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… Read More ›
Come Halloween, the popular imagination turns to witches. Especially in Pendle Witch Country, the rugged Pennine landscape surrounding Pendle Hill, once home to twelve individuals arrested for witchcraft in 1612. The most notorious was Elizabeth Southerns, alias Old Demdike,… Read More ›
On July 4 countless people in the United States celebrated Independence Day and many enjoyed a long leisurely Independence Day weekend. While there’s nothing wrong with celebrating freedom and all that is good in your country, I’ve become increasingly… Read More ›
Clara Schumann To a large extent, women have been written out of history. Any surviving record of female accomplishment is often trivialized or dismissed. This seems especially true in the male-dominated world of classical music. When asked to… Read More ›
Judy Chicago, The Three Faces of Man from Power Play, 1985 On December 1, 2018, I most reluctantly moved off a stable yard where I had kept my beloved mare Boo, aka Queen Boodicca, for ten years. I… Read More ›
This linoprint of Margaret Fell can be ordered here. Pendle Hill will forever be associated to the Pendle Witches of 1612 who live on in the undying soul of the landscape and its folklore and who inspired my 2010 novel,… Read More ›
Women Singing Earth by Mary Southard Here is a hymn of praise, a beautiful and intimate piece meant to be sung. Reader, I invite you to guess the author of this text and the sacred figure to whom this work is… Read More ›
One of my Facebook friends, a young woman academic, recently posed a question, inviting discussion. (I’ve abbreviated her post for the sake of space.) “What is it about white male liberals that just MUST have me buy [into] their ideas… Read More ›
Last month I blogged about Three Herstorical Divas to Die For. But since herstory is teeming with heroines whose praise needs to be sung and whose legacies deserve to be remembered, I now present three more Herstorical Divas to inspire… Read More ›
The Urban Dictionary defines a diva as a woman who exudes great style and confidence and expresses her unique personality without letting others define who she should be. In my mind, a diva is a woman who stands in her sovereignty… Read More ›
While Frida Kahlo is arguably the world’s most famous woman artist, most women in the surrealist movement have been overlooked. But Frida’s sister surrealists now seem to be experiencing a long overdue resurgence, with recent international exhibitions showcasing Leonora Carrington,… Read More ›
Women who stand out and dare to seize their power have been maligned throughout history. Even today many people are uncomfortable about the very idea of a powerful woman. Witness how Hillary Clinton was demonized in the 2016 presidential… Read More ›
We have been lost to each other for so long. My name means nothing to you. My memory is dust. This is not your fault or mine. The chain connecting mother to daughter was… Read More ›
Jessie Chaffee‘s Florence in Ecstasy is the most luminous debut novel I have read in a very long time. Imagine, if you will, a darker and more literary version of Elizabeth Gilbert’s popular spiritual seeker’s memoir, Eat Pray Love. This… Read More ›
Doing a recent talk on pioneering woman writers, I like to do the Before Jane Austen test with my audience. Who can name a single woman writer in the English language before Jane Austen? Alas, because woman have been written… Read More ›
What do groundbreaking 17th century poet, Aemilia Bassano Lanier, and 20th century feminist icon, Virginia Woolf, have in common? A lot actually. In her 1929 essay, “A Room of One’s Own,” Woolf imagines the tragedy of Shakespeare’s brilliant sister, Judith,… Read More ›
The following is a guest post by Mary Sharratt’s Welsh mare, Miss Boo aka Queen Boudicca The ancient Romans and Gauls knew something that many modern day humans have forgotten. Mares are divine. The worship of… Read More ›
Continued from Part 1 and Part 2 When Bess was in her fifties, walking past the quarry at sunset—called daylight gate in her dialect—a beautiful young man emerged from the stone pit, his hair golden and shining, his coat half… Read More ›
Continued from Part 1. As I sought to uncover the bones of the cunning woman Mother Demdike’s story, I was drawn into a new world of mystery and magic. It was as though Pendle Hill had opened up like an… Read More ›
Pendle Hill, seen from the back of my house, in May. The Soul of Gaia is the numinous earth beneath my feet, her soil cradling the bones and the stories of the ancestors who have died into the land… Read More ›
The world at large might view artists and writers as free spirits rocking la vie bohème, but creative people know that it’s much more complicated than that, especially if we’re striving to earn even a modest living from our work…. Read More ›
We have been lost to each other for so long. My name means nothing to you. My memory is dust. This is not your fault or mine. The chain connecting mother to daughter was broken and the word passed… Read More ›
In medieval Europe, religious devotion provided an alternate narrative for women’s lives in a male-dominated culture. Defiant women who stood up for themselves in the face of rape, incest, and murder were hailed as virgin martyrs. Religious vocations, such as… Read More ›
Maenad dancing with snake, ancient Greece, ca 450 BCE This post is in part inspired by Donna Henes’s brilliant post, I am Mad. Too often as spiritual women, we are told we have to be nice all the time. Accomodating…. Read More ›
Hildegard’s vision of Christ, surrounded by concentric circles of light. When I was forty-two years and seven months old, Heaven was opened and a fiery light of exceeding brilliance came and permeated my whole brain, and inflamed my… Read More ›
Saint Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179) was not only a visionary Benedictine abbess, composer, and Powerfrau extraordinaire. She was also a physician and healer who developed her own highly original system of medical treatment and holistic dietary philosophy. Saint Benedict of… Read More ›
December 7 marks the Second Sunday of Advent. Here in Northern England, I find myself plunged into the depths of midwinter darkness. It is in this dark womb of stillness that the Light is reborn. Through the ages and across… Read More ›
The visionary abbess Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) has long been regarded as a saint, with her feast day of September 17, yet she was only officially canonized in May 2012. Why did it take the Vatican over eight centuries to… Read More ›
Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179) was a visionary abbess and polymath. She composed an entire corpus of sacred music and wrote nine books on subjects as diverse as theology, cosmology, botany, medicine, linguistics, and human sexuality, a prodigious intellectual outpouring that… Read More ›
The Great Goddess and Divine Mother of Us All manifests where and to whom She chooses, no matter what faith we hold. In the 12th century, She manifested to a German nun named Hildegard. Hildegard’s story has been told in… Read More ›
