The Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd

beside the rapids of the Chatooga River and came upon a young family. Betty watched as the father took the boy, who looked about four years old, down to the water’s edge so he could dip his hands into the surging water and feel the spray on his face. The boy’s sister, slightly older, begged her mother to take her to the edge, too. “No,” the mother told her. “It’s too dangerous there.”
    A small incident, but when multiplied a hundred, a thousand times in a little girl’s life, she learns that she’s not as capable as a boy of handling life on the edge. She learns to hang back.
    Peggy Orenstein’s 1994 book, Schoolgirls, 15 draws on a 1991 survey by the American Association of University Women, which suggests that parents and teachers seem to have lesser expectations for girls than for boys. Orenstein showed that girls’ self-esteem is lost as they “dumb themselves down” and conform to lesser expectations to avoid being threatening. The girls in her study learned by adolescence not to be too outspoken, too aggressive, or too smart. They learned to balance drive with deference. The boys, by contrast, were rewarded for their drive and discouraged from showing deference. Girls learned to negate themselves through simple experiences: On the playground calling a boy “a girl” was the worst slur possible.
    Orenstein also found that boys received more attention from teachers than did girls. In many of the classrooms she visited, boys were called on more often. Even at home many of the schoolgirls felt their brothers were favored, that the boys were, in fact, listened to more than they.
    At church girls fare no better. A young girl learns Bible stories in which vital women are generally absent, in the background, or devoid of power. She learns that men go on quests, encounter God, and change history, while women support and wait for them.She hears sermons where traditional (nonthreatening) feminine roles are lifted up as God’s ideal. A girl is likely to see only a few women in the higher echelons of church power.
    And what does a girl, who is forming her identity, do with all the scriptures admonishing women to submission and silence? Having them “explained away” as the product of an ancient time does not entirely erase her unease. She also experiences herself missing from pronouns in scripture, hymns, and prayers. And most of all, as long as God “himself” is exclusively male, she will experience the otherness, the lessness, of herself; all the pious talk in the world about females being equal to males will fail to compute in the deeper places inside her.
    As a girl absorbs her culture, for instance as she watches movies and television, she may also come to understand that her real importance derives from her relationship with men and boys, by how good she looks for them or how well she takes care of them. She will notice the things traditionally assigned to women—keeping a home, cleaning, cooking, laundry, child rearing—and grow aware of how little value these things seem to have in the world compared to things men typically do.
    When she grows up and enters the workplace, she will likely plunge into the staggering dilemma that is often hers alone—working while caring for children and keeping a house. She’ll likely encounter ceilings, networks, and traditional assumptions that work against her as a woman. She will arrive at the disconcerting realization that success comes only as she learns to modulate and adapt her feminine self to a man’s world.
    If she sees few women in places of real power, hears few female voices of strength, and witnesses little female creativity, then despite what is said to her about women’s equality, she experiences women (and herself) as absent and silent.
    The feminine wound is created as we internalize all these experiences—the voices we hear at church, school, home, work, and