veiled. Except on one occasion, my mother never apologized to me for her actions so that bridge remains broken.

Everything I know about my mother’s history (and that isn’t much) I learned from her relatives. I knew she was illegitimate, the daughter of a wealthy and very married senator and my grandmother. She lived a privileged life and was sent to the very best schools/colleges. Once a month she visited with her biological father. By the time my mother was in her twenties she severed this relationship for unknown reasons. I have no idea if she ever met her half – brothers and sisters. She disliked – blamed (?) my grandmother who was banned from the family when she became pregnant. No doubt shame was an issue for all. My mother lived with my grandmother’s sisters, my great aunts and called my grandmother by her first name. She married twice. The first marriage was annulled by the family. No idea why. Secrets and Silence ruled my mother’s family; and she clearly perfected that tendency. Didn’t anyone recognize that secrets leave holes that cannot be bridged once that person is dead?

The Legacy of Intergenerational Violence/ Silence, part 1 By Sara Wright

Patriarchy begins at home.

Author’s Note: One reason I am sharing this story is that I hope that it will ease another round of suffering. However, I would dearly like to believe that others might reflect upon the ways they have been impacted by family violence or silence in their own lives, so we don’t get caught by projecting these patriarchal roots outside of us onto the collective while dismissing them in ourselves. That dark patriarchal seed is present in all of us, and I think that telling our personal stories keeps us attached to the whole with humility – a challenge in this time of monstrous ethical, social, political, ecological breakdown.

I often have dreams that leave me with questions, dreams that provoke deep personal reflection, dreams that stay with me as the following one did. At mid-life I had written tributes for two men that mentored me from a distance who brought ‘good fathering’ into the foreground because each encouraged me to believe in myself, to celebrate my original thinking, to trust my intuition and more.

Heather Pringle: Celebrating Viking Women— Warriors, Weavers and Wise Women, part 2 by Theresa Dintino

part 1 was posted yesterday

Women weavers who made the Viking world possible

Viking Women were also farmers, running their own farms, merchants running their own businesses, and voyagers upon the seas, locating and settling new territories in Iceland, Greenland and even Vinland in Canada.

The chapter on the Viking weavers is truly astounding. Pringle details the importance of and vast amount of weaving the Viking women produced to support the excursions of the ships and to dress their husbands and sons — maybe wives and daughters—safely for battle.

“In 2016, archaeologist Morten Ravn, a curator at the Viking Ship Museum in Denmark, published an estimate of the total time required to construct two medium-size Viking ships, from keel to sail. Ravn based this estimate on projects documented by the museum staff. His calculations showed that spinning and weaving enough cloth for just one sail accounted for as much as 36.9 percent of the total number of hours logged by builders of an average-size Viking ship. This meant that just over a third of all the work that went into constructing such a ship was performed by women. And if the crew carried enough spare cloth to mend the sail—a practice recommended by one Old Norse text, King’s Mirror—that statistic climbed to 53 percent, more than half of all the necessary work.

But the women weren’t done there, they also produced a wealth of other high-quality gear for the raiders themselves, from heavy seafaring blankets to water-resistant clothing. And last but certainly not least, research now suggests that they made a surprisingly effective form of body armor”(NW 114).

Heather Pringle: Celebrating Viking Women— Warriors, Weavers and Wise Women, part 1 by Theresa Dintino

Moderator’s Note: This piece is in co-operation with The Nasty Women Writers Project, a site dedicated to highlighting and amplifying the voices and visions of powerful women. The site was founded by sisters Theresa and Maria Dintino. To quote Theresa, “by doing this work we are expanding our own writer’s web for nourishment and support.” This was originally posted on their site on April 22th, 2025. You can see more of their posts here.

Most people have heard of the Vikings, the seafaring warriors of Northern Europe. Their travels to Iceland, Greenland and the American continent long before most believed contact was accomplished proved their prowess in navigation and traveling the turbulent waters of the north. Others are familiar with Norse Mythology: the flying Valkyries, god Odin and goddess Freya. But little has been known of the lives of ordinary or extraordinary Viking women until recently.

In The Northwomen: Untold Stories From the Other Half of the Viking World, Heather Pringle does an incredible job of gathering and telling the stories of these erased, ignored and unacknowledged women.

The Glorians written by Terry Tempest Williams, discussion by Sara Wright

The Glorians: Visitations from the Holy Ordinary is an astonishing book written by internationally acclaimed writer Terry Tempest Willams that is predicated on the necessity of bearing compassionate witness to all beings during these troubled times. It is a book about family, friends, earth and dreams, the later of which inspired the title. The volume is composed of a series of essays, only one of which I will discuss here.

Terry, who teaches at Harvard Divinity School, writes about the Divinity Tree, a two-hundred-year-old red oak that was removed from the Commons. Listening to this narrative as a ‘Tree Woman’ was/is excruciatingly painful. My stomach roils in misery, but I am compelled to listen, over and over, because this is my story too.

I came to the mountains because I was in love with trees and bears discovering an evergreen paradise or so I thought until the dreams began. In my night stories all the trees were being slaughtered and there was nothing I could do. Since I was surrounded by fragrant forests that stretched from horizon to horizon, I could make no sense of these terrifying warnings and let them be.

Burning Woman, by Lucy H. Pearce, 10th Anniversary Edition, Book Review by Beth Bartlett

As someone who came into feminism in the late 1970s early 1980s, reading Lucy Pearce’s Burning Woman was re-entering the power and promise of women-centered feminism – the heyday of Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Mary Daly, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Andrea Dworkin, Charlotte Bunch, China Galland, Riane Eisler, Carol Christ, Gloria Anzaldúa, Susan Griffin, Starhawk, Sara Ruddick.[i] It was the era of reclaiming the Feminine from its patriarchal definitions and women defining themselves outside of patriarchy – celebrating women’s spirituality, art, music, language, bodies, sexuality, birthing, voices, and power – when feminism was about transforming patriarchy rather than fitting into it — when Meg Christian proudly sang Betsy Rose’s “Glad to Be a Woman.”

And then everything changed. Just as women were coming into our own beyond patriarchy, women-centered feminism came to a halt due to pressures both from within feminism and without – with a whole school of deconstructionist feminists[ii] now critiquing women-defined women as “essentialists,” and moving back to minimizing rather than maximizing the differences between the sexes,[iii] with an emphasis on abolishing the gender binary, welcoming trans and non-binary folk, and questioning the whole concept of “women.” Indeed, one of my Women’s Studies, now Gender Studies, students asked me privately if it was okay to call herself a “woman” because the term had become so forbidden among many of the students. At this time, feminist theorist Nancy Hartsock raised the important question, “Why is that just at the moment when so many of us who have been silenced begin to demand the right to name ourselves, to act as subjects rather than objects of history, that just then the concept of subjecthood becomes problematic?”[iv]

Maryam Rajavi by Yalda Roshan

My name is Yalda. I am a woman from the Iranian resistance who, for many years, has fought for women’s equality and worked to amplify the voices of Iranian women around the world. Today, I want to share with you the source of inspiration and motivation that has guided my path.

Covering every aspect of Maryam Rajavi’s life and thought in one article is a challenge, so today I will focus only on what has personally influenced me: her perspective on women.

She herself is a woman who has spent decades fighting against two dictatorships—the Shah’s and the misogynistic clerical regime—and believes that women can change the world. A brief overview of her biography: she was born on December 4, 1953, in Tehran and is a metallurgical engineer from Sharif University of Technology in Tehran. From her teenage years, she embarked on the path of struggle, learning from action rather than words.