The Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd Page A

within the culture at large suggesting (in ways both bold and subtle) that women and feminine experience are “less than.”
    If you receive often enough the message that women are inferior and secondary, you will soon believe you are inferior and secondary. As a matter of fact, many experts tell us that “all women in our society arrive at adulthood with significant feelings of inadequacy.” 16
    Once on an airplane I sat beside a thirty-year-old woman with a briefcase. As we chatted, a female voice came over the loudspeaker and said, “This is your captain.”
    The woman stopped midsentence. “Oh no,” she said, “a woman pilot.”
    â€œI’m sure she’s well trained,” I said.
    â€œRight,” she said, “but she’s still a woman.”
    Her feminine wound—her personal concentration of female inferiority—had made a brief appearance.
    As time went on, I would grasp how deep such wounds go. For we carry not only our own wounding experiences, but the inherited wounds of our mothers and grandmothers as well. “We think back through our mothers and grandmothers, if we are women,” Virginia Woolf said. 17
    This statement is not mere poetry. We carry something ancient inside us, an aspect of the psyche that Carl Jung called the collective unconscious. Containing river beds of collective experience, the collective unconscious is the place where preexisting traces of ancestral experience are encoded. 18 Thousands of years of feminine rejection reside there, and it can rise up to do a dark dance with our conscious beliefs.
    I read a moving example of this interplay in physician Christiane Northrup’s book, Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom. She recounted being in the delivery room countless times, hearing new mothers apologize to their husbands when the baby was not male. She described the experience as staggering to her. But, she writes,
    When my own second daughter was born. I was shocked to hear those very words of apology come into my brain from the collective unconscious of the human race. I never said them out loud, and yet they were there in my head—completely unbidden. I realized then how old and ingrained is this rejection of the female by men and women alike. 19
    For Northrup, as for me, recognizing this wound in herself was a pivotal moment in her growth as a woman.
    There’s always the danger, though, that as we open our eyes to the social, physical, psychological, and spiritual violence done to women throughout history, not to mention the wounding in our own personal histories, we will become paralyzed by a sense of victimization. For me, opening my eyes to the feminine wound was rather like getting hit by a stun gun. I felt knocked down by the force of it, and for a short while I didn’t get up. On some level, I felt overwhelmed by the depth of the feminine wound, which I was uncovering, not only in myself, but all around.
    The danger of getting stuck in feelings of victimization is real, but nevertheless, recognizing the feminine wound is important because in the end it’s the only way we can stop being victims. We can’t change anything until we acknowledge the problem. I’d been an unconscious victim before my awakening began. Discovering the truth was waking me up to my victimization, but it was also making it possible for me to move beyond it.
    Feminist writer Naomi Wolf has especially cautioned women not to shape our identity as victims. Yet shaping our identity as victims is quite different from naming the truth of our victimization in order to work against it and live into our power. If women don’t document and protest the harm done to us, who will? As Wolf says, “Women are not natural victims, but they sure are victimized.” 20
    While holding onto the awareness, then, that we must not fall into shaping our identity as victims, we have to tell ourselves the “flat-out truth,”