But for many reasons, this didn’t continue. The Black Death decimated the convents, which never were repopulated. Women were back at home. Between one-third and two-thirds of the population of Europe died; worldwide, the estimate is seventy-five million dead. And for some reason at this most desperate hour in history, the cult of the Virgin Mary blossomed throughout Europe, to the surprise of the church hierarchy. In Civilization and the Transformation of Power, James Garrison observes that “the confluence of the Black Death and the adoration of Mary was followed by a whole new ordering of reality in Europe, which resulted in the Renaissance, the Reformation, and eventually, the Enlightenment.” This may be all of a piece, one movement in consciousness—women mystics, an ideal of courtly love, and the cult of the Virgin. Could these expressions of love and freedom, by women or directed to women, have helped open the way for humanity to think new thoughts and see the world differently?

As the winds of change began to whip and the new ordering of reality emerged through the Reformation and Enlightenment, women again stepped forward. Despite the fact that from the mid-fifteenth century to the early seventeenth, thousands of women were accused of witchcraft and publicly executed, women couldn’t be held back. Anderson and Zinsser tell us that in the sixteenth-century Reformation, “women again became rebels and zealots, seizing opportunities with a fervor as intense as that which had motivated the believers and proselytizers of the early church. They protested, they fought and died as martyrs. . . . They studied, they preached, they converted others. For some, God spoke through their visions and thus gave them the authority to criticize and to prophesy.” And would the Enlightenment have arisen in France—a France that had only two hundred years before been propelled toward freedom from English rule by a young mystic named Joan of Arc who herself was burned at the stake—without the salons, initiated by women, that allowed freethinkers to debate, discuss, and plot?

The women’s salon movement defied the status quo of the courts and fanned the flames of liberty. The first salon was created by Catherine de Vivonne, the Marquise de Rambouillet, in the early seventeenth century. She defied convention and propriety to build a house in which there were rooms for people to sit and talk, creating an atmosphere in which women and men could meet and speak as equals. At Madame de Rambouillet’s suggestion, those women and men in her circle made a pledge not to have sex with each other, another controversial decision that “freed [them] for a role beyond that of wife or courtesan.” Starting in France, over the course of almost two centuries, the salon moved across the continent and crossed the channel to England. Everywhere it went, it spread the Enlightenment ideals of rationality, freedom, and enjoyment of this world. For some salonières, the intimate setting was just another venue to attract male attention, but for others it was, as German salonière Henrietta Herz said, a complete break with tradition and the expression of “an exuberant freedom of spirit.”

Over time, the salons were repudiated; it was considered too dangerous for women to have the ears of men in power. And so again women returned home to roles that were changing to reflect a growing belief that women were men’s opposites, incapable of rational thought, too delicate for the passions of the body, and ideally suited to the domestic sphere.

By the early nineteenth century, smack in the middle of the flowering cult of domesticity, women were on the rise again—in the United States. This time the powerful confluence of the democratic ideals rooted in Christ’s message of equality and the grim reality of slavery created a context in which a few women, ignited by a spiritual vision that gave them the courage to break taboos against women in public life, put their lives on the line to speak out, first against slavery and then against their own second-class status. Their authority, though ridiculed and questioned, was unassailable. They pored over the Bible, became reacquainted with a Christ freed from the biases of churches, negotiated, and organized. These women—among them Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, and Ida Wells—were tireless and fearless, and their words prophetic.

Over the span of seventy years, the leaders of the suffrage movement worked to get an all-male Congress to give women the basic right to vote. They needed a mass movement. So, to elicit women’s support for what was considered an unladylike activity, the twentieth-century suffrage leaders no longer spoke of equal rights with men—the message of equality was too radical for most—so they coaxed women to join by arguing that women had a higher moral sense than men and that this was needed to keep the country on the right path. It worked: Millions of women petitioned and marched. But after 1920, once the vote was won, women rushed back home again.

Then finally, after the Great Depression and Second World War, the baby boom generation of unprecedented prosperity took to the streets to finish the work of the previous century. After fighting for civil rights and against the Vietnam War, young educated women in America began to agitate for their rights, creating a tidal wave of consciousness change that wreaked havoc with tradition and then swept across the Atlantic to Europe. These women had no God or religious faith to anchor and exalt them. Through a collective practice of “consciousness raising,” they questioned every aspect of a woman’s life, upending it all—sexuality, work, marriage, children, and religion. Under this scrutiny, the authority of the established order that divided the world by gender began to crumble.

And these women didn’t return home. They, and the generations after them, might have wanted to, but they couldn’t—not like before. Home life had finally lost its mooring to a larger social structure sanctioned by God or custom. Now women have choices that would have boggled the minds of our foresisters. Marriage, children, and all that has been the core of women’s lives have become optional, not just for a few courageous souls but for all of us postmodern women. The house has fallen down.

Where Do We Go Now?
Following the trail of these culture shifts—traveling from the savannah to the Roman provinces, moving through Europe, stopping in France and crossing to America—at each cataclysmic confrontation between the old and the new, we find women. Inspired women defied the authority of the Roman Empire, the early church, the medieval church, the custom of the courts, the ideals of perfect womanhood, and the demand to marry and bear children. Before there was Christianity, women claimed the freedom to proclaim Christ’s word; before the birth of the Renaissance perspective, women saw life from a God’s-eye view. At each of the brief moments when women rose to reach beyond the known, there has been a sudden illumination like the flash of a camera, revealing the potential for women and men to be social and spiritual equals. And after each glimpse, women abandoned their hard-won freedom and autonomy, got caught in the undertow of tradition, and sided with the powerful forces that custom can rally to its defense. Until now.

Until now because in the last forty years we have made a radical break with tradition. We are free, as no women have ever before been free, to invent our lives, to do as we please, to work or not, to marry or not (or marry multiple times), to have children, adopt, or not. Our foresisters could barely imagine what we have: the freedom to control our reproduction, the sanction to learn and think independently, the ability to earn our own living, the potential to have an impact on the world.

The entire trajectory of human history until now has been based on the need to protect the mother-child dyad, even though so many women and children have often struggled for the barest survival. Women’s relationship to children, and to the men who have protected us, has always been the ground of our existence. For women within patriarchy, this has meant both intense competition with other women and the constant insecurity of depending on another—someone physically and socially more powerful—in order to survive. Hence, over millennia, women created vast arts of subtle manipulation, obfuscation, and attraction until we ourselves became hooked on the need for affirmation. Yet even though this dyad is no longer the pivot around which our lives turn, women continue to practice the survival arts designed to attract and keep men’s attention—despite the fact that we no longer need to be dependent. We are the social equals of men.

Now, for a growing number of us, there is no God, no church, no custom, no home, no “other” to anchor the center of ourselves. Millennia of carefully catalogued reasons for our subordination, both biologically and culturally imposed and self-enforced, have fallen away, and with them, surprisingly, our sense of security in relationship, our knowing who we are and what we are here for. Our freedom has cost us our core, rending the web of relatedness that has defined us—daughter of, sister of, wife of, mother of . . . This relatedness is a force—a program etched into the female brain to enforce the mandate to give birth, to do evolution’s bidding to create a species that would eventually stand and look God in the eye. Struggling, some of us are reaching back to recreate the old and familiar roles. Most of us remain desperate for the affirmation of relationship—and are willing to do almost anything to find or keep one, while some are trying to bring nurturing and connection into the workplace, transforming the world into the home that we have left behind. The habits of deference, of caretaking, and of seeing ourselves through the eyes of others, particularly men, still shape us from within.

These habits are operating structures in Woman’s consciousness, often blinding us to the reality that we privileged postmodern women have achieved social equality with men. Who would we be if we were free of these structures—yes, even free of the compulsion to appear caring? One of the lessons that I take from history is that the deep changes that have moved consciousness and culture forward have not come from women who are primarily identified with our biologically based role as caretakers. Change has emerged from women who dared to defy tradition to wholeheartedly heed Spirit’s call to be free.

After more than two thousand years of struggle toward equality, what freedom does the deepest spirit in woman yearn for now? Dare we risk liberating ourselves from these habits that are so ingrained in our cells and psyches? It’s monumental—a different kind of liberation of consciousness that challenges each of us to confront and transcend the psychic habits of the past in and as ourselves. In this, women may indeed hold the keys to cultural change. Standing together as women, holding the spirit of our courageous foresisters in our hearts, we can shift the core dynamics of dependence on men and separation from women that have held our culture in place. Then we can join with men in a new way to take equal responsibility for the planetary crises we face and, together, give birth to a radically different future.