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I remember this one Sunday afternoon in 1988 with the sharp vividness that memory usually reserves for truly significant or disastrous events. But this was such a small thing. I was in the bathtub reading the New York Times when I came across an announcement stating that the weekly “Hers” column, which was the only place in the whole newspaper that specifically reflected women’s thinking, would no longer appear every week because, in the name of equity, it would alternate with a new “About Men” column. To my own surprise, I burst into tears, sobbing almost uncontrollably. My partner came running, wondering what calamity could possibly have befallen me in the bathtub. He laughed when I told him what my trouble was. “But don’t you get it?” I cried. “The entire New York Times is about men!”

I don’t know why I had such a strong reaction to this—maybe because it was a definitive sign that the fresh inrush of women’s concerns that had flooded into the mainstream since the sixties was slowing to a trickle, mixing with everything else, losing its bracing quality. I’m sure my response was unusual, but it touches on an experience shared by so many women: the strange, sometimes enraging sense of living in a culture that rarely reflects one’s priorities, concerns, and deeper desires. Despite the progress made in these last four decades, Western culture still suffers from male bias—from Our Father in Heaven and the occupants of the Oval Office to the ravaging of Mother Nature and the ever-intensifying sexual objectification of women (and girls). The recipe for cultural change has been pretty much “add women and stir”—as if reaching some balance in the numbers of men and women in public life, which has not even happened, would transform the basic ethos of our culture and shift the course of history.

Over the last twenty years, however, something deeper has started stirring in women, a motivation to change culture at its roots. The goal is to create a new spiritual and ethical context that would balance and heal our hypermasculine world through honoring the feminine as sacred. This means a variety of things, and different women (or groups of women) have identified the feminine in different ways. There are some who see the Divine Feminine in the unique life-sustaining roles that have emerged from our biological role as mothers. Others speak of a feminine principle that is a force in the human psyche and a fundamental aspect of the manifest world. And still others are engaged in reclaiming or re-creating rituals to celebrate ancient goddesses, to make this feminine divinity more visible and conscious. Common to all (or most) is the sense that the sacred is not to be found in a transcendent realm out there somewhere but that the sacred is immanent to life. Thus these forms of spirituality celebrate the very human endeavor of trying to realize unity with nature and with one another—often celebrating the body, sexuality, and relationship.

All told, it’s an unprecedented phenomenon. Never before in Western history have women actively insisted that the sacred dimension of life reflect their (our) gender. And from what I can tell, the same generation of women who advocated for social change in the last century—my boomer sisters—are the vast majority of those engaged in this experiment in cultural and consciousness change.

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From what I gather, most of these new woman-created spiritual paths implicitly or explicitly rely on the groundbreaking theoretical work of psychiatrist Carl Jung (1875–1961). Jung, who pioneered the theory that all of humanity shares a deep psychic realm that he called the collective unconscious, assumed that the feminine and masculine are ontological principles so profound to life that one could easily see them as inherently sacred. They describe two fundamental ways of being, two types of psychic energy, often represented by female and male images called archetypes.

<snip>

While the difference between the masculine and feminine may seem self-evident, I haven’t found it to be all that clear. Some, like Ken Wilber, note that men are more naturally aligned with Eros, which he considers to be the creative instinct, and that women are more aligned with Agape, compassion. Others divide Being and Doing into feminine and masculine, respectively. Jung apparently believed that the feminine was Eros and the masculine Logos, which crudely corresponds with emotions and intellect.

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Originally posted by Henry J:
I'm not sure why the differences between genders would be assumed to be intrinsic to the collective unconscious. To me it seems more likely that gender attributes are a side-effect of the body one winds up living in. If that makes sense.

Henry

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On Being Victorian

That question led me back to Carl Jung and to a surprising fact that was right under my nose: Jung was a Victorian. His ideas are so central to today’s cutting-edge psychology that I nearly overlooked the particular time and set of cultural assumptions that he was operating within. Jung was born in Switzerland near the midpoint of Queen Victoria’s reign, during Europe’s industrial revolution. This is profoundly important: The Victorian era, like no time before or since, asserted that one’s gender and sexuality were the core of who we are. Thus when he was developing his theory, Jung, like Freud and other pioneers of psychoanalysis, would not have had the awareness that what he understood about women and men was located in his particular cultural context. While human civilization has always been patriarchal to one degree or another, you could easily say that in the Victorian era, modern patriarchy reached its height, bolstered by newly developing sciences that aimed to prove extreme differences between women and men. Victorians perfected the idea that men and women are opposites. As Jung himself said, “What can a man say about woman, his own opposite?”

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According to Thomas Laqueur in Making Sex, a brilliant exploration of how our understanding of the body, sex, and gender has changed over time, nineteenth-century philosophers and scientists were determined to prove that “not only are the sexes different, but that they are different in every conceivable aspect of body and soul, in every physical and moral aspect.” Before then, and up until the Western Enlightenment, male and female existed on a continuum in which the female was inferior and often derided but was not diametrically opposed and fundamentally different from the male.

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Freeing the Feminine Divine

While the aim of bringing forth the feminine principle has been to create a new value system, one based on women’s experience, in order to overturn “masculine” values of dominance and separation, repeatedly we end up reinforcing the polarization of male and female that is at the root of patriarchy. When we boomer women speak of what the feminine can do for culture, we most often speak of those Victorian “good woman” qualities of nurturing and caretaking, which are qualities that are certainly needed in our world gone awry. But the persistent identification of women with these domestic attributes can put national female political leaders between a rock and a hard place: If they emphasize care and nurturance, they are seen as “too soft” for the rough world of politics, and if they express interest in other issues, they are seen as scarily unwomanly.

Another way we women approach culture change is through our feminine reflection in nature. We express concern for the fertile body of the planet and the need to tend our garden. We certainly do have to extend our caretaking to the entire human family and the tree of life. But in equating women, body, and nature, we reinforce the deep belief of patriarchal culture that divides women and men: Women are nature; men are culture. Women are body; men are mind. Women are caring; men are aggressive.

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But I always wondered why we could not accept the fact that men and women are different without immediately getting into superior and inferior characterizations. Equality does not have to mean same.

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P.S.
Your Divine Feminine made me think of Dan Brown's DaVinci Code.
I had never run across the term before and it sure got him into a lot of trouble with the Catholic Church.

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I am slowing working to understand women better, and its valuable to hear your point of view of the situation.

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I think I need to get away from the computer and spend a little time writing in my journal, not even trying to relate to anyone else. At this point I couldn't tell you what my POV is because I don't even know myself!

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Freeing the Feminine Divine
While the aim of bringing forth the feminine principle has been to create a new value system, one based on women’s experience, in order to overturn “masculine” values of dominance and separation, repeatedly we end up reinforcing the polarization of male and female that is at the root of patriarchy. When we boomer women speak of what the feminine can do for culture, we most often speak of those Victorian “good woman” qualities of nurturing and caretaking, which are qualities that are certainly needed in our world gone awry. But the persistent identification of women with these domestic attributes can put national female political leaders between a rock and a hard place: If they emphasize care and nurturance, they are seen as “too soft” for the rough world of politics, and if they express interest in other issues, they are seen as scarily unwomanly.

Another way we women approach culture change is through our feminine reflection in nature. We express concern for the fertile body of the planet and the need to tend our garden. We certainly do have to extend our caretaking to the entire human family and the tree of life. But in equating women, body, and nature, we reinforce the deep belief of patriarchal culture that divides women and men: Women are nature; men are culture. Women are body; men are mind. Women are caring; men are aggressive.

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Originally posted by JohnT:

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I think I need to get away from the computer and spend a little time writing in my journal, not even trying to relate to anyone else. At this point I couldn't tell you what my POV is because I don't even know myself!

Linda,
Do what I do. Take a nap.
Sometimes we need to completely vacate the mind and give it a rest.

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Women enter the world with a different set of needs from men, and they enter with a different set of abilities.

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DON'T BE SO SURE ABOUT THAT!!!
...... ....
This is really a hit-and-run post to kick the thread, and to let you know I read your last couple of posts and that I've been thinking about them. I'll respond in more depth as soon as I have time.

--Linda