Here, now, at century's end, hemlines are a matter of choice and we don't have to bind our feet in high heels and pointed toes, we can have a closetful of running shoes, walking shoes, sandals, flats, medium heels, platforms, and so on. Women can not only vote but have wider options in the job market and the professions as the Computer Age struggles with potential shutdown as the date of the changing century looms on the horizon. There have been improvements that our grandmothers may or may not recognize as such. But the very fact that there is still a Women's History Month and an International Women's Day -- as if women were a special minority, or perhaps a condition or a disease -- is a clue to some other inequalities that still abide.
In her preface to Cries of the Spirit, published by Beacon Press in 1991, the editor, Marilyn Sewell, wrote:
Almost two years ago, I went to the beginning session of an adult education course called something like "Sources of Faith." It was led by one of the most deeply spiritual and inspired men that I know. He began by telling the group his assumptions and faith convictions. Throughout his presentation, he quoted from his teachers, from books, from the founders of Western thought -- everyone from Aristotle to Auden -- and not once did he mention a woman's name or recall the words of a woman. I went away feeling unacknowledged, nonexistent.The Rev. Sewell, who is senior minister of the Unitarian Church in Portland, Ore., put together her book of selected poetry and readings by women to redress that strange silence that exists in our culture regarding the contributions to its wisdom by women.
This morning, I invite you to mark this Mother's Day 1998 by sharing some of the words of Woman Wisdom that cry out to be heard and heeded. At the outset we need to note that the very language we share has often been a subtle yet deeply conditioning message about gender, coloring history and literature with a certitude of which sex is the real one. One of my favorite commentaries on this language thing is this poem entitled Myth by Muriel Rukeyser:
Long afterward, Oedipus, old and blinded, walked theTwo hundred years ago on this continent, some women of European extraction articulated their dissatisfaction with woman's nonentity. Abigail Adams, left to manage farm, home, and family while her husband served in the Congress that established the United States of America, urged him to "remember the ladies," noting that women "will not hold ourselves to be bound by any laws in which we have no voice." And Judith Sargent Murray, a contemporary of Abigail and one of the early Universalists on this continent, published strong condemnations of Bible interpretations that supported the continuing inequality of the sexes. She found it necessary to assume a masculine nom de plume, however, in order to get a readership.
roads. He smelled a familiar smell. It was
the Sphinx. Oedipus said, "I want to ask one question.
Why didn't I recognize my mother?" "You gave the
wrong answer," said the Sphinx. "But that was what
made everything possible," said Oedipus. "No," she said,
"When I asked, What walks on four legs in the morning,
two at noon, and three in the evening, you answered,
Man. You didn't say anything about woman."
"When you say Man," said Oedipus, "you include women
too. Everyone knows that." She said, "That's what
you think."
Language, politics, religion. Well, maybe there is some relief in the objectivity of contemporary science. Maybe. Except that as recently as a decade ago, there was a study done at the Rockefeller University in New York on "the effects of obesity on estrogen activity and the tendency for women to develop breast and uterine cancer." All the subjects studied were male.
Sometimes I am left speechless. Thank goodness for poets like Lillian Morrison:
Fury transforms to energy when channeled in positive directions. Even so, time requires patience. Some seven decades or so after Abigail's plea for full citizenship in the new United States fell on deaf ears, Elizabeth Cady Stanton kicked off the women's suffrage movement with a convention at Seneca Falls in upstate New York. Unfortunately, though she lived 87 years, it was not long enough for her to cast her vote when women were finally enfranchised some seven decades later. Even so, we have discovered the vote was but a small step for womankind. Now here we are, more than seven decades later, yet and still recognition as full partners in the human venture remains an unattained goal. The conclusion of a Worldwatch researcher in as recently as 1992 was that sex discrimination is the major cause of poverty worldwide; for, although she is more often the breadwinner, woman's possibilities of attaining the same economic status as men are everywhere less.WOMAN
After the thousandth insult
she wakes up to fury
having waited ten thousand years
like the people of India
under their yoke of acceptance
assaulted again and again
by barbarians.
She was Saint Sebastian
bleeding from arrows.
She has become Saint Joan
a determined guerrilla
in the centuries-old, undeclared
war against her.
Woman Wisdom, beginning in anomie, moves through anger, and sometimes denial until a new generation may discern and discover new wisdom in taking up the work anew. Adrienne Rich saw that process at work in the life of a 1903 Nobel Prize winner -- from Power:
... Today I was reading about Marie Curie:>From the wound of subhuman or non-existence, through anger and denial, power begins in the turn toward self-recognition and self-affirmation. Alta, a writer of African-American background, expresses the dawning realization in this excerpt from a piece entitled Shameless Hussy:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified.
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
til she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil.
She died a famous woman denying her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power.
yesterday i had a wild thot. hearing james brown on the radio singing say it loud: i'm black and proud. i thot, wonder how it would feel to say, say it loud, i'm female and proud. it was obviously too silly. think how embarrassed i would be if a neighbor came to the door. what if john came home & i was making the bed yelling I'M FEMALE & I'M PROUD? i'd never hear the end of it. i started saying it and nearly choked on the words. couln't get them out. realized it was a lie. i aint proud. didn't have a thing to do with it, took pot luck and came out a broad. kept trying to say it. after a few tries, i could. it wasn't very loud. it was probly the quietest sound in the room. me patting pillows into place on the bed and muttering, i'm female & i'm proud. then i got a little hostile and said it loud, i'm female and i'm proud and thot about it and wanted to feel it and said it loud i'm female and i'm proud and after the record was over i yelled it a couple of times and it felt okay, and i havent done it since but maybe i will again.Profoundly necessary to this self-affirmation is the recalling of names, the remembering of the stories and the lives of our mothers and grandmothers. Though my grandmothers -- one of English extraction who grew up in a small village nestled up against the Virginia mountains and one of German extraction who grew up on a farm near the Antietam battlefield at Sharpsburg, Md. -- used to sew dresses for me, I did not have the experience Ramona Wilson, descendant of Native Americans, writes about in her poem, Keeping Hair. Nonetheless I am deeply moved by it:
My grandmother had braidsThere is the wisdom of self-affirmation in recognizing that the cultural conditioning which values only eternal youth denies the full and genuine development of any human being. "It is sad to grow old but nice to ripen," said Brigitte Bardot. And Joanna McCarthy used that statement as preface to her poem entitled Ripening:
at the thickest, pencil wide
held with bright wool
cut from her bed shawl.
No teeth left but white hair
combed and wet carefully
early each morning.
The small wild plants found among stones
on the windy and brown plateaus
revealed their secrets to her hand
and yielded to her cooking pots.
She made a sweet amber water
from willows,
boiling the life out
to pour onto her old head.
"It will keep your hair."
She bathed my head once
rain water not sweeter.
The thought that once
when I was so very young
her work-bent hands
very gently and smoothly
washed my hair in willows
may also keep my heart.
What she regretted was her skin, folding inAnd now what has been belittled as simply "woman's work," seen from the perspective of maturing Woman Wisdom, takes on new value -- from Aunt Jane of Kentucky by Eliza Calvert Hall:
on itself like fabric, elasticity gone. Life
juice that plumped her cheeks disappeared,
wrinkles cast their fine net across her
face, laugh-lined her mouth. Her eyes deepened
Leave it, she said, I want to see
what Nature will do. What Nature did
was remind her that ripeness
is all, that autumn is the richest
season, that preparing for snow means
building a shelter, that warmth within
withstands whatever winter howls without
When the baby laughed, reached for her breast
even though milk had been gone for years,
she remembered sweet burdens of motherhood,
relinquished them gladly, her destiny
now another -- grandmother, wise
woman, matriarch. The brain holds
what I am, she said, knowing then
that body was always hers. The heart
holds what I would be, the womb can rest.
She saw her life, and knew that it was good.
"I've had a heap o' comfort all my life makin' quilts, and now in my old age I wouldn't take a fortune for 'em ... You see, some folks has albums to put folks' pictures in to remember 'em by, and some folks has a book and writes down the things that happen every day so they won't forgit 'em, but honey, these quilts is my albums, and my di'ries, and whenever the weather's bad and I can't git out to see folks, I jest spread out my quilts and look at 'em and study over 'em, and it's jest like goin' back fifty or sixty years and livin' my life over again. ...Self-affirmation, recognition of the power that comes from the same source as our wounds, remembering our mothers -- so Woman Wisdom waxes. And it continues in the struggle to make the world of human beings more open for our daughters and sons as well.
"I've been a hard worker all my life, ... but 'most all my work has been the kind that 'perishes with the usin',' as the Bible says. That's the discouragin' thing about a woman's work. Milly Amos used to say that if a woman was to see all the dishes that she had to wash before she died, piled up before her in one pile, she'd lie down and die right then and there ... But when one o' my grandchildren or great-grandchildren sees one o' my quilts, they'll think about Aunt Jane, and, wherever I am then, I'll know I ain't forgotten.
... Now some folks has money to build monuments with -- great tall, marble pillars. ... And some folks can build churches and schools and hospitals to keep folks in mind of 'em, but all the work I've got to leave behind me is jest these quilts, and sometimes, when I'm settin' here, workin' with my caliker and gingham pieces, I'll finish off a block, and I laugh and say to myself, "Well, here's another stone for the monument.'"
One hundred years ago, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, with the help of a few friends, scandalized most of her sister suffragists by daring to write and publish criticism of the Bible. She knew that book to be the proof text used against the development of women. Today as the people of the Book -- be they Jewish or Christian or Muslim -- continue to sacrifice their children to greed and the competition between tribes and tribal deities, this particular rounding out of a woman barely alluded to in Holy Writ carries Stanton's work forward, expressing the depth of woman's anguish over the plight of children. Betsy Sholl begins her poem called Job's Wife with this quote from the Book of Job:
Then his wife said to him, "Do you still hold fast your integrity?Some are looking beyond the traditional biblical sources for religious sustenance. Among them, the Rev. Shirley Ann Rankin, the Unitarian Universalist minister who produced the popular adult education curriculum, Cakes for the Queen of Heaven. In an article entitled "Born of Woman, Born of Earth," she said:
Curse God and die." -- Job 2:9
Yes, I said it.
And I told him to pull out his hair,
scream till his eyes turned black
Some integrity,
scraping himself with broken pots.
An expert on God.
I'm an expert on mustard plaster,
bad breath.
On ten children --
their shoulders, their eyes,
the curve of their buttocks
I knew better than my own hands.
So you're God.
Tell me I'm straw, chaff, mist.
Tell me the sea has springs
deep and cold as dreams
that make me wake exhausted.
Enough thunder,
What have you done
with my children?
... As a woman, I need very much to reclaim my pagan religious roots. I also believe that men as well as women need to know that for many thousands of years of our human heritage God was female.Woman Wisdom, like all truth, does not spring into existence full-blown, but rather, following a period of gestation, comes to birth and continues to develop, given nurture and sustenance. Woman Wisdom this Mother's Day, the voice of thoughtful experience, honors mothers and daughters, sisters and aunts and speaks with woman's voice to sons and fathers, uncles and lovers as well. The poet is Mary Oliver:In Judaism and Christianity there is only the father or the father and the son. ... If the myths of a culture reflect its social arrangements, we should not be surprised that no woman has been elected president. ...
There is another reason for all of us to embrace pagan traditions. The earth is in a severe crisis. Our water is polluted, our cities are choking on poisonous smog, the ozone layer has huge holes in it and our forests are disappearing. Something is terribly wrong with our attitudes toward these life-giving ecosystems. What is the source of such attitudes? Some say the industrial revolution, which cut us off from our agricultural roots, is causing the pollution. But I think that the problem has much deeper, long- standing origins.
Patriarchal societies all over the world have for centuries promulgated a worldview that can be imagined in the form of a ladder. God is at the top, below God are the angels, below them is man, below him is woman, below her are children and below them is the earth and its creatures. In this scheme, higher is better, more important and in control of what is below. The material world, the earth and even our own bodies have been seen as inferior to an imaginary supernatural realm where some non-material part of us may go after death if we will just obey the authority above us. The divine in this view resides in the supernatural realm, not in the material world.
The biblical tradition gave man dominion over the earth as well as over women and children. Humanists lopped off God and the angels, but left the rest of the image in place. We have all learned to look upon the earth as a bundle of resources at the bottom of the ladder, resources to be exploited. Such a worldview undergirds the development of industries that pollute and human relationships that degrade and exploit. It condones and encourages the use of force. It generates resentment, hatred and war. Those at the top of the ladder are raised to believe that they have to fight to control everyone and everything below them on the ladder. Those below feel resentment or participate in their own degradation by believing themselves to be inferior. The Old Religions revered the earth, just as they revered woman's body, as the giver and sustainer of life. The most ancient Greek deity was Gaia, or Earth. The worldview was more of a cycle or spiral. Death was a natural part of life, and the material bodies of the dead, as well as their spirits, were thought to become part of the stones, the hills, the wind. ...
In the pagan religions the divine was immanent as well as transcendent. Rocks and hills and rivers and trees were understood to be alive with energy. Sophia Fahs (1952) pointed out many years ago that our scientists have now learned that "the dividing line between the living and the nonliving is no longer clear. ... The universe as a whole may be alive." As human beings we need to climb down from the ladder and join in the circle -- not only of all humans, but of all life.
You do not have to be good.____________________ SOURCES
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Martz, Sandra Haldeman, ed. If I Had My Life to Live Over I Would Pick More Daisies. Papier-Mache Press, Watsonville, Cal., 1992.
Sewell, Marilyn, ed. Cries of the Spirit, A Celebration of Women's Spirituality. Beacon Press, Boston, 1991.
Tracy, Denise D., ed. Wellsprings: Sources in Unitarian Universalist Feminism. Delphi Resources, Delphi, Ill., 1992.
The sermon in a Unitarian Universalist setting is never the last word on any subject, but rather an invitation to further dialog.
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