I will preface this post with a disclaimer. I am a girly girl. I am a girls’ girl. I do not hate men. (Although at times I think there are too many in my life and they are exhausting. But that’s another story.) I love dresses and lipstick and the joy of a gaggle of girlfriends. I am, as told once by a dear friend, the most female of feminine they’d ever met.
I’m a child of the 80s, and when I think of feminism and my childhood, Gloria Steinem is the icon that immediately jumps into my head. Growing up Ms. Steinem was THE voice of all the voices. She is a writer, and gained a lot of attention from an article written in 1969 for the New Yorker titled “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation.” (It’s a great read.) She founded Ms. magazine, founded the Women’s Action Alliance, started Take Our Daughters to Work Day, advocated for women in politics and was an outspoken trailblazer. Still is.
There were so many others in the public realm: Jane Fonda (my father did not approve of her, which told me she was doing something right); Oprah; Madonna (provocative enough to lose the approval of both my mother and my father). But like most of us, the true feminine influences in my life were the women in my life. My mother, my aunts, my grandmothers. The women who came before me. Their lives were not extraordinary, rather, they simply endured.
My mother is an elder boomer and was influenced by what she saw from her own household. Her father was an alcoholic, and the abuse fell on my grandmother, my mother and my aunt. One may easily ascertain that growing up in such a household would result in either repeating that pattern of abuse, or rejecting it. My mother took her stance, telling my father while they were dating, “If you ever raise a hand to me, it’ll be the last thing you do.” She would tell me this story about her grandma, who was born in Poland, asked her after she got married, “He beat you?” And mother’s reaction of, “No, Grandma! It’s not like that.”
My other grandmother (my father’s mother) had six children and a tumultuous marriage. She once said to my mother, “You girls are lucky. You can have your babies whenever you want. All we could say was, ‘No.’”
I wished I had siblings, and I knew I wanted to have several children. I always recognized that childbirth and motherhood are important not because it’s the ONLY aspect of being a woman, but because the continuation of the human race is ultimately dependent upon it. Life is indeed a miracle, and the ability of the female body to sustain it, and bestow it, is profound. One of my favorite feminists, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, often spoke of why women’s ability to bear children should elevate us, and not be seen as a hindrance to accessing all that life had to offer.
I share that sentiment, despite not growing up in a world where women were legal property of men. My generation saw our mothers benefiting from their newish freedoms. They went to work, they paid bills, they got divorced or never got married. We observed these events in their lives not knowing what these challenges meant.
My mother (in a feminist move that was not deliberate, it just was what it was), happened to be the breadwinner in the family. After I was born, she took maternity leave and stayed home with me for the first few months, until she absolutely had to go back to work. But her job? Given to someone else. She had no legal recourse. This was the 1970s. She had to look elsewhere.
I had an aunt that didn’t “need” to work, but went out and got a job anyway. Her husband didn’t like it. There was a mom at school who stayed home with her kids while her husband worked. To make extra money, she picked a few us of up from school. I got to stay at her house, with her daughter and son, until my dad picked me up after work. I was fascinated with the concept that she didn’t leave the house every day and go to a job.
I grew up in a Christian household, baptized Methodist, raised Lutheran. There’s a joke in the Lutheran faith that we’re really “Catholic Lite.” It was a conservative faith that did not allow women in leadership roles.
A moment that fueled my feminist ways came in college, while I was taking a class on Jesus and the Gospels. I was in the library researching, looking for the Gospel of Thomas, and came across the Apocrypha, which are the 14 books that were removed from the Bible. How in all of my years I didn’t know of their existence is nothing short of preposterous, but there I was. The existence of these books fascinated me, especially the book of Judith.
Sidebar: Judith
Judith. My goodness, how she fits the bill for a feminist icon. (Scholars believe that she wasn’t real, but a conglomeration of folk tales.) The shorty short version of the story is: Her people were about to be slayed by the very powerful Assyrian army. Her village cried out to the Lord asking to be saved, and as fear grew, the men of the village decided if God didn’t come save them by say, Friday, they would just surrender. Judith, a widow who lived alone, didn’t like this vibe. God wasn’t to be tested, and she would prove this to her people. So she prayed for the Lord’s help, got all gussied up, left her village, and went toward the army. When she was stopped, she told the soldiers that she wanted to see the general Holofernes. She lied and said she had fled her village, and she could help them conquer her people.
Holofernes thought she was clever and beautiful, so he agreed to let her help him. She stayed with the army for a few days, and one night he decided to invite her to dinner so he could seduce her. Because, why not? (That’s not just my aside. He actually said, “It would bring shame on us to be with such a woman without enjoying her.”) So Holofernes got smashed, his servants left the two of them alone and she took the opportunity to lift his sword and behead him. Oh, yes. Head. Off. Prayed for God to give her strength and, well, he did.
Then Judith gave the head to her servant and they high tail it out of there. They return to the village, told the tale, and the men rose up and went out to start threatening the Assyrians, who realized their general was seriously dead and headless, and they scattered.
Meanwhile, Judith lived a long, happy life, refused to marry again and even freed her slave. I mean … what a badass.
Judith was just the jumping off point. I began to investigate and read more about religions and there connection to the feminine. Lillith was my next discovery, the first wife of Adam and the dumping ground for all the blame. She refused to lie with her husband. She consorted with demons and bore many. She tempted Eve/was the snake. It was said she tried to destroy children. Just all the yuck. It’s a double whammy on the creation story: Eve, the woman, was the one who sinned first. But Lillith, the first woman, was the sin. It is even said that God made Adam from the earth, but Lillith was made from sediment and “filth.” Modern day women that take inspiration from Lillith do so as a kind of rebellion.
But there were more in the depths of the world. Of our past. And I began to read about all of them. The Amazons were a force to be reckoned with. Athena, goddess of war, who helped Odysseus return to Ithaca. Demeter, the Mother Earth, celebrated at the autumnal harvests. Astarte, the Phoenician goddess of fertility. Aditi, the mother goddess of Vishnu, or Tara the Tibetan goddess of compassion who lived in 21 different forms, different colors. Mother Isis, who was exalted for more than 3,000 years.
There was a time when women were worshiped.
And the more I began to explore the more I realized how so many religions taught that we were directly connected to the Divine. That God was Yahweh was Mother Nature was Mother/Father Goddess was Me.
God is God is God is God. And if God is in Me, that doesn’t make you better than me. It may not even make us equals. Because that makes me Divine. It makes YOU Divine. We are absolutely the reflection of the one who made us. We do not deserve less money. We are not required to kneel. We do not exist for his fists, or fury. We are here as the mothers, grandmothers, sisters, aunts and daughters of the world.
(1) “If those who lead you say to you: ‘Look, the kingdom is in the sky!’ then the birds of the sky will precede you. (2) If they say to you: ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fishes will precede you. (3) Rather, the kingdom is inside of you and outside of you.”
The Gospel of Thomas, 3:1-3
My Voice In This 
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