Several years ago, a quote by Dorothy Sayers, the Christian essayist and mystery novelist, stopped me in my feminist tracks. “The first thing that strikes the careless observer is that women are unlike men,” she writes. “They are ‘the opposite sex’ (though why ‘opposite’ I do not know; what is the ‘neighboring sex’?). But the fundamental thing is that women are more like men than anything else in the world.” Having spent years exploring gender differences, I found her statement of the obvious to be a complete and refreshing surprise.

So much has been made of the differences between men and women—Mars and Venus, dogs and cats—that sometimes it does seem like we are two different species. The simple fact of sex difference has puzzled humanity since the emergence of human culture. Most ancient cultures—as well as aboriginal peoples everywhere—dotted the heavens with male and female deities that represented different core aspects of the process of creation and the experience of life. Somehow we have always believed that the fact of two, not one, bears a mysterious significance.

Frankly, even today with all of our scientific sophistication, why we exist as two sexes is still a mystery. Why didn’t intelligent life continue the way it began—by some form of cloning? Biologists argue that there were significant evolutionary advantages in mingling DNA from two parents. Through combining DNA, change was built into the process of procreation. But could the existence of the two sexes in fact reflect a deeper pattern in the universe—expressing two fundamental forces, the masculine and the feminine, that are not just human but cosmic? It is very hard to know. Pioneering psychologist Erik Erikson noticed that when young children played with blocks, boys built erect towers and girls created circular enclosed spaces. He didn’t think it was an accident that children constructed structures that reflected their anatomical differences—in fact, he suggested that projecting our experience of embodiment outward is a primary way that we make sense of life. For much of human civilization, for example, we have projected our inner experience onto the world around us, inventing deities that reflect the mysterious forces at work within us. Aphrodite, the goddess of love. Mars, the god of anger. Are feminine and masculine, yin and yang, another projection of our experience onto the canvas of the cosmos? Or is it the other way around—that there are two sacred cosmic principles that are manifested in physical form as male and female and expressed in human psychology as masculine and feminine?

Why does it matter? In the last few issues of this magazine, I have been asking: Where are the women who want to evolve consciousness to the next level of human awakening? Responses, primarily from women, poured into my email in-box from around the globe. We’ve never seen anything like it. By and large, the women who have responded argue that our global culture has been shaped by a hypermasculine ideology that is destructive of the web of life so meticulously woven by nature. They also observe that women are working in every corner of the world to bring forth a feminine form of consciousness, leadership, and social change in order to transform this planet. It’s obvious that women care passionately about the leadership that will bring humanity forward. And I can think of nothing more thrilling—since the sixties, Woman Spirit has ignited, spreading like brushfire around the globe. I wholeheartedly agree that this has to continue. But I would also argue that there is more than bringing forth the feminine that is needed to transform the world. If we believe that masculine and feminine are primary sacred forces embodied by males and females (even though each contains aspects of the other), then the evolutionary progress that we can make will always be bounded by our ideas of who we are as men and women. I’m asking: Could there be something beyond our ideas of the masculine and feminine that marks a new potential for humanity, women and men alike?

Gender holds the heart of culture, I have written elsewhere. Gender is such a primary organizing principle of human life, governing its most intimate aspects, that it is almost unthinkable to seek for new ways of being that take us beyond what is so deeply familiar to us. Our cultures, particularly those that have the most global impact, are patriarchal—meaning that they have developed out of social arrangements in which men hold power. However, it’s not simply that men rule but that most often women are considered to be the lesser, weaker, and justifiably subordinate version of humanity—leading to dismaying episodes in history such as the debate within Christianity as to whether or not women have souls. In many of our societies, perhaps most, patriarchy operates out of what historian Riane Eisler calls a “dominator” model in which everyone, male and female, is distorted in his or her development by dynamics of domination and oppression.

How do we move beyond this dynamic when it is so deeply entwined with our sense of ourselves as men and women? If we take to heart Einstein’s oft-repeated and apt statement that problems can never be solved at the same level at which they were created, it seems doubtful that we will ultimately be able to “solve” the twin problems of patriarchy—the dynamics between women and men and the way our male-dominated cultures function—from within a framework that still sees the solution in terms of our existing ideas of gender. However, at this moment, the need for new leadership that embraces values that have been traditionally ascribed to women—care, communication, inclusiveness—is critical.

So, holding the tension between the need for a solution beyond gender and the immediate need for more “feminine” values in leadership, I want to explore three key themes that emerged across the various responses to my query: Where are the women? These themes contain some popular assumptions about women’s leadership. Given women’s sincere desire to change the world for the better, I believe it’s important that we be very clear about the assumptions we are making so that we can see where they are taking us. And then we can better determine if this is where we need and want to go.

THEME 1

We need to bring forth the Divine Feminine, because
we need to imbue our overly masculinized culture with
feminine values.

The Divine Feminine—what does that mean? “At the very dawn of religion, God was a woman,” art historian Merlin Stone wrote in 1976. “Do you remember?” For most of us, Stone’s words are evocative, even if only because we were weaned by an all-powerful and all-knowing female presence, the first great goddess: Mother. Just as mother sustained our lives, the Mother Goddess gave birth to human culture. More than twenty thousand years ago, toward the end of the Old Stone Age, homo sapiens sapiens witnessed with awe the swelling of women’s bellies and the squalling miracle of life that so violently came forth from them. As our ancestors struggled to survive, they created carvings of the pregnant mother—all breasts, belly, and buttocks—as a sacred symbol that, one can imagine, they felt was imbued with the power of life. This life-giving, nurturant mother is the first face of the Divine Feminine. She “inspires and focuses a perception of the universe as an organic, alive, and sacred whole, in which humanity, the Earth, and all life on Earth participate as ‘her children,’” write Anne Baring and Jules Cashford in their impressive compendium, The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image. “Earth was her epiphany: the divine was immanent as creation.” However, with the rise of the Judeo-Christian tradition in the West some four thousand years ago, Baring and Cashford tell us, “our mythic image of Earth lost this dimension.”

As the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) looked beyond creation to a transcendent male God, the loss of the sense of immanent divinity and wholeness in creation took its toll. All that had been associated with the feminine gradually lost its value. This is less true in the East: in the Tao, yang, masculine energy (light, focused, agentic, and action-oriented), and yin, the feminine (dark, diffuse, intuitive, and receptive), each contains the seed of the other. But in the West, masculine and feminine are more often polarized:

The list could go on indefinitely. The significant point, however, is that all of the terms ascribed to the masculine are those that have been widely valued in Western culture since the dawn of the Scientific Revolution in the eighteenth century. Today, some three hundred years later, as we look across a planet wracked with war and exploitation, feminists are crying for a reassessment of what we value as a culture. “The half of humanity in charge of the world’s agenda is led by men addicted to power and maintaining their dominance,” writes Jungian analyst and feminist activist Jean Shinoda Bolen in her latest book, Urgent Message from Mother. “Now, there are weapons of mass destruction that can cause more suffering in a shorter time than ever was even imaginable. . . . It is time to gather the women to save the world.” In this reversal of patriarchal values, the feminine—our Divine Mother—represents life and the masculine increasingly represents death.

Could the renewal and reclamation of the Divine Feminine be what we need to save ourselves and our world? “The [Western] Enlightenment ended with the Holocaust and Hiroshima,” historian Jim Garrison wrote in 2000, before 9/11 and Iraq. In his fascinating and often cryptic book, Civilization and the Transformation of Power, Garrison notices a remarkable pattern in history. Whenever civilization’s leading edge courted annihilation, there was an inexplicable emergence of the Feminine—for example, the rise of the cult of the Virgin Mary after Europe was threatened by plague. I could name more: the spread of Christianity through the commitment of women and slaves within the violent Roman Empire; or, after the fall of the Empire, the remarkable role that women (particularly nuns) played in laying the groundwork for Christian civilization. Garrison suggests that it’s no accident that the women’s liberation movement arose just at the point that we created weapons that could destroy ourselves completely.

Something seems to be moving in the collective psyche. The secular women’s movement of the sixties freed women from confinement to hearth and home. And it also may have opened a channel to the Divine Feminine. In The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, Sue Monk Kidd tells of her extraordinary journey from being a Southern Baptist “Gracious Lady” to creating her own feminist spiritual path of worship and celebration of the Sacred Feminine. Kidd’s story is striking because she tracks in her dreams the emergence of images that were utterly foreign to her in her devoutly Christian life—images such as the bare-breasted Minoan goddess holding two red snakes. Kidd becomes this wild goddess in a dream and only later is stunned to see the image in a book. Jungian analyst Marion Woodman, in a 1999 interview in this magazine, reported that her clients were telling of a gorgeous, lusty black goddess appearing in their dreams. Perhaps, suggests Woodman, this new goddess figure “represent[s] a cumulative insight that will eventually have an impact on the planet,” a fierce and creative aspect of the Feminine. Like the tantric stream in Buddhism that emerged in the late medieval era, this call from the Sacred Feminine demands a recognition of the holiness of the manifest universe—the unified, nondual realization that every aspect of life, and all of its mysteries from birth to maturity, is divine.

From a philosophical and spiritual standpoint, who can argue with this? The techno-scientific worldview that brought us to modernity has done so by viewing the universe as dead matter and other life forms as lacking any sensibility whatsoever. This acute separation from the sanctity of life needs to be transformed at the core. “The Sacred Feminine is coming back,” explains Shinoda Bolen, “mostly through women, but also men who have dreams of numinous goddess figures or who follow intuition and instinct to find and resacralize land or go on pilgrimages.”

What an enormously appealing vision, particularly for us women! But I wonder about the value of making these arguments in terms of “masculine” or “feminine.” Yes, Western culture needs to radically reconnect with the sacredness of life if we are to create a life-enhancing future. But as soon as we link this with the Feminine, we evoke our personal and cultural past. Images of male God and female Goddess came to life in the human psyche at a time before literacy, which limited the human capacity to conceptualize. Thus, these pre-literate visions, expressed by the female or male form, tie us to a primitive duality. Moreover, since masculinity and femininity have become so oppositional—bound together in a hierarchy of domination and subordination—breaking this pattern cannot come about by now making the feminine superior. That will only continue the pattern of one being up and the other down—this time with women on top. And I don’t think that is a cure for the abuses of power that are destroying our world. Which brings us to the second theme.

THEME 2

Women are better suited to leadership because we don’t have the egoic need that so many men do to be in the limelight.

I was struck by how often women described their inclusive, supportive, and nonhierarchical way of leading and, at the same time, expressed the opposite of that by asserting their superiority to men. Isn’t this part of the division, hierarchy, and separation that we are trying to move beyond? I am not saying this in my best mother voice, with the underlying message, All of my children need to get along. I don’t think that we are at a point where women and men are going to be able to trust each other overnight. These structures in our selves and in society have grown roots for thousands of years. Transcending that history would mean men giving up their assumption of power and women giving up our belief in our victimization. Both of these are entwined with our core sense of identity. And no one gives up power—or one’s source of identity—easily. Despite our desire to bring forward women’s talents and qualities, unless we find a way to change the core tensions and dynamics that divide women and men, we aren’t going to be able to pool human creativity to truly change the world. For starters, that means taking a deeper look at ourselves, which is why I’m asking for deeper analysis—and greater self-awareness.

The dynamic of men feeling superior to women (“How could she be so stupid?”) while women feel superior to men (“He’s so out of touch with himself”) may go as far back as the Mother Goddess. The cultural idea that women are morally superior to men, however, can be traced back to the early modern era—which marked the dawn of capitalism, the birth of the middle class, and the division of the world into the masculine public sphere and the feminine private sphere. According to Nancy Armstrong, in her groundbreaking book Desire and Domestic Fiction, the early seventeenth century saw the creation of an ideal of femininity that gained wide acceptance because it was spread through the new art form of the novel—the first triumph of popular culture. The ideal of the good, pure, and virtuous woman solved a social problem. During this dangerous transition, women became extremely vulnerable because men were exploring, exploiting, and inventing a whole new capitalist economic order that destroyed the existing social structures protecting women.

In the so-called Dark Ages, women and men shared a fairly similar lot in life—and that lot was determined by social class. The majority of women who were not born into nobility—good wives and mothers, and also bakers, chicken-hawkers, hostel-keepers, weavers, and so forth—worked alongside their mates. Both men and women lived lives circumscribed by their role in the feudal world, working on the land or in small cottage crafts, secured by kinship, class, custom, and church. But as more and more men went to cities to seek their capitalist fortunes, women were left behind. What would women’s role be in the emerging society? Men of lower birth now had money, and they no longer wanted to be with the women of their class. They wanted to marry noblewomen. But there weren’t enough noblewomen to go around. Quickly, a shift occurred in the meaning and value of being “noble.” No longer did “noble” mean one was born into a particular social class. It now referred to characteristics of the woman herself. Women’s identity as pure and good was an invention—literally a way of creating value so that men of means would seek to marry lower-class women, something that would have made less than no sense in feudal society. A bargain was struck in the new capitalist society, enabling women to trade the moral qualities of goodness and virtue for social and economic security. The price, however, was an even greater dependence on men. How ironic it is that these qualities are now being proclaimed as women’s pedigree for leadership.

But does women’s “goodness” make us better leaders? “Three decades of research in state legislatures, universities, and international public policy centers have proven beyond doubt that women, children, and men all benefit when women are in leadership,” states my friend Marie C. Wilson, founder and president of the White House Project. “Broader social legislation, benefiting everyone, is more likely to pass if women are in office.” Wilson also cites how women have been effective negotiators and peacemakers across the globe. This is how women’s identification with being mothers, caregivers, and nurturers has had a positive impact. From the U.S. to Rwanda, across the dimensions of race and class, women’s practical and immediate connection to caregiving orients us as leaders to provide better health care, education, nutritional programs, and other sources of social support.

Is this the leadership that will create a new world? While advocating for these basic life supports is essential—and so often neglected—I’m not sure it’s enough. Education and health care are long-term solutions for the inequities in our global society, but caring and listening won’t change the minds of those who are gripped by ethnic rivalry or religious righteousness. Will women dare to engage in conflict when it’s needed? Risk our sense of security and comfort? Be disliked? Men seem to find it easier to go their own way and damn the rest. However, women’s preference for consensus-building and collaboration does not mean that we are pure as the driven snow. At a 2001 Women’s Leadership Summit at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Debra Meyerson and Robin Ely argued that the jury is still out on whether women’s “difference” makes a difference: “The difference sex difference makes in how leaders, corporations, or politics function and in what they produce is likely negligible.” Why? They observe that women’s “difference”—“listening, collaborating, nurturing, and behind-the-scenes peacemaking”—arose in the context of women’s second-class status. In fact, they note that “the wish to celebrate women’s goodness would seem to require the perpetuation of her subordination.” In other words, we are good and selfless because that’s the bargain we made, and kept making, for our survival. Our self-image as good and caring women is our emotional consolation prize for years spent fearfully silent and obsequiously obedient within a world of male domination. While we women may feel superior to men who are out there with their accomplishments, our task may be to risk putting ourselves forward, even if it might mean being all alone.

Hence, I worry about the easy assumption of women’s moral superiority to men as grounds for our leadership. Our goodness and care are double-edged. Women’s ego, I submit, holds up our smiles of goodness and bows our heads in false humility. Of course, we too can get caught in egoic posturing, but most often our egos bloom in cultivating a self-image of selfless goodness. Could this be why so many women wrote to say that they are leading quietly, out of earshot? Certainly, the very structures of our society value men and what they do. But we have to be careful not to conflate our self-protective (and self-gratifying) self-effacement with greater virtue. And when we reinterpret the Divine Feminine in light of this self-image and thereby make feminine goodness something sacred, I think we are on dangerous turf. The world does need us—desperately. As Sue Monk Kidd says, we can no longer just be content to cultivate our inner life or, I would add, to lead quietly in the margins; we need to be “prophets . . . calling society to truth, justice, and equality.”

This calls us to consider what it would mean for women to wield power in a world in which we are no longer constrained by patriarchal bargains to uphold this image of goodness. What will happen when the lid is off of our power and potential? To prepare, we have to dare to investigate our relationship to power. Frankly, I don’t think it’s going to be pretty. Taking a look at powerful women in history or literature before the cult of the good woman began—Boadicea, Joan of Arc, and Cleopatra, or Medea, Lady MacBeth, and Moll Flanders—they are not creatures of sweetness and light. Or think about Kali, the Indian goddess of creative destruction. Or angry Demeter, jealous Hera, powerful Athena. There may be far less difference than our cultural roles would have us believe. So, will we care enough for the world that we are living in to wield power, assert our values, engage in conflict, or do whatever is necessary without getting intoxicated by that power, as we have seen so often in men, and at the same time not separate ourselves from them? That means a radical transformation of consciousness, which brings me to the third theme.

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?