THEME 3

We are the women who are doing it—it’s already happening!

Women are doing so much extraordinary and groundbreaking work. The seismic shift of women’s consciousness that started in the second half of the last century has created massive and continuing change. Newsweek’s issue last fall on women’s leadership featured San Francisco’s police chief, fire chief, and district attorney—three women of color who have ended the turf war between their agencies to create a more effective response to emergency. Locally and internationally, women are part of the leadership of every movement for social and environmental justice. Around the globe, women are creating the space and opportunity for other women to rise up, to be able to educate their families, and to restore communities ravaged by war, disease, and disaster. The United Nations Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995 created a global platform for highlighting issues critical to women and girls. Appalling forms of oppression—like female genital mutilation—are slowly being relegated to humankind’s barbaric past. I’ve been amazed by stories of African girls spontaneously refusing to be cut—with no role models, no support, just a sudden shift in consciousness that now says, “No, this is not for me.”

Something is happening. Women are working to evolve consciousness and transform lives everywhere, as many readers pointed out. But that’s not what I was asking. When I raised the question “Where are the women who want to evolve consciousness?” I wasn’t asking about how we are working with others. I want to know where are the women who want to evolve our own consciousness, the consciousness of those of us who have the unbelievable privileges that this era offers. We are at a unique moment in human evolution. For the first time in recorded history, men and women at the leading edge of culture are social equals. Although the goal of equity has certainly not been reached (women are still underrepresented in leadership in every sector of society), our hard-won and nascent social equality brings a potential alive on earth that has never before existed. I’m calling those of us who have been the beneficiaries of this new equality to take part in transforming what it means to be men and women, to break the binary opposition of gender. Who wants to explore this frontier that lies beyond what we know? And how do we even begin to find our way?

Harking back to Einstein’s statement about resolving problems at a higher level than that at which they were created, two things come to mind. First, my mentor Carol Gilligan has said that patriarchy is founded on separation from women—men separate from women, and women from each other and dissociated from themselves. Certainly, we must unite where we have been divided—first, women with other women, then women with men. But how do we do so in a way that does not reassert this fundamental division and separation? How can we end the division of the world by gender if we cannot do it from within gender itself, from within our ideas, beliefs, fears, and desires of being good women (or men, for that matter)? The Divine Feminine cannot help us here. We cannot use our identification with our gender as a way to transcend its grip on our consciousness. So, where do we go, within and without, to create a new consciousness free of these divisions?

That brings me to my second thought: Helen LaKelly Hunt, author of Faith and Feminism, has discovered that the nineteenth-century women suffragists and abolitionists dared to defy the conventions of “feminine” behavior, dared to speak in public, agitate, petition, and march, because they were on fire. A spiritual vision that the Kingdom of God—the manifestation of true equality and justice—was each human being’s birthright lit up their hearts and led them out of their comfortable bourgeois homes. “Let us not hesitate to be the messiahs of our age,” Lucretia Mott declared as she called others into the battle against slavery. She herself did not hesitate to speak, despite the fact that at the time women weren’t supposed to open their mouths in public. In fact, she once narrowly escaped an angry mob that burned to the ground in protest the building in which she spoke. Because she took incredible risks to uphold what was then almost unimaginable—freedom for all human beings and the equal rights of women—Mott was “spoken of as a most dangerous woman . . . an infidel, a heretic, a disturber,” as her younger contemporary Elizabeth Cady Stanton recalls. But to Stanton, this diminutive woman, who insisted on living in obedience to a spiritual truth higher than the laws of men, was like “a being from some larger planet” who offered “an entirely new revelation of womanhood.” No wonder Mott’s public speaking, as one observer has said, was “so born of conviction, so radiant with . . . inward light” that it ignited social transformation by evoking a new consciousness.

There is a powerful connection between profound social change and the kind of consciousness that Mott, as an example, was a vehicle for. Mott was guided by a vision for humanity that did not exist in her day. Her vision of Truth was not tied to ideas of gender—it freed her from them. Epoch-shifting cultural change seems to be linked to a spiritual vision that illuminates a potential for human dignity and unity that was previously unknown. And this pertains not just to the suffragists such as Mott, Stanton, or even Sojourner Truth and Susan B. Anthony. Think about it: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream came from beyond this world to wake us to a new conscience and consciousness. Likewise with Gandhi. And think about Buddha and Christ. Their spiritual awakening laid the foundation for shifts in consciousness that transformed the world. As the anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre mused in 1907, “I have been approaching the conclusion that consciousness . . . is the dawning power which threatens to over-hurl old processes and old laws, and supplant them by other powers and other ideals. I know no more fascinating speculation than this, of the role of consciousness in present and future evolution.”

At this point where the most privileged of us live on the edge of gender equality, perhaps the next step is to reach beyond the notions of masculine and feminine that have deeply shaped our selves and society. The evolution of consciousness so desperately needed to transform this planet could well depend on our discovering a new ground for human relationship that destroys all of the division bound up in our ideas of being women or men. The glimmer of that ground may have been glimpsed by one of the greatest spiritual visionaries in history, as my colleague Jessica Roemischer and I discovered recently at the Omega Institute’s Women & Power weekend. Jane Fonda spoke there about her conversion to Christianity and her recent discovery of the surprising message in the Gnostic gospels. Quoting Christ’s words from the Gospel of Thomas, she said: “When the male will not be male nor the female be female, then we will enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”

Where are the women who want to discover this?