Читать книгу The Book of Awesome Women - Becca Anderson - Страница 9
ОглавлениеWomen have always been powerful. So much so, in fact, that several millennia of oppression have only made us stronger. And no amount of witch burnings, stiletto heels, and lack of basic human rights can stop the blossoming forth of the boldest, bravest wave of women and girlpower ever, here at the dawn of the new millennium.
Women have always been heroes. But, it is no longer enough to say so. As we shake off the last traces of a major patriarchal hangover, women need a new language, a new dialect, and a freshly forged paradigm to express an untrammeled femininity that has nothing to do with bondage—unless, of course, that’s your bag. Women of courage, in addition to taking back their power, must have a name of their own. Any wise woman can tell you that words have power. As Rumpelstiltskin knew, the naming of a person or thing is to have ownership and power over the named. He was quaking in his leathery dwarf boots for fear that the princess he had imprisoned (so she could spin straw into gold for his moldering coffers) would figure out his name. Sure enough, our girl psyched it out with good, old-fashioned women’s intuition and his game was up. As sheroes, all women can fully embrace and embody all their fiery fempower and celebrate the unique potency of our gender-tribe. By taking, telling, and proudly touting the title and banner of sheroes, women can identify with the traits of strength, courage, and no-holds-barred individuality, thus sharing and spreading the power around. Taking back power doesn’t necessarily mean that power has to be taken away from someone else; there is enough for all. No need to repeat the mistakes of the past.
Power. Share it; it grows!
Packing estrogen, and, not infrequently, a pen and a sword, awesome women come in every imaginable shape, size, and color, and manifest their sheroism in infinite ways. Our sheroic foremothers of the past centuries paved the way for the cybersheroes and screen goddesses of today at a time when women were relegated to the status of second-class citizens, if they were fortunate enough to be citizens at all. Their accomplishments are stunning in light of the fact that there was, for all practical purposes, a tacit caste system with one gender on top. Battling exclusion and seclusion, these incredible women risked it all to create the freedom we enjoy and uphold today. Women warriors, they didn’t take no for an answer and went to the head of the class without passing go, oftentimes through a gauntlet of disapproval, bad press, and all other odds against them.
The Shero’s Journey
Heroes and their trips have gotten plenty of air time thanks to the erudite scholarship of the late mythographer Joseph Campbell, who popularized the genre. His delineation of the hero’s journey begins with restlessness and hearing the call to action; it moves to the middle road of dragon slaying and an underground passage through hell and back where the hero faces death, to the culmination of the visionary quest in self-awareness and the return home.
The heroic archetype was brought to the world’s attention when George Lucas extrapolated Campbell’s explication of the hero’s journey in the Star Wars trilogy. It is important to bear in mind that not every would-be hero who sets upon the path to greatness succeeds. In fact, the most promising candidates may fall—look at Lancelot, the flower of France and the finest knight in King Arthur’s court, who betrayed his liege lord and lost his honor. Heroism is no guarantee! The question for us to consider here is how a shero’s journey differs, if at all, from the hero’s journey. Having been obsessed with this very question for the better part of a year, I have concluded that it is, indeed, different.
Interestingly, Campbell himself never tackled the subject, but commented that the question always came up after his lectures. (Can’t you just see Sarah Lawrence women giving him the business?) His position was that “if a woman engages in the man’s task of achievement, then her mythology will be essentially the same as that of the male hero.”
Aside from the fact that achievement in and of itself is not the true hallmark of a human’s psychospiritual evolution, women have been achieving great things since women took primitive society from hunting and gathering to agricultural-based communities. For that matter, we might as well go back to the beginning, to Eve, who would’ve burned her bra if she’d had one, and her predecessors among the first femmes, including the first feminist Lilith, whom Yahweh attempted to hook up with the utterly human Adam. Lilith, being semidivine, would have none of this mundane human-beingness and bailed immediately. But, according to the early Christian Gnostic Gospels, before there was Adam and before there was God even, there was Sophia, the primordial and very female entity embodying the ultimate wisdom associated with the unknowable heart of darkness.
Marion Woodman, doubtless one of the preeminent Jungian analysts of our time, does examine the “heroine’s journey,” as she calls it, deeply and brilliantly. In her excellent book on the subject, Leaving My Father’s House, Woodman cuts to the heart of the repression of women’s adventurous and powerful energies and advocates a transcendence of the old patriarchal model for women through dumping obsolete control systems and dangerous daddy complexes to illuminate the world with our true spirit and our excellence. “So long as a woman accepts a man’s archetypal projection, she is trapped in a male understanding of reality,” she notes. The shero’s journey, she explains, is an awakening to consciousness, and “staying with the process is what matters.” The shero needn’t necessarily go underground; she can turn inside to the intuitive and occasionally superconscious wisdom at the core of her being—Sophia, divine feminine wisdom. Woodman urges women to share these stories of transformation and growth to “open the path to freedom” for other women.
The Book of Awesome Women is a collection of the life stories of the harbingers of female transformation. Each of the sheroes in this book, and the legions who are not, have done this work. They have released their full energy and, in so doing, changed the world for us by blazing trails, breaking down barriers, and empowering other women to do the same.
Sister-sheroes, suffragists, amazons, and priestess-healers laid the foundations for the post-modern sheroes of today, who are making new strikes in art and letters, the business world, and in the power and sports arenas. From Madeleine Albright, who declared politics “is not a fraternity anymore!” to the courageous televised outing of lesbian Ellen DeGeneres, women are making enormous strides today that should see us to a fabulously feminized twenty-first century. A delightful irony I’ve noticed is that the aforementioned Star Wars Trilogy contains the perfect parallel journey of hero and shero, although that hasn’t seemed to get nearly the air time among all the hype of the incredible international success of this mythical sci-fi series. You will recall that Luke Skywalker has a twin sister, none other than Princess Leia Organa. While Luke was playing with droids and scooting around his planet in jerry-rigged spacecrafts, Princess Leia was masterminding the rebellion against the fascist Darth Vader. Talk about leaving your father’s house!
Tripping the Light Femtastic
This book of sheroes is intended to be a call to action as well, and a challenging exhortation to honor bold and brave women by telling their stories. This book is only the tip of the sheroic iceberg, however. If I had my way, it would never end, because I wanted to include every shero who ever lived. My greatest hope is that it will spark something in you, the reader—who are your personal sheroes? Let me know (see the personal note in the back of the book).
Ethnographer Marina Warner, in her compelling examination of women in fairy and folktales, From the Beast to the Blonde, concludes that words and the wielding of words is the realm of women: “The story itself becomes the weapon of the weaponless. The struggles of women, for example, are not resolved by combat on the whole (one or two Amazon heroines excepted), as the contests of men may bring heroic epic…women’s arts within fairy tales are very marked, and most of them are verbal: riddling, casting spells, conjuring, understanding the tongues of animals, turning words into deeds.” Storytelling is a way of weaving the fabric of consciousness, introducing new strands, new awareness. In this way, the shero stories can, on an archetypal level, shift, transform, and create new reality for ourselves, and, most importantly, for young women and girls. Imagine a neo-Amazonian utopia where every adolescent girl has sky high self-esteem—no Ophelias to revive! Estrogen empowered, full-esteem ahead, and absolutely, unabashedly glorious.
This brings me back to the original point of this storytelling adventure for me. In the beginning was the word. Logos. Sophia. In the new beginning was the word—sheroes! The term women heroes is no longer sufficient for a post patriarchal populace, and the auditory twinning of heroine to the supremely addictive opiate is certainly a turn-off, and reason enough to embrace the mantle of sheroism. For this, I must thank poet shero Maya Angelou, who used the word in a speech and sparked the muse for me. In closing, I want to thank all the women who set the standards and knocked down the walls of oppression, brick by brick. Often, as I researched the lives of these women, I was moved to tears with the realization of what they went through for their magnificent accomplishments—by, among others, Elizabeth Blackwell, who got into medical school on a joke and had the last laugh, by supermodel superwoman Waris Dirie battling against the scourge of female circumcision, and by every working-class shero who demands her due. I dedicate this book to every shero whose story remains untold and whose unquenchable spirit lives on!
