Women’s Voices – Page 15 – Feminism and Religion

May Sarton: Leaping the Waterfalls (1912-1995 American Woman Writer), part 2 by Marie Dintino

Part 1 was posted yesterday.

That richness of self may be what May chased her entire life: for herself to be enough. Eight years later in Journal of a Solitude, May further explores her relationship with solitude:

May’s house in Nelson, NH

“Later on in the night I reached quite a different level of being. I was thinking about solitude, its supreme value. Here in Nelson I have been close to suicide more than once, and more than once have been close to a mystical experience of unity with the universe. The two states resemble each other: one has no wall, one is absolutely naked and diminished to essence. Then death would be the rejection of life because we cannot let go what we wish so hard to keep, but have to let go if we are to continue to grow”(57).

But May knew the drill, and wrote such to a friend, “I came to see that my loneliness (acute and awful) was really a loneliness for myself”(Peters 279).

In Journal of a Solitude, May reveals the challenges surrounding the writing of Mrs. Stevens in 1965, the guts it took, the mission she had in mind:

“On the surface my work has not looked radical, but perhaps it will be seen eventually that in a “nice, quiet, noisy way” I have been trying to say radical things gently so that they may penetrate without shock. The fear of homosexuality is so great that it took courage to write Mrs. Stevens, to write a novel about a woman homosexual who is not a sex maniac, a drunkard, a drug-taker, or in any way repulsive; to portray a homosexual who is neither pitiable nor disgusting, without sentimentality; and to face the truth that such a life is rarely happy, a life where art must become the primary motivation, for love is never going to fulfill in the usual sense.

“But I am well aware that I probably could not have “leveled” as I did in that book had I had any family (my parents were dead when I wrote it), and perhaps not if I had had a regular job. I have a great responsibility because I can afford to be honest. The danger is that if you are placed in a sexual context people will read your work from a distorting angle of vision. I did not write Mrs. Stevens until I had written several novels concerned with marriage and family life”(91).

The need to mask in life and art, the patience to slowly roll out the truth, in a “nice, quiet, noisy way.”

Margot Peters weighs in on Mrs. Stevens in May’s biography:

“While Hilary Stevens might outrage those who believe that women artists are not deviants, her claim that women must find their own language and subjects in the dominant world of men’s literature was a radical concept in 1965. Mrs. Stevens’s idea of “woman’s work” also goes far to explain the puzzle of May Sarton’s own oeuvre: how such an aggressive, volatile, and violent person could produce novels and poems that ultimately transcend conflict. Like Hilary Stevens, May believed that her creative demon was masculine, her sensibility feminine”(254).

”Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing was a novel before its time. In coming years, as the gathering momentum of the feminist, gay, and civil rights movements raised America’s consciousness and women’s studies departments sprang up on campuses across the nation, Mrs. Stevens brought its author a fame she had sought all her life”(259).

While living in Nelson, May received letter upon letter from women envying her seemingly ideal situation, but May wanted to set the record straight, that her living alone in a small rural town in New Hampshire was not the panacea so many imagined.

“No partner in a love relationship (whether homosexual or heterosexual) should feel that he has to give up an essential part of himself to make it viable. But the fact is that men still do rather consistently undervalue or devalue women’s powers as serious contributors to civilization except as homemakers. And women, no doubt, equally devalue their own powers. But there is something wrong when solitude such as mine can be “envied” by a happily married woman with children.

“Mine is not, I feel sure, the best human solution. Nor have I ever thought it was. In my case it has perhaps made possible the creation of some works of art, but certainly it has done so at a high price in emotional maturity and in happiness. What I have is space around me and time around me. How they can be achieved in marriage is the real question. It is not an easy one to answer”(Journal 123).

Make no mistake, although May was living alone, she was not alone. She had frequent visitors and was often off lecturing, leading workshops and teaching seminars. Nelson was an attempt to extract, one met with mixed results.

May Sarton grappled with life’s intangibles while living as close as possible to tangible pleasures; she struggled with darkness in the greatest sense and basked in full-on light in the intimate moments, where she found peace. Nothing was meaningless; everything was meaningless. She bared her soul and her heart, revealed her gifts and vulnerabilities in a way not many dare.

“Rage is the deprived infant in me but there is also a compassionate mother in me and she will come back with her healing powers in time”(Peters 339). How accurately May’s sums herself up here; for all her crossness and fire, she was generous to a fault, gifting thousands of dollars to friends every single year.

May became a gardener, as was her mother. In Nelson, she planted, weeded, harvested and displayed vibrant, oh-so-necessary flowers. It became a true labor of love, for even if she wasn’t up to doing such work, she forced herself out of doors to commune with the rocky soil, the scent of dirt and plants, the distinct hope of growth and blossoms. This seemed the antidote to starving for love and light:

“For a long time, for years, I have carried in my mind the excruciating image of plants, bulbs, in a cellar, trying to grow without light, putting out white shoots that will inevitably wither. It is time I examined this image. Until now it has simply made me wince and turn away, bury it, as really too terrible to contemplate.”(Journal 57).

May lamented in a letter to a friend,

“My rage and woe come from great and prolonged suffering that the critics have never never given the poems a break. I see the mediocre winning and I suppose to keep going I have to get mad…better than committing suicide. It is a fight to survive somehow against the current. I am a salmon leaping the waterfalls”(Peters 279).

Thank you for passionately and patiently swimming against the current, May.

May Sarton is a #NastyWomanWriter.

(Here’s the post about May’s resting place in the Nelson cemetery: The Phoenix Takes Its Rest: Visiting May Sarton’s Grave.)

©Maria Dintino 2019

Works Cited:

Peters, Margot. May Sarton: a Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.

Sarton, May. Journal of a Solitude. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1973.

Sarton, May. Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1965.

May Sarton: Leaping the Waterfalls (1912-1995 American Woman Writer), part 1 by Marie 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 July 13, 2021. You can see more of their posts here.

Spending summer 2021 in New Hampshire, I drive through Nelson quite often these days. Each time I do, I think of May Sarton, her years here, who she was, her art, and all she accomplished. I always glance down the road at the cemetery where she now rests.*

This post is one I wrote about May two years ago and it feels right to run it again since I feel so close to her these days. Enjoy!

May Sarton: Leaping the Waterfalls

I’d been duped. The gray-haired writer who moved to the small town of Nelson, New Hampshire in 1958 was not who I imagined. I only discovered this when I began work on this post. Far from the tranquil woman in my mind, May Sarton was an enigma, even to herself.

At forty-six, May Sarton purchased her first and only house, attempting to extract herself. In a destructive relationship, struggling to reign herself in, she sought to settle, to live where only those she wanted to see or those who really wanted to see her would visit. Plus, the dramatic move would provide fresh writing material.

May, high school graduation, Cambridge, MA 1929

Circle of Fire by Sara Wright

Moderator’s Note: This is the final part of Sara’s poem that was posted last week. You can read it here.

Part 1

She burned
in raging fires
swamped by
merciless floods
crossed mountains
of grief
so wide so deep
crushed Silence
in her sleep
unknowingly
accompanied
by Owls
and Winter Wren
Marked by Bear’s
sharp Protective
Claws
Circles of Fire

Seeing Double by Esther Nelson

I’ve often thought that we (in the USA) have been somewhat, albeit reluctantly, willing to discuss and perhaps even change our minds, behavior, policies, and laws when confronted about the long-lived presence of racism in our local and national institutions. However, when it comes to misogyny—not so much.

Shirley Anita Chisholm St. Hill (1924 – 2005), was an American politician who, in 1968, became the first black woman to be elected to Congress. “Chisholm represented a district centered in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, for seven terms from 1969 to 1983. In 1972, she became the first black candidate for a major-party nomination for President of the U.S. and the first woman to run for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. Throughout her career, she was known for taking ‘a resolute stand against economic, social, and political injustices’ as well as being a strong supporter of black civil rights and women’s rights” (Wikipedia).

Chisholm noted that “…she had faced much more discrimination during her New York legislative career because she was a woman than for her race” (Wikipedia). Why are not more of us aware of Chisholm’s confession?

Mother Blues: Interfaith Somatic Reflections on Support Systems, Chronic Pain, Tension Relief, and Supporting Oneself by Chaz J

I have had a weird relationship with my stomach or core BEFORE birth.

My back has been hurting since giving birth.

I’ve carried fragments of my birth story like heirlooms,
passed down in murmurs from my mother and family.
They say she went into labor at home,
a warm plate of food in her hands,
My aunt Akami recalls she refused to leave for the hospital
until every bite was finished.

I came into the world under sudden urgency—
an emergency C-section,
my first act a quiet rebellion:
I had soiled the waters before taking my first breath.

My mother remembers it in a haze,
“I was pregnant, went to sleep…
when I woke up, there was a baby in the corner.”

I do not know if every detail is true,
but the outline fits—
the origin of a loneliness that has followed me
like a shadow that never unhooks from the heel.

Honeysuckle Jewels and Women with Wings by Sara Wright

Initially I wrote this article for publication at a plant site but was forcibly struck by the reality that what we are doing to plants is exactly the same thing we are doing to humans, women in particular. Separating, Othering, Judging, Dismissing, Eradicating. I could go on here. When you read this article about invasives think about how we are being treated as women. It alarms me that no matter I turn I see the same story played out with humans (women and children suffer most overall), trees, plants, and the animals we are so busy annihilating if not physically then in some other monstrous way. Fill in the blank with your own story. Then imagine yourself as a bird with wings who carries the seeds of new life into unexpected places.

When I first moved to this area many years ago, I used to spend most of the time in the forests that surrounded my house except in the spring. Then I walked along what used to be a country road to see the wild trilliums, arbutus, lady slippers, bunch berry, violets and columbine that peppered the road edges.

All the trees and flowers were so plentiful and so beautiful that it took me a few years to pay closer attention to the bushes like the various pussy willows and wild cherries, beaked hazelnut, witch hazel and hobblebush that I also came to love.

We Don’t Have to Live Like This by Trista Hendren

A Tribute to Carol P. Christ’s Legacy of Peace

Rawan Anani, The Melody of Freedom, Gaza Palestine

Carol P. Christ was a feminist scholar and thealogian I deeply admired from afar for many years. That changed when I read her post in Feminism and Religion describing “washing wet clothes cast off by refugees who crossed the Sea of Death.”[1]

In that moment, she became a woman I connected with on a soul level. What could be more profound than washing and folding the clothing of tiny dead children? What other metaphor could be more vivid for how desperately we need to change the world?

“A tiny pink long-sleeved shirt with a boat neck, for a girl, size 3 months.

A pair of leggings with feet, grey with pink, orange, brown, white, and blue polka-dots, to be worn over diapers.”

The week before, she asserted that “the only ‘solution’ to the problem of people leaving their homes in fear for their lives is TO END WAR.” She continued, “No one takes this suggestion seriously enough to engage it.”[2]

I remember sitting inside the Idean cave with our Goddess Pilgrimage group when Carol read, “We Need a God Who Bleeds Now” by Ntozake Shange. I knew the poem well, but hearing Carolina read it so forcefully shook something deep inside me.

While I have had the privilege of having several wonderful female pastors, they were never particularly affirming of my womanhood—or my divinity. They certainly never celebrated my period.

SheSpeaks! Eve by Janet Maika’i Rudolph

Author’s Note: I have begun a project called She Speaks! Women of the Bible Have Their Say. As part of this project, I have done five films with some very dedicated actors (friends of mine) who have dubbed themselves the SheSpeaks!Ensemble. I showed 4 of the films at the recent Yerusha Symposium. Based on the comments and reception, the project is now expanding. I am looking to create longer films that include story arcs. The first one will be of Eve. Below is the script for Eve along with the link to the video.

EVE speaks:

Why hello I don’t get visitors very often! Welcome. Come, come sit under my tree, let’s share some tea. I have the most wonderful and flavorful herbs here in my garden.

Look around at my most marvelous paradise. It is all filled with magical treasure. I’ll tell you a secret, the treasure I care for spans both the heavens and the earth. You see, we are at the place where spirit, breath and matter intersect. Where the living beings of earth and the animating forces of the divine join in harmony.

It is so hard to look at your holy book. I can’t imagine why I keep getting blamed for . . .well . . . just about everything. It’s strange that your world wants to connect me with curses as I am the giver of life. In fact, did you know that my name Eve means life. I don’t understand what has become of you, my children. It is said that I brought a curse to humanity. Do you see life as a curse? Let me tell you a bit about myself. Perhaps then you will see me differently.

My Grandmother’s Pearls are Green by Sara Wright

“That move into mystery
is not an abandonment of
perception
into a cloud of unknowing.
It’s a move
into a different form
of knowing.”

Robert Macfarlane

I stepped outside when the sun was just rising over the horizon and low enough in the sky to create a play of shadow and light. This is my favorite time of the day to witness the astonishing beauty of the earth that is spreading her shimmering cloak around my feet… ‘oh, my grandmother’s hair, the words rose unbidden’. Chartreuse, plum, wine, lime, gold leaf and emerald canopies stretched across the brook blurring the leaves between birch, ash, beech and maples. The silvery water glistened, and I imagined myself flowing around those serpentine moss-covered banks listening to an ancient song that has been sung by water for more than 4 billion years. How I wish I understood what ‘ki’ was saying but I am no longer able to discern the language.

Diana Beresford-Kroeger: Integrating Celtic Wisdom and Science, part 2 by Theresa Dintino

Part 1 was posted yesterday

Combining ancient wisdom and western science

At age sixteen Beresford-Kroeger was graduated from her mentorship of the Lisheens and went on to become a scientist, learning medical biochemistry and botany. Eventually she saw that many of the things she learned from the Lisheens elders could be scientifically proven. This offered her delight and reassurance.

One of the first of these was the plant Chrondrus crispus or seaweed named Irish moss. Her Great-Aunt Nellie taught her that it cured tuberculosis and how to prepare and use the gel-like mucilage it released upon being boiled.

In the lab Beresford-Kroeger later discovered that this mucilage has antibiotic properties.

“The feeling this confirmation of Nellie’s teaching gave me is hard to describe. I loved my teachers in Lisheens, but I hadn’t completely ruled out the idea that the things I’d been taught there were just old superstitions. I needed to confirm them for myself. There was always the chance that there would turn out to be nothing of import in the plants they’d emphasized to me, and nothing more to the ancient knowledge than beautiful clouds of vapor”(96).

She began to understand that what she had been taught was an oral tradition and that it existed in no other format and that she was meant to be a bridge between “the ancient and the scientific”(97).

“My teachers in the valley might have indicated that a particular plant was good for poor circulation, which I’d taken to mean heart trouble. I would then know to keep a particular eye out for the presence of any chemical known to benefit the heart. “Well, Diana,” they might have begun, while cradling a small, five-pointed yellow flower in the crook of two fingers. “St. John’s Wort, as you see here, has a strong medicine for nervousness and mental problems.” I would later find out that St. John’s Wort contains phytochemicals such as hyperforin, which increase the effectiveness of dopamine and serotonin in the brain. The plant is as effective as many prescription anti-depressants, and may in some cases be more effective”(98).