The Dance of the Dissident Daughter (6 page)

I laid down my pen. You know what, I thought, maybe I made this big nest because I'm here to hatch my new life, to give birth to something. I remembered the dream of giving birth to myself, to the female life that wanted to come into being, and immediately, surprisingly, my eyes filled with tears.

I sat still. I wrote, “So then, what's standing in the way of this new life being born?” And it came to me all at once.
For one thing, you're going to have to forgive yourself for not being born male. You're going to have to learn to love your real female life.

I sat there open-mouthed. What? That was ridiculous. Of course I loved being a woman. I reveled in my femaleness.

But the inner voice was not talking about my surface revelings in being feminine. It was telling me something much more complex. It was telling me that I'd lost the voice of my native soul, or as novelist Ursula K. Le Guin put it, the innate mother tongue. I had learned instead to speak the father tongue, the dominant cultural language.
¹¹

Inside I felt like something submerged in me from the beginning of time had slit the surface. Some awful, sunken truth I didn't want to acknowledge had floated up to awareness. Maybe that humiliating Father Sue comment had dislodged it. Or maybe the comment was merely the debris of a truth already rising. For a moment I tried to pretend the thought hadn't come, but it was too late. My body had recognized it as the truth even before my mind could allow it. My heart was thudding, and my stomach was doing slow rolls into my chest.

Next I was crying one of those shoulder-shaking cries. A girl, I thought. I was born a girl with three brothers. I felt utterly cheated. My anguish was so intense it shocked me. It was as if I felt inferior simply for being female—that as a woman I was damaged goods or at least “seconds.”

I had somehow never known this about myself. It was terrible to admit, but even worse was feeling the pain that came with it. I thought, If I'd been born male, dear God! the things I could have done! I longed for parity with men, the freedom and choices of men, the ability to quest without worrying about who would cook dinner or pick up the children. I longed for the power men had to name the world, for the world had been largely male defined. Even God “himself” was defined by men and envisioned in their image.

Being female had always seemed vaguely limiting, confining, lacking in power, second-class. As I tried to understand why, I found myself thinking about Eve. Some words played in my head, the old litany about women I'd heard in church: “second in creation and first to sin.” Some years before, the Southern Baptist denomination had passed a resolution saying that women should not have a place of authority over men in church because of this. It had come straight out of the epistle of 1 Timothy (2:11–14) written in the second century:

Let a woman learn in silence with all submissiveness. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. (RSV)

As I brooded over this, I remembered the first time I'd heard the words
first to sin, second in creation.
The memory was still vivid, undulled after more than twenty-five years.

It was a Sunday morning, and I was around twelve. I sat in church in my childhood Georgia with my mother and father and two of my three younger brothers. We were listening to a visiting preacher give a sermon. It had to do with the “God-ordained family.” The preacher had a portable chalkboard beside the pulpit, and on it he diagrammed the family for us. He wrote
God
at the top, then in a descending chain of command he wrote
husband, wife, children.

I remembered the downward-pointing arrows he drew between each word, showing us the line of authority. When he got to the part about why wives were below husbands, I was on the edge of my pew. “Woman was the first to sin and the second to be cre
ated,” he said. Then he went on to talk about Eve, how she was created for man's benefit, that she was unworthy because she disobeyed God and offered Adam the forbidden fruit.

It was just like that day in Vacation Bible School when the teacher had informed us the Bible put men in charge. I felt the same rush of disbelief and betrayal.

By then I'd heard the message many times, but that day it fell like the proverbial last straw, the one that breaks the female camel's back. I listened to this “man of God” taking his message right out of what we considered to be the truest book of all. A feeling of pressure built in my chest, almost the same feeling I got at the city pool when I stayed underwater too long. I looked down the pew at my mother to get her reaction. Her eyes had glazed over; she looked like she'd heard it at least five hundred times before. I looked at the other women. Same there. I wanted them to stand up and say indignantly that this wasn't so, but none of them looked the least bit perturbed.

My heart sank. If I could have put the feeling into words, I would have said, “God, how
could
you?”

The so-called God-ordained image of female as under male, incapable, disobedient, unworthy—all of which added up to inferior—was a devastating notion to me as a girl. It snuffed out something vital, some hope for my female life.

When I left church that day, real doubt had set in about the value of being a girl.

Years later when I came upon some words by theologian Elizabeth A. Johnson, I felt the deep click of truth inside. She said that experiences like the one I had “give girl children from the beginning the experience of a world where the male is the norm from which her own self deviates.”
¹²
Over the years the idea of being “other,” of being the lesser sex, had continued to seep into me. I saw now it had penetrated the marrow of my tiniest bones. That day in the nest of leaves outside the monastery I came to know this for the first time. It was a moment of awakening. I had touched the wound of my feminine life.

THE FEMININE WOUND

When I returned home from the monastery, I wasn't quite the same. Oh, I tried to be. The holiday season was coming, and I thought if I dived into it full force the pain would be forgotten. I shelved my journal. The children and I went shopping. We dragged out decorations, drove to the country, and cut greenery. We put so much evergreen in the house Sandy said it looked like we were celebrating Arbor Day. I went crazy baking things, and I don't even like to bake. I also created new writing projects for myself. I did what I could to blot out the recognition that there was a feminine journey to be made and it was probably going to be the most arduous, most revolutionary experience of my life.

Feminist the
a
logian Carol P. Christ states that a woman's awakening begins with an “experience of nothingness.”
¹³
It comes as she experiences emptiness, self-negation, disillusionment, a deep-felt recognition of the limitation placed on women's lives, especially her own.

An experience of nothingness was what I encountered at the monastery. In tasting what it meant to be female in my culture and faith, I felt, for the first time, a hidden despair lodged inside.

At the time I had delusions that I was probably the only woman in the world with a wound like that. Later I would be surprised to discover that most women carry this wound, though it is usually buried and unnamed. Psychotherapist Anne Wilson Schaef's name for this wound is “the original sin of being born female.” She writes,

To be born female in this culture means that you are born “tainted,” that there is something intrinsically wrong with you that you can never change, that your birthright is one of innate inferiority. I am not implying that this must remain so. I do believe that we must know this and understand it as a given before it can be worked through.
¹⁴

Of course, being female is not inferior at all, but that doesn't change the fact that women have often experienced it that way. Messages of inferiority and self-denial are passed to us all our lives,
messages that we should deny our own experiences, feelings, and needs. We absorb them in an ongoing process of osmosis that creates and enlarges the wound's core.

Early on a girl starts to soak up the idea that she is less than boys. Not long ago my friend Betty told me about the day she and her husband walked beside the rapids of the Chatooga River and came upon a young family. Betty watched as the father took the boy, who looked about four years old, down to the water's edge so he could dip his hands into the surging water and feel the spray on his face. The boy's sister, slightly older, begged her mother to take her to the edge, too. “No,” the mother told her. “It's too dangerous there.”

A small incident, but when multiplied a hundred, a thousand times in a little girl's life, she learns that she's not as capable as a boy of handling life on the edge. She learns to hang back.

Peggy Orenstein's 1994 book,
Schoolgirls,
¹⁵
draws on a 1991 survey by the American Association of University Women, which suggests that parents and teachers seem to have lesser expectations for girls than for boys. Orenstein showed that girls' self-esteem is lost as they “dumb themselves down” and conform to lesser expectations to avoid being threatening. The girls in her study learned by adolescence not to be too outspoken, too aggressive, or too smart. They learned to balance drive with deference. The boys, by contrast, were rewarded for their drive and discouraged from showing deference. Girls learned to negate themselves through simple experiences: On the playground calling a boy “a girl” was the worst slur possible.

Orenstein also found that boys received more attention from teachers than did girls. In many of the classrooms she visited, boys were called on more often. Even at home many of the schoolgirls felt their brothers were favored, that the boys were, in fact, listened to more than they.

At church girls fare no better. A young girl learns Bible stories in which vital women are generally absent, in the background, or devoid of power. She learns that men go on quests, encounter God, and change history, while women support and wait for them.
She hears sermons where traditional (nonthreatening) feminine roles are lifted up as God's ideal. A girl is likely to see only a few women in the higher echelons of church power.

And what does a girl, who is forming her identity, do with all the scriptures admonishing women to submission and silence? Having them “explained away” as the product of an ancient time does not entirely erase her unease. She also experiences herself missing from pronouns in scripture, hymns, and prayers. And most of all, as long as God “himself” is exclusively male, she will experience the otherness, the lessness, of herself; all the pious talk in the world about females being equal to males will fail to compute in the deeper places inside her.

As a girl absorbs her culture, for instance as she watches movies and television, she may also come to understand that her real importance derives from her relationship with men and boys, by how good she looks for them or how well she takes care of them. She will notice the things traditionally assigned to women—keeping a home, cleaning, cooking, laundry, child rearing—and grow aware of how little value these things seem to have in the world compared to things men typically do.

When she grows up and enters the workplace, she will likely plunge into the staggering dilemma that is often hers alone—working while caring for children and keeping a house. She'll likely encounter ceilings, networks, and traditional assumptions that work against her as a woman. She will arrive at the disconcerting realization that success comes only as she learns to modulate and adapt her feminine self to a man's world.

If she sees few women in places of real power, hears few female voices of strength, and witnesses little female creativity, then despite what is said to her about women's equality, she experiences women (and herself) as absent and silent.

The feminine wound is created as we
internalize
all these experiences—the voices we hear at church, school, home, work, and within the culture at large suggesting (in ways both bold and subtle) that women and feminine experience are “less than.”

If you receive often enough the message that women are inferior and secondary, you will soon believe you
are
inferior and secondary. As a matter of fact, many experts tell us that “all women in our society arrive at adulthood with significant feelings of inadequacy.”
¹⁶

Once on an airplane I sat beside a thirty-year-old woman with a briefcase. As we chatted, a female voice came over the loudspeaker and said, “This is your captain.”

The woman stopped midsentence. “Oh no,” she said, “a woman pilot.”

“I'm sure she's well trained,” I said.

“Right,” she said, “but she's still a woman.”

Her feminine wound—her personal concentration of female inferiority—had made a brief appearance.

As time went on, I would grasp how deep such wounds go. For we carry not only our own wounding experiences, but the inherited wounds of our mothers and grandmothers as well. “We think back through our mothers and grandmothers, if we are women,” Virginia Woolf said.
¹⁷

This statement is not mere poetry. We carry something ancient inside us, an aspect of the psyche that Carl Jung called the collective unconscious. Containing river beds of collective experience, the collective unconscious is the place where preexisting traces of ancestral experience are encoded.
¹⁸
Thousands of years of feminine rejection reside there, and it can rise up to do a dark dance with our conscious beliefs.

I read a moving example of this interplay in physician Christiane Northrup's book,
Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom.
She recounted being in the delivery room countless times, hearing new mothers apologize to their husbands when the baby was not male. She described the experience as staggering to her. But, she writes,