The Dance of the Dissident Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page B

going where they took me. But worse, those events said something about the female gender itself—that it simply wasn’t up to par. It had to be subdued, controlled, ruled over.
    For girls there is always a moment when the earnest, endearing assumption of equality is lost, and writing about it in my journal thirty years later made me want to take those two eight year olds into my arms—myself and Ann, both.
    October was nearly spent before I finally got around to reflecting on my life as a “Christian writer,” which was how I was often identified. I’d been a prolific contributor to an inspirational magazine with millions of readers. I’d written articles for religious journals and magazines, books about my contemplative spirituality. It always surprised me where my readers turned up. One time I called L. L. Bean to order Sandy a denim shirt, and the operator said she was reading one of my books. I got lots of mail from readers. I spoke at Christian conferences, in churches. As a result, it seemed people expected me to be a certain way. Of course, I expected me to be a certain way, too. And that way had nothing remotely to do with feminist spirituality.
    After a month of journal writing, one morning I sat as usual in the den. The light was coming up in the backyard, and the maple, at the height of fall color, appeared to be on fire. As I gazed at it, I understood that while I had gone through a lot of spiritual transformation and written about it, my changes had not deviated much from what were considered safe, standard, accepted Christian tenets. I had never imagined any kind of internal reformation that would call into question the Orthodox Christian Woman, the Good Daughter to the Church, or the Monk who lived high in the spiritual tower of her head. The risk of doing so seemed much too high for lots of reasons, but certainly paramount among them was that it might jeopardize my marriage and my career. I finally came to this:
    As a woman, I’ve been asleep. The knowing rose in me, fast and brilliant, like the light coming now across the grass. I closed the journal and put it away.
    A woman in Deep Sleep is one who goes about in an unconscious state. She seems unaware or unfazed by the truth of her own female life, the truth about women in general, the way women and the feminine have been wounded, devalued, and limited within culture, churches, and families. She cannot see the wound or feel the pain. She has never acknowledged, much less confronted, sexism within the church, biblical interpretations, or Christian doctrine. Okay, so women have been largely missing from positions of church power, we’ve been silenced and relegated to positions ofsubordination by biblical interpretations and doctrine, and God has been represented to us as exclusively male. So what? The woman in Deep Sleep is oblivious to the psychological and spiritual impact this has had on her. Or maybe she has some awareness of it all but keeps it sequestered nicely in her head, rarely allowing it to move down into her heart or into the politics of her spirituality.
    The awarenesses about my female life that emerged during that month were sketchy, thin, and incomplete. A memory here, a thought there, a recognition, an insight—all of them sifting around like vapor. I knew as a woman I’d been asleep, but I had no idea exactly how. I knew I was waking up, but I didn’t possess a clue about what I might be waking up to. All I knew was that there was this tiny female life inside, some part of me waking up and wanting to be born. She was rousing me out of years of somnambulance, and something had to be done with her.
    An Unambiguous Woman
    All in all I had been what some have called an “unambiguous woman.” I didn’t know this term at the time. It was coined by feminist theorist Deborah Cameron and later referred to by author Carolyn Heilbrun in her book Writing a Woman’s Life. “What does it