<< (Do women still make $.65 to a man's dollar, or has that
ghastly disparity begun to close?) >>
It's about $.72 now. Some improvement, but still...
>I agree that idealizing womanly virtues has its dangers. The concept of
>"Mother Earth" for example.
As someone who's very interested in earth-based spiritualities, I've found
that a lot of feminist theorists are so concerned with essentialism that they
totally miss the point of the power inherent in symbolism and metaphor, which
are after all a large part of any religion. Many modern religious ideas are,
as I'm sure all will agree, highly male-oriented and -dominated. This has not
always been the case. The use of goddess imagery is a way of reclaiming
pre-Christian (or Jewish, or Muslim, etc) traditions that held women as
sacred. It gives women a symbol of strength, power, and creativity that
cannot be found in these other religions. Obviously the Earth has no literal
sex, but the metaphor of Earth as Mother--the one who creates our bodies, and
provides us with what we need to survive--has been a powerful one in
traditions all over the world. To state that there is a connection between
women and nature is not to exclude men--there is plenty of masculine imagery
available along these lines too (ie, the Celtic Green Man, Native American
Father Sky).
>"...the public and the private worlds are inseparably connected;
>the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and
>servilities of the other." Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas
One of my favorite books. Great to see it quoted!
Nicole
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 25 2000 - 19:06:43 PDT