Preface

         As a student of Women’s Studies, I was once approached by a friend who asked why I was studying "all this women's stuff?"  I don't remember the inadequate response I gave her, but I distinctly remember the stunned feeling of disbelief I had at her inquiry.  My reaction was slight.  Looking back, I realize I was trying to hide my shock at the question.  Looking back twice, I'm glad it was asked of me since it forced me to evaluate my intentions.  If asked the same question again I would know how to respond more appropriately.  I am prepared.  My response would go something like this:  Because I am a woman.  The female role model most dominant in my formative life was my mother.  Although I love her and care for her greatly, she is a woman who regards her husband as master, second only to her male god.  She is conditioned to obey.  Her submissive role is her guardian angel, her excuse, her coven.  The black and white answers laid out before her offer solace.  She never has to worry about making a wrong choice.  Her husband and "organization" of  fellow worshipers supply her with all the answers she needs.  She is God’s servant for he promises to destroy all the wicked from the earth.  This is extremely meaningful to her.  She experienced much evil as a child.  As her daughter, I grew up feeling her pain.  I felt her anger, and most strikingly, I felt her oppression.  I lashed out against it.  I hated her for it. 

         As a woman, I realized my desperate need to learn different perspectives on what it means to be fully integrated; to be a whole, psychologically sound, content woman.  I will not be caged.  I've always been happiest living my life within mutable shades of gray.  My love for my mother thrives, but her life is not the example I choose to follow.  I, like many women, have needed to create my own example--being my own role model plus seeking out other female exemplars to help sculpt my life.  I have needed to learn from scratch.  I continue building my own spiritual foundations avoiding the dogma of the patriarchy.  To find my own path--one that allows a woman to flourish creatively, intellectually, spiritually, professionally, and, with the strength of a lioness--that is my ultimate indulgence.

         My early education was predominantly male focused.  I learned--sort of--about George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Shakespeare, Edgar Allen Poe, Michelangelo, wars fought by men, conquests made by men, slaves bought and sold by men, inventions of men, and countries supposedly discovered by men.  I say I "sort of" learned because I can remember at least one occasion when I slept through history class.  If I remember one occasion, I wonder how many I forgot.  I did not care about silly little men with wooden teeth and curly white wigs, their petty disagreements, or their discoveries.  None of this related to how I felt in my life as a girl with a very troublesome home life.  Where were the female counterparts to all these men?  Where were the heroines?  Where were the suffragettes?  Where were the women revolutionaries?  Where were the female artists, slaves, wives, mothers, daughters, and factory workers during the wars?  Where were any prominent women?  Where was Mary Wollstonecraft, Susan B. Anthony, Mary Shelly, Georgia O'Keefe, Margaret Mead, Anna Freud, Virginia Woolf?  Where were the Bronte sisters and the tales of the Native American storytellers?  In short, where was any woman who wasn't Betsy Ross?  As far as my early education was concerned, they didn't exist.  Had I been exposed to some of these women figures earlier on, speculation tells me I would have gained knowledge through similitudes between their lives and mine.  Academia might have attracted me at a much earlier age.

         I remember hearing Joseph Campbell's description of the Chinese symbol of Yin and Yang.  He pointed out that the white fish has a black eye, and the black fish has a white eye.  Without each having a means to relate--or a part similar to that of the other--there could be no understanding hence balance could not be achieved.  In my adult years, I became aware of my need and craving for balance in my education.  I hungered for a balance in my spirituality.  I needed to heal from a destructive upbringing in a Christian cult that used people as spiritual pawns for the growth of an earthly organization.  As a child I learned to numb out.  I learned this from my mother.  Over the course of my life, I heard my mother’s favorite utterance hundreds of times, “I’m numb.  I shut myself off.”  In this, I cannot follow you, mother.  I want to feel.  Give me the pain that comes along with the pleasure and beauty of living, for there is purity in pain as there is in joy.  Both are elemental.

         I recognize my quest for balance as a result of years of counseling, through new perspectives gained about my childhood, through adult experiences, and through being a woman alone in the world.  I came to accept responsibility for not being an over-achiever in high school, while recognizing that I did what was necessary to keep my sanity.  I distanced myself from school activities since my parents did not permit me to participate.  I was not allowed to join the school band, drama club, or track team--things that would have been appealing to me if I had been encouraged to flourish.

         For some reason, my parents started me in music lessons when I was six years old.  I suppose my “worldly” influence was lessened in part in these once a week classes since they were in the private homes of my teachers and my mother was able to accompany me.  Creative expression was to be my savior.   I was able to take art classes in junior high and high school, and did rather well for a while.  Along with song-writing, which I began as soon as I learned a few chords on the guitar, art classes gave me some permission to be myself.  Sheer creative expression allowed me to see that I could be good at something I enjoyed.  I remember an English class that exposed me to interesting writers.  I enjoyed math until tenth or eleventh grade.  At that time, my math teacher used to sit in the first row of student desks with her desk turned around facing us; it felt like she was one of the students.  Her classroom was very loose.  I sat in the back of the class.  I was quiet.  One day she began talking about sex toys in class.  From that point on, I cut her class more than I went.  If she wasn't going to be serious about math, neither was I.  Aside from several unpleasant classroom experiences like this, I was so wrapped up in personal survival throughout my school years that I'm sure I missed many enjoyable learning experiences. 

         I recently found some old calendars from my school years.  Looking at them after more than two decades was telling.  Each month on the seventh, for twenty-two months before my eighteenth birthday, I noted how much longer I had till I could legally leave home.  In my senior year I joined the work study program.  This allowed me to attend school in the mornings and work in the afternoons.  My goal was to make enough money to be able to leave home as soon as I graduated, which happened a few days after I turned eighteen.  I planned to go to California to see a friend.  At home, college was never emphasized, even discouraged.  The only thing that was of any importance at home was obedience to God and, of course, my parents.  Obedience, submission, mildness, meekness, modesty, and devotion to "the organization" were far more important than education.  The world was supposed to end soon.   The only importance to a "worldly" education were legal requirements.  Since it didn't require killing anyone, such as in a war, this law was one to be obeyed.  These were my parents' beliefs, not mine.  Without realizing how unprepared I was, I had dreams of grandeur.  I didn't need college.  I had dreams of fame.  Mostly though, I had dreams of freedom.

My education has been central to my healing process.  Up to my entrance into Vermont College, my college career spanned fifteen years.  I never seriously considered a degree until I realized that experiential trial and error were not the means to a solid life foundation.  It also took years to accumulate the confidence to believe that I could make it through college.

         One of my educational highlights was an acting class I took in the fall of 1990.  My acting teacher was a beautifully strong black woman--very regal.  Her name was Gloria Weinstock.  I did well in her class, and for the first time started going inside my body to bring out emotional responses.  Her word was "sensorial."  Everything was a sensorial experience.  She taught me the meaning of feeling the scene, feeling the smell, feeling the color, feeling the taste, feeling the notes, feeling the sound.  Thinking back, I realize she had a broad influence on my healing process.  She put me in touch with my senses, my intuition, my feeling, my tactile urges.  In most other classes, I was required to "think."  This was disappointingly true in music classes, even though in song-writing I wrote from feelings and senses while engaging the thinking process for structure.  In Gloria’s class, I was encouraged to feel and sense.  She gave the class exercises to put us in touch with our instinctive ways of knowing.  This was new.  These exercises enhanced a body-based form of psychotherapy that I underwent a few years later.

         The period during the Gulf war proved to be a very fertile time for me.  In the two years preceding the war, I had cleaned up my act.  I became more serious about my education, started performing live music, and I wrote more songs than ever before.  Twelve-step recovery programs were helpful to me at this time, as were my bi-monthly therapy sessions.  Sensing that I could not attain true spirituality in the twelve-step meetings, my dear uncle Bill encouraged me with a few words that made sense:  "Using these programs as stepping stones may be all you need from them."  This was true.  I found myself feeling empowered through creativity and new female friends who introduced me to folklore, mythology, and earth religions that balance masculine and feminine principles of sovereignty.  Fundamentalists would say that in order to be healthy one must have two parents.  So, I began pressing the subject further:  Where is God the Mother?  My interest in things feminine took hold.  In spring, 1991, I enrolled in a women's history course at CCSF.  I was 31 years old.

         In my women's history class I became aware of many strong female figures including the suffragists.  The professor introduced my class to the roles of women in many of the pertinent races of the United States from the seventeenth through the early twentieth century.  We discussed the equality of Native American women with men in their tribes, their equal distribution of working and spiritual roles, and treatment of homosexuals within different tribes.  We covered the Salem and European witch hunts in which 90% of the executions were of women.  Having experienced my own witch hunt at the age of sixteen that found me guilty and ostracized me from my parents’ religion, I particularly resonated with this material and would later do my first Vermont College study on medieval women, healers, and "witches."  Another interesting point covered in my introduction to women's history was that of the slave-owning men.  These men often had concubines among the slave women, thereby maintaining two separate families.  This created a heavy undercurrent of jealous tension directed at the female slaves by the white women.  White women who were honored and protected on a metaphorical pedestal were in direct competition with black women who were, by statute, sub-human.  These kinds of ironies of the white man's laws did not go undetected by the eyes and senses of women.  The suffragists and abolitionists started their own private war that met these ironies head on.  These were topics that fueled my inspiration.

         I found this material extremely compelling, yet sensed that my history teacher gave me sub-germane grades on papers because she didn't agree with my ideas.  I sensed that she wanted me to temper my sentiments.  She did not discuss this with me, but her terse border notes betrayed her.  In my papers I questioned the efficacy of authoritarian patriarchal religions.  I believe she took offense to this.  My opinions were not that radical--in my opinion.  I even performed a bit of self-editing.  Is rage and exasperation over millenniums of male dominance of women exceedingly radical as we approach the twenty-first century?  Is the image of God as a hovering gaseous mass whose gnarled fingers slide through a long, white beard while he judges worshipers below not yet obsolete?  Is it not time to replace this oppressor of women?  My teacher had fooled me in her guise.  I became aware that these were ticklish waters quite in need of attention, yet within their wake still holding womens’ spirit at bay.  This woman--my professor--appeared a feminist on the outside.  What was her hesitation?  Did she fear her own belief structure being threatened?  For many people there is a fierce pond separating the worlds of patriarchal zeal and matriarchal zest.  Was her personal spirituality unawakened yet content in Zen-like bondage?  She never told me why I didn't get A's, and I would not allow myself the comfort of asking.

         My culminating senior study is an extension of the exploration that began with my heightened interest in womens’ roles.  I always knew I would someday write about my experience as a female child within the Jehovah’s Witnesses.  I never knew how or when the writing would come about.  I trusted life’s natural processes for its manifestation.  While working on my senior thesis was a chance for me to learn academically, a culmination of another sort has also transpired.  In the closure of my studies, I have discovered the hidden and blatant aspects of my childhood experiences.  This study has been arduous and emotional.  It has been rich in both slight and robust epiphanies with a sense similar to the casting off sand-bags allowing a balloon to ascend.  I am grateful for the comprehension that has come to me in this process.  The guest of my consciousness has been readily greeted by the ghost host of my unconscious.  Researching the psychologies of adolescent girls, cults, and creative spirituality, has helped me to piece together an amalgam of possibilities which extends back to my past while grasping my future, stretching across worlds yet unknown.