HOW DID I GET TO BE A FEMINIST?

For the next few weeks, while the TOP lecture series takes a vacation, I'll be running a series of stories from people of various parts of the country and of various ages telling us how and when they became feminists. Read our two new stories below!

—Cheryl Suchors

A Gradual Turning to Feminism  I

I read Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex in college and started to realize the emptiness of women's lives, but I think my conversion to feminism has been gradual, reinforced by each brick wall I encounter in the male-dominated world.

First I was relegated to second class status in Oxford, England, identified as "wife of a member of the College" and had to receive special dispensation to play the college pianos. Later, after I had my babies and wanted to go back to job-sharing with my husband, as I had done before, I was told, “Stay home and take care of your children.” Didn’t anyone think they were his children, too?

A real turning point came when my five-year-old daughter announced, "I want to be President when I grow up!" I loved her ambition and naiveté, but I heard myself saying, "That would be great, sweetie. There's never been a woman President before, but it would be great if you became President."

She wondered why no women had been President—and I didn't know what to say. I told her women didn’t get the right to vote until late, that there were very few women in Congress, but the "Why?" really wasn't answered satisfactorily for either of us.

And finally, my good friend Cheryl made me much more aware of the patriarchy infused into our culture at every turning. She introduced me to a women's circle of spirituality that harkened back to the goddess worship of ancient peoples, before religion became so male-centered (God, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost). I delighted in the ceremonies celebrating the earth and the Sacred Feminine; the circle of supportive women and elemental chanting and sharing really resonated with me.

As a conductor, I work in a very male-dominated profession, and I strive to change people's biases every day. I am trying hard to become the best conductor I can be, so that I can prove that women can be equally effective conductors as men.

Maybe someday we'll have a woman President and more women conductors, too. I definitely hope so!

—Nancy from the West

A Gradual Turning to Feminism  II

I was born in 1950, so my whole teenage experience—which included feminism—took place during the 1960s. I was 13 when the Beatles were on the Ed Sullivan show. Martin Luther King was shot the day before my 18th birthday. I was a sophomore at Oberlin College in Ohio when the student protestors were shot at Kent State. Kent State students whose friends had died cried into microphones at the mass meeting on the Oberlin campus as we voted to strike.

I was still a teenager when women’s liberation hit my world. Feminism was engulfing the entire school. Oberlin had a program called the Experimental College where students could teach mini-courses. I signed up to take a course in women’s lib. I remember that the teacher was an articulate, persuasive petite strawberry blonde named Katie.

When I first arrived at Oberlin, female students were ironing their hair to look like Mary Travers.

Hear and watch Mary singing - on stage with Mama Cass & Joni Mitchell - performing in Mama Cass television program -1969.

By the time I left college it was okay that I and others had naturally curly hair. I remain grateful for that and the many other ways it has become okay for women to be—a list that, thankfully, keeps getting longer.

—KathyD from Massachusetts

FORGET REMAINING CENTERED

What was my favorite line of Anne Yeoman’s lecture? In response to our topic, “What Kind of Spiritual Core Do We Need to Remain Centered in This Time of Anxiety,” she blew away the notion that anyone could remain centered.

“Forget remaining centered,” she said. “It’s about centering—finding our core, losing it, and coming back.” She likened it to learning to walk. One takes a step or two, loses balance, perhaps falls down; then gets up and takes another step. With centering, the emphasis is on the process, the continuing effort, rather than on the goal of some static state of centeredness.

That was good to hear.

And as to what kind of spiritual core we needed? The one we’ve got, right now, right here. It’s all there for us to lean on, tap into, reach for, deep inside each and every one of us, she said. We didn’t need to go create a core or improve our core. We just needed to connect with it. That was also good to hear.

Connecting to the Core

Esther Scanlan started us off by explaining her daily practice of reaching for the core. Each morning she reads something that inspires her, counts her blessings and, later in the day, to bring her back to center, meditates.

By show of hands, a number of people in the room meditated. A similar large group wrote out their thoughts or feelings into a journal to bring themselves closer to their inner wisdom. Others did yoga. Quite a few wrote down their dreams to see what they could learn from these messages from the unconscious.

For Yeomans, it’s important to take contemplative time first thing after she wakes up. She called this practice “finding myself before the world finds me.” Many in the audience shared her view that they needed to check inside to gain that initial sense of balance before girding themselves for whatever the day might bring.

Spirituality Has a Body

Yeomans believes that our spirituality, that illusive/fragile connection to the core, is not something “otherworldly” that happens out there in the ether. Nor is it something that happens only through the auspices of a specially anointed cleric or prophet. Because we are human, our spiritual connection happens through our bodies and, therefore, we need to recognize it must include our bodies.

She pioneered in the notion that our spirit is embodied by being one of the founders of The Women’s Well, a center offering courses in women’s spirituality. Because our spirit resides within our body, we can access it through those common pathways of bodily understanding—our senses.

Ever wonder why candle light induces a different mood than electric lights? For the same reason that being out in nature—our feet tramping amongst the leaves and stones, our noses growing cold and smelling the piney freshness of hemlock or the chill damp of snow—brings us to a peaceful place within. For the same reason that so many forms of meditation involve following our breath. For the same reason many people rely on music to lead them inward. Once we connect to our bodies we’ve gone a huge way toward connecting with our inner spiritual core.

As we are human, our spirit is necessarily embodied.

Hundreds of Ways to Kiss the Ground

The great news, both speakers noted, is that there’s no right way to get connected to our inner knowing. Besides those practices already mentioned, reading poetry came up. So did self-awareness, the effort to learn our own hot buttons and crazy places, our own hurts and wounds, our typical tendencies, so that we can at least know what we’re feeling or thinking when we’re feeling or thinking it. Self-awareness helps us own our own stuff, a big piece of the atlas within.

Finding like-minded folks—“kindred souls,” Yeomans called them, who give attention to the inner life in ways that are compatible with our own—helps us connect to spirit. One of the first things Yeomans had us do when she came to the podium was a short group meditation noticing our breath. And here’s something lovely: when as a group we meditate we conspire, from the Latin meaning “to breathe together.”

She mentioned the women’s spirituality movement that grounded spirituality in the miracle of the earth and in our bodies, instead of in some great figure in the sky known as “Lord,” “Master,” or even “Father.” In so many organized religions, concepts and words like these exclude or even disparage women and women’s knowing such that women have come together in various places to celebrate what has been left out, the sacred feminine.

Books Yeomans turns to frequently these days to connect with her inner core include: Missing Mary, by Charlene Spretnak; The Language of The Goddess and The Civilization of The Goddess, by Marija Gimbutas; The Great Turning, From Empire to Earth Community, by David Korten; The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan; Any Thing We Love Can Be Saved, by Alice Walker; and Coming Back to Life, Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World by Joanna Macy and Molly Young Brown.

Lastly, we learned about a contemporary vision quest Yeomans and another woman in the audience had undertaken which, literally, changed their lives. She said if anyone were interested, she knew the women who could lead us on this amazing journey of several days alone in the woods, and they could be reached by contacting The Women’s Well.

She concluded her comments by reminding us of that wonderful line from the poet Rumi that teaches us there are so many ways to arrive at spiritual connection: “There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”

—Cheryl Suchors