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If you would like to read a blog post I wrote for Her Circle Ezine’s Inner Circle blog about Mary Moody Emerson, an initiator of American Transcendentalism and a woman who found her own way despite the constrictions of Victorian life, click on the link below!
As I mentioned in the last post, I often think of the women who lived and worked in my house 150 years ago. Though I know nothing about them, I do sometimes wonder what their lives were like and what they thought about the world they lived in. Occasionally, when I am feeling as if the earth in my time is in too much trouble to ever survive, I imagine the world they saw when they stood at the same kitchen window I gaze out from everyday.
In their time, which was my great-great-great-grandmother’s day, not so far back, really:
• Americans held other Americans in slavery—buying, selling, and killing each other with no remorse.
• Women could not vote, keep their earnings or inheritances if they were married, serve on juries, follow a career of their choosing, or engage in most other activities that we take for granted.
• The genocide against Native Americans was in full swing and would continue for decades and decades.
• If you had a mental illness or a developmental disability, you would receive no treatment, intervention, or education, and may spend your life in an institution.
• You had a good chance of dying a painful, wasting death from tuberculosis and burying one of more of your children from infectious diseases.
• If you became too old or sick to work and had no savings or family, you would spend your last days in a poor farm, if you were lucky.
• And on and on.
When you look at the world from our ancestors’ perspective forward, we have come very far in 150 years. Perhaps we might come just as far or farther in the next 150 years.
I also realize that each of the changes has come about because someone or a group of people envisioned a different and better future and made it happen, even though in some cases it took many lifetimes to accomplish. We live in the utopian dreamworld of our ancestors. One reason why I may ponder those who changed our ancestors’ world is that I live in a town that is well-known for its Victorian reformers. Abolition, women’s rights, education, inclusion of those with disabilities, religious reform, labor—all these were passions of people who walked the same streets I do and were not so very different from me.
So, I have learned from them that it isn’t enough to have faith in the future, but we must also actively envision and create it. Then, in 150 years, our great-great-great-grandchildren will think about our world and celebrate us just as we do those who brought about a better world so many years ago.
But, you may ask, what does this really have to do with women’s spirituality? I believe that real change is only possible when people recognize and honor the sacred within all of us, all beings, and the earth. Until then, it is acceptable to treat others as less than human and ravage our home. What we do to bring balance, Goddess, and the Sacred Feminine back into our world is as essential as anything that has happened to make human progress in the past. The only difference is that now it is up to us.
The house that I live in is more than 150 years old; it was built in about 1850 as housing for workers in the textile mill down the street. Everyday, when I put my clothes into bins under the bed because there are no closets or stuff the groceries into the cupboards that were built too small for our 21st century abundance, I am reminded that real women spent their lives within these walls, hauling water up the stairs, lighting woodstoves before the sun came up, sending children off to school or war, perhaps feeling content to have some measure of security and love or maybe crying with frustration at how restricted their lives were. Before the house was built, it may have been an earlier colonist’s farmland and before that may have been a cornfield planted and tended by Algonquin women. It may have even been the site of their homes.
I’ve always been fascinated by learning about the women who lived before in the buildings where I reside. No one lived before my family in the house where I grew up, but when I was in my 20s I moved to an unrenovated tenement building in the East Village of New York City. It had been immigrant housing built around the turn of the century and I was able to find photographs of apartments just like mine from that time. I came to feel a kinship with the women who had lived there and who, like me, had left home to find a new life in a strange place. I believe it helped me feel more at home in NYC than I have ever felt anywhere.
Thinking about how bonded I feel with the women who lived in my present home and that tenement made me wonder about whether we should sometimes think about our kinships and lineage of place as well as of blood. What if we thought of those who lived on the land where we now dwell as our ancestors, too, and all those who share it with us as our family?
If we did, we might feel that we were part of a web of existence that includes not only the people who have lived on the land we share, but also the plants and animals and all other beings. Our sense of connection would go not only back in time and include not only people, but also all those who shared our environment with us.
We might be less inclined to take up centuries-old grudges based on our blood heritage rather than work together to make where we live now a better place to be.
We might feel more responsibility to be a good steward of our spot on Mother Earth if it was how we defined our family and if we felt a familial obligation to those who would come after us.
Perhaps defining ourselves by our bloodline is a concept more in tune with the past, when it was important to know who should have inheritance and property rights and when some people, especially women and children, were more possessions than loved ones. I believe that, in many ways, we are moving to a society where your family is who you love, not who shares your DNA. By including in our family Mother Earth and all those who share the land we dwell on—past, present, and future—we can add another dimension of reverence for She who sustains us now just as surely as our blood families did when we were children. We can declare our sisterhood with all those who have been nurtured by Her on the land where we are now. We can always feel that we are not only with “family” but also that we are “home.”
In a curio cabinet of a historical society in a small New England town is the story of the town’s witch. She was a woman who lived in the mid-1700s and was called a witch but was, most likely, not someone who healed with herbs or practiced a non-Christian spirituality. She did wear a long red cape. In the 1700s in New England, apparently this was enough to cause an entire town to ostracize a woman and call her a “witch,” no small thing given that it was within living memory in her time that people were hanged as witches not too far away.
She had received the cape as a gift and liked to wear it when she went out and about. Of course, given that the consequences of doing this showed that it was clearly more significant than just a fashion faux pas in the culture in which she lived, her wearing of it was possibly just one of many other rebellious acts. Maybe she spoke out against some of the small hypocrisies and tyrannies that she saw going on in the town. Perhaps she refused to do some of the duties of the meek and mild perfect wife and mother that were expected of her. It isn’t too hard to see her reading books that were not the Bible; questioning religious, political, and social assumptions; talking back to her “betters,” as any man in the town would have been considered to be. It could be that she was just plain cranky, Goddess bless her.
To me, her story holds much significance. First and foremost, lots and lots of women were born, lived, raised families, and died in that town. Almost all of them did exactly what they were supposed to do and were buried with, one can imagine, the minister praising their obedience, their lives of unselfish service, and their blessed silence when it came to any issue of importance. Not a one of them has her story told in any curio cabinet in the historical society. I think our witch – somehow I think of her as belonging more to our time than hers – would have enjoyed the fact that women like you are reading her story nearly 300 years after she lived.
Second, you have to wonder how many other women’s stories that would inspire and speak to the real lives of women in past times are hidden in curio cabinets in small town historical societies. Only when I happened to be in the back room of a public building housing the curio cabinet did I read our witch’s story. If we all did a little digging, perhaps we could, together, write new chapters of American and women’s history.
Last, we only have to read the newspaper or examine our own lives to see that times have not significantly changed. Intolerance of people who do not do as they are expected and seem to challenge authority has certainly not gone away. Our society still has its own lethal witch-hunts. Women, especially those who are born into communities or families with strict rules about what women should be and do, must still look and act within very narrow bounds in order to survive. We may shake our heads at the idea of a woman being shunned and called a witch for wearing a red cape, but it is not hard to figure out what the “red capes” of our time are, especially if you happen to “wear” one of those “red capes.”
I love that woman with the red cape, and if I could, I would put flowers on her grave and invite every young woman in that town to come with me to celebrate her by doing the same. Unfortunately, I don’t know where she is buried. But, there are plenty of women with “red capes” in my own time and place: women who fight back against abuse, women who question authority and have their jobs and family’s well being threatened because of it, really, all of us have our own “red capes.” Maybe the best thing to do is to honor her by working even harder to make it so that it is less than 300 years before people shake their heads that women could be alienated for such things.
Here’s another story of how women in my family found the Sacred within themselves.
When my mother was in her 40s she took up flying and eventually earned a private pilot’s license. Though she went to church, flying alone was her spiritual practice. It was how she connected to her inner being and the Mother Earth and Sky. She always said she had thought she would do something wonderful with her flying but never did. In fact, she taught her daughters that women can do anything they put their minds to and to let their spirits soar.
I truly believe that the Sacred Feminine has been with us for as long as women have come together, even during times when no one spoke of Her or called Her by Her true name. Here is a story from my past that I think express how She has always been present.
In a beauty parlor in Montgomery, Alabama
When I was young, in the mid-60s, I would go to my grandparents in Montgomery, Alabama for some time in the summer. Each week my grandmother would take me along with her to get her hair done in a beauty parlor down the street. I would listen as the women would talk over everything but even then I realized that what they were really doing was celebrating themselves as women together. They may have said they were doing their hair for their husbands, but their husbands never really noticed. It was really for themselves and each other. This was their way of having time alone with other women in a place that was completely woman-centered. It was their way of feeling good about their physical being in a place and time when women and their bodies were not taken seriously. It was the mid-20th century version of women gathering at ancient temples to honor the old Goddesses and themselves.
