The Task of Modern Woman
We women can move culture forward and create a future beyond patriarchy. But it will neither be easy nor necessarily feel “natural” if we see our nature primarily in terms of the roles we have played in culture over most of historical time. Jung himself saw the potential in women for evolving consciousness, and as Castillejo explains, Jung came to believe “that man can go no further in the pursuit of consciousness until woman catches up with him.” This may be a bone in the throat for us postmodern women. But Jung is speaking of the enormity of the task that we women face to step beyond our biologically driven and culturally sanctioned roles. In a talk that he gave between the two world wars entitled “Woman in Europe,” Jung said woman “is faced with a tremendous cultural task [that] perhaps . . . will be the dawn of a new era,” because women long “for greater consciousness . . . [to] escape the blind dynamism of nature” in which he saw her caught. In other words, Jung, too, saw how women’s existence within patriarchy was focused on our capacity to reproduce (or not)—virgin, wife, mother, crone—which has left us lagging far behind in our capacity for the kind of creative thought that the privileged males in our species have developed through trial and error over the past several millennia. “So long as a woman lives the life of the past she can never come in conflict with history,” he says. “But no sooner does she begin to deviate, however slightly, from a cultural trend that has dominated the past then she encounters the full weight of historical inertia.” Taking on this inertia in order to free our souls and spirits from that which we have been embedded in through the ages would be heroic. It’s a new kind of heroism that demands the creation of the new within us. The goal would be to develop a consciousness that both includes our biological and cultural inheritance and also transcends it, so that a new, free space of relationship is created in culture in which to catalyze a new partnership between women and men. This would be a new expression of the feminine, and given how essential it is for transforming our world, such an endeavor is nothing less than sacred.
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The recipe for cultural change has pretty much been “add women and stir,” as if reaching some balance in the numbers of men and women in public life would shift the course of history.
The Victorian era, like no time before or since, asserted that gender and sexuality were the core of who we are.
There is an assumption that women have been untouched by patriarchy and are innocent of the culture we are steeped in.
The Divine Feminine, Unveiled
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