Carolyn Lee Boyd – Page 7 – Feminism and Religion

carolyn portrait

The healing face of Feminism hovers just out of sight behind your shoulder, but is still always there for you, whispering encouragement and guidance whenever you doubt your own sacredness. Or maybe She has always faced you, bold and strong, with the features of an ancestress or hera pushing you to act on your unique gifts. Have you seen Her?

From the time I was five, in the early 1960s, when an inner voice told me that it was good to question the constrictions on the lives of the women around me, through all the years of making my way through the exhausting morass of life as a contemporary woman, Feminism has been a deep and ever-flowing well of strength and power to which I could always go in times of despair or indecision. Still, it has been by witnessing the trauma of other’s women’s lives that I first truly understood the importance of Feminism’s healing aspect.

carolyn portrait

Winter’s hungry hand has taken another powerful and precious older woman. No one knew Ellen beyond her family and friends, her church and her neighbors. She was 90, a nurse, faithful to her church and of service to her community, and quiet in manner and tone. In my work in elder services over 25 years, I have come to know many Ellens, older women who have labored relentlessly in their homes or in the outside world for little recognition or financial recompense but who have made a tremendous difference in the lives of other. For reasons that may have to do with the harshness of New England winters, or maybe just coincidence, or maybe only perception, winter seems to be the time when they leave the Earth and we are bereft.

Ellen and the many older women I have known like her do not fit into any standard or feminist image of a powerful woman. They do not generally challenge the status quo, except with occasional complaints about unfairness to women in comments to friends. They may not feel comfortable labeling themselves as “feminist.”

Continue reading “Honoring the Older Women of December’s Darkness by Carolyn Lee Boyd”