The Dance of the Dissident Daughter (11 page)

It had been a core pattern of my life, this attempt to be a Favored Daughter.

Favored Daughters are women who, carrying the wound of feminine inferiority, try to make up for it by seeking the blessing of the cultural father. Through accomplishments and perfectionism we hope to atone for the “original sin” of being born female. We are hoping that Father God will finally see our worth.

Even as an adult woman, I'd set up perfectionist standards, which kept me striving. I pursued a thin body, happy children, an impressive speech, and a perfectly written article with determination to succeed, but also with an internal voice that led me to feel
whatever I did wasn't quite enough. I worried about not measuring up.

Herein lies the torment of it: Favored Daughters strive for their worth, piling up external validations, but inside they are most often plagued by self-doubt, wondering if their work or their efforts are good enough.

I met a Favored Daughter at a conference in Atlanta. A successful businesswoman, she told me her story one afternoon over coffee. “All my life I've been internally driven to succeed at things,” she said, “even things that don't matter all that much. I had to be a star at everything. When I finally asked myself why, what came to me was the time my father took me to a Braves baseball game.

“I got the chance only because my brother was sick that day. I was a daydreamy girl who didn't care much for baseball, but I tried to like it to make my father happy. He loved the game almost irrationally. And he loved my brother the same way, I think, because he was a boy. My father loved me, too, but he didn't value me the way he did my brother. I always had the feeling that if I'd been a boy, he would have loved me in that same irrational way.”

Suddenly her eyes grew teary. She said, “That day at the ballpark I was looking up at the sky counting the clouds, which was this thing I did. And here comes a foul ball flying into the stands, landing right at my feet.

“I was so lost in the clouds I didn't hear my father shouting at me to pick up the ball. By the time I realized what was happening, someone else had grabbed it. What I remember most is my father's reaction. He said, ‘Geez, you girls. You think your brother would have lost the ball like that?'

“I've spent my whole life since trying hard not to drop the ball, trying to make it up to my father for being nothing but a girl, hoping I could finally get him to prize me like he did my brother. The crazy thing is, I have this nineteen-page résumé, but still there's a voice inside telling me I'm going to mess up.”

I didn't know what to say to her except that I understood, that undoubtedly we were looking for validation in the wrong place.
That we needed to quit trying and go recover the primacy of our feminine souls. Then maybe our sense of worth and confidence as women in the world would flow to us fully and naturally.

I've met so many of these women, heard so many stories like this. They are all different, and yet they are all the same. In every one the woman is sitting in the bleacher (or the pew, the school desk, wherever) just being her girl-self when the moment of truth descends kerplunk! at her feet—that in this family, this church, this culture, female is the less-prized gender. She starts to feel that her gender has somehow “dropped the ball.” And without even being aware of what she's doing, she may try to make up for it by going through life trying to win love, validation, and esteem from the father-world.

The Silent Woman

Throughout all this unnaming I was doing, I kept thinking back to the sketches I'd drawn of the mouthless woman. I knew they were attempts to capture the pattern of the Silent Woman in myself.

I began to reflect on the ways I'd withheld my opinions, muzzled disconcerting truths, refrained from expressing my true feelings, squelched my riskier ideas, or thwarted my creativity. When I did that, I was living out the script of the Silent Woman. Being a Silent Woman is not about being quiet and reticent, it's about stifling our truth. Our
real
truth.

I wondered, Had silence encroached as I internalized the message of inferiority? Had I learned that silence was a safe place?

Some of the scripting concerning silence has come from the church, from Bible verses like this one: “Let a woman learn in silence, with all submissiveness” (1 Timothy 2:11,
RSV
). We may not claim this verse as a guiding principle, but it's there inside us nonetheless.

Overall, women's voices have not been encouraged unless they spoke as mouthpieces for the party line. Quiet ladies who held their tongues were loved and lauded. Uppity, pioneering women who spoke their minds and said bold things were attacked and sanctioned. “And that plays into our greatest fear, which is going
against convention and having love and approval taken away,” says writer Erica Jong.
³⁸

Very often silence becomes the female drug of choice.

I grew aware that while I spoke a lot, much of the time my deepest words, my outrage, the voice of my feminine soul, were silent. For the first time I began to feel the confinement of my creative voice. There were things I wanted to say, needed to say, yet they didn't lie within the boundaries of “Christian writing.” In Gail Godwin's novel,
A Southern Family
, one of her characters, a writer, wonders if she writes “to satisfy the tastes of the culture that shaped me.”
³⁹
Now I wondered, Had I? Where had I hedged, pulled back, or diluted my truth?

As I reflected on these questions, I stumbled by chance upon the Greek myth of Philomela. It is the story behind the Silent Woman, and it goes like this: While traveling to see her sister, Philomela was raped by her brother-in-law, Tereus. Outraged, she threatened to tell her sister and the world what he'd done to her. He responded by cutting out her tongue and banishing her to a guarded tower where she was forced to live in silence.

Eventually, though, she seemed to know that if she continued to be silent she would die. So Philomela began to weave a series of tapestries that became her voice and told her story. She then enlisted an old woman to take them to her sister, who came and liberated her.

The myth is about the loss of women's voices. It suggests that the source of female silence is the rape of the feminine—the devaluation and violation of femaleness. It suggests that when women protest this violation, their voices are frequently squelched through ridicule, sanction, and fear of reprisal. In the public arena, at church, work, and home, women's tongues are often silenced when we dare to speak our anger, truths, and visions.

In 1993 the Councils of Churches in the Twin Cities and Minnesota sponsored a Re-imagining Conference. I didn't attend but I read about the multiplicity of women's voices that were raised there expressing women's truths, imagining bold feminine images
of God, and presenting new challenges to the church. I also read dozens of editorials and letters to denominational papers by church traditionalists who reacted to these voices by castigating, repudiating, and calling for denunciation, full-scale church inquiries, and resignations.

Poet Muriel Rukeyser writes, “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open.”
⁴⁰

Today the world is starting to split open with women's truths. The fear of voicing ourselves still runs deep, but women are still weaving their truths into a tapestry of stories and sending them out into the world.

In the end, speaking out would become the cure for my feminine silence. It would not necessarily banish my fear and reluctance, but I would learn to voice my soul in spite of it. To speak as if my life depended on it.

FORMING A FEMINIST CRITIQUE

By now more than a year had passed since my dream of giving birth to myself. I went about my routine—writing, being mother to my teenaged children, seeing friends, jogging, reading a lot, painting a little, serving on an occasional committee, going methodically to church, and, through it all, keeping my awakening mostly secret.

Part of it was because I was afraid of the response I might get. But secluding my experience during that early period was both cowardly
and
wise. Some things are too fragile, too vulnerable to bring into the public eye. Tender things with tiny roots tend to wither in the glare of public scrutiny. By holding my awakening within, I contained the energy of it, and it fed me the way blood feeds muscle. It fed me a certain propelling energy, and I kept moving forward.

I had finally told myself the truth about the presence of the feminine wound and the way I'd adapted to it. Now I began to tell myself the truth about how this wound came to be inflicted. I began to form what I called my feminist critique.

Forming a critique is essential to the birth and development of a spiritual feminist consciousness. Until a woman is willing to set aside her unquestioned loyalty and look critically at the tradition and convention of her faith, her awakening will never fully emerge. The extent of her healing, autonomy, and power is related to the depth of the critique she is able to integrate into her life.

As I formed my critique, I came face to face with a system of social governance, a vast complex of patterns and attitudes within culture, religion, and family. The name of the system is patriarchy. It's important to emphasize that patriarchy is neither men nor the masculine principle; it is rather a
system
in which that principle has become distorted.

The word
patriarchy
comes from the Greek word
pater
, which means father, and
archein
, which means rule. It has come to mean a way of social organization marked by the authority or supremacy of men and fathers. Western civilization has been organized this way since its prehistory, though patriarchy is now showing signs of real demise.

Learning to see patriarchy, not as I was conditioned to see it, but as it actually is—a wounder of women and feminine life—was not easy. One reason is that since patriarchy is so pervasive and familiar, it becomes invisible.

Psychotherapist Anne Wilson Schaef compares living in patriarchy to living in polluted air. “When you are in the middle of pollution, you are usually unaware of it. You eat in it, sleep in it, work in it, and sooner or later start believing that is just the way the air is,” she writes.
⁴¹

In a similar way we've accepted the widespread attitudes and effects of patriarchy as givens. They are so much a part of the world, we start to think that's just the way reality is.

In the play
The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe
, a deceptively wise bag lady named Trudy mutters, “What is reality anyway? Nothin' but a collective hunch.”
⁴²

Far from being the sole reality, patriarchy is actually nothing but a collective hunch. For women, making this fine distinction—
that it is only one way of viewing reality and not reality itself—is crucial in helping us see patriarchy clearly.

The Hierarchy

As I began to observe the patriarchal world around me with more clarity, one of the first things I noticed was a principle that seemed to lie at the very heart of it: Life is a hierarchy with men and so-called masculine values at the top.

The hierarchy goes like this: at the top God, then men, then women, children, animals, plants, and minerals. (Of course there are also hierarchies within hierarchies as we consider issues of race, culture, and economic status.) Embedded in the human psyche, this hierarchal view has been passed on as the natural and “divinely created” order of life.

Once I perceived the truth of this, I began to see how subtly (and not so subtly) hierarchies were ingrained in church, family, marriage, workplaces, politics, and all kinds of systems of thought.

With men at the top (or at least with a sense of entitlement about being at top) and women below (or at least with a sense of belonging below), a way of relating was put into place based on dominance and dependence. The role of the one above was to dominate and oversee the ones below. The role of the one below was to answer to and depend on the one above. In addition, the one above learned how to protect his prestigious place at the top. He learned to stay up by keeping her down, that is, by insisting she be content with things as they are.

Theologian Anne E. Carr relates that this hierarchy issues forth in a whole series of “unequal power relations; God as father rules over the world, holy fathers rule over the church, clergy fathers over laity, males over females, husbands over wives and children, men over the created world.”
⁴³
The pattern even extends to our relationship to nature and how countries seek dominance over each other.

I was intrigued with an exercise Anne Wilson Schaef performed with mixed-gender groups.
⁴⁴
She asked them to list on one half of a sheet of paper the characteristics of God and on the other half
the characteristics of humans. Invariably the list for God was: omnipotent (all-powerful), omniscient (all-knowing), omnipresent, and eternal. The list for humans typically read: childlike, sinful, weak, stupid, and mortal.

At this point the exercise got more interesting. On a different sheet of paper she asked the group to list characteristics of males on one half and females on the other. The consensus list for male was: intelligent, powerful, brave, good, strong. The list for female fell into this general pattern: emotional, weak, fearful, sinful, dependent.

When Wilson Schaef asked the group to set all four lists side by side, they were surprised but had to conclude that according to their perceptions, male is to female as God is to humans.

The Great Imbalance

One of the more destructive consequences this hierarchy sets in motion is a pattern of imbalanced valuing, in which the masculine is valued over the feminine.

That autumn as I looked at the world with new eyes, asked new questions, and thought new thoughts, I was also reading new books. While reading feminist culture critic Elizabeth Dodson Gray's work, I was struck by her definition of patriarchy as “a culture that is slanted so that men are valued a lot and women are valued less; or in which men's prestige is up and women's prestige is down.”
⁴⁵
She followed her definition with a story about Margaret Mead. When Mead journeyed from tribe to tribe on her anthropological studies, she stumbled upon a discovery: It did not matter what work was done in a particular tribe but rather who did it. If weaving was done in one tribe by men, it was considered a high-prestige occupation. Twenty miles away, if weaving was done in a different tribe by women, it had low prestige.