Who Is A Woman? In Search of Female Identity – part 1

Introduction

Who is a woman? This question is so simple and straightforward that for many years I never thought of asking it. But the changes in culture and society of the last half century, and the big questions that follow these changes (Are women equal to men? Why are women paid less? Why is there still a glass ceiling?) finally made me track back to this very basic question. And when I looked for answers, the answers I found in our current culture proved to be remarkably confusing and contradictory.

It all used to be so simple: there were men, and there were women. Men were equated with the masculine and women with the feminine, and each had their roles. With the many opportunities opened up by feminism, this started to change and many more opportunities became available to women. But as I considered above questions about equality and success, I realized that as we women broke out of the confinement of our fixed role of bearing and caring for children and shed our mother’s identities, we found ourselves increasingly as strangers in a male world and discovered that the outward changes of earning money and controlling our fertility were only the beginning of the journey.

Many of us now realize that we have gained freedom but are losing our bearings. It is no wonder, then, that the third wave of feminism has moved the feminist journey from women’s rights to women’s identity. In many circles, this identity is increasingly more described as a feminine one; where better to find the female identity than in that quality of a woman that is most unique and natural to her: the feminine principle?

This new wave, often called “post-feminism”, is also taking place at a time when we see an increasing commodization of women’s sexuality in popular culture; a time where breast modifications are the norm, girls compete in emaciated looks on facebook, and books on how to land a man make their comeback. Is this coincidence? Is this the search for our prized femininity? Or are there deeper structures that still influence our interpretations of what makes a woman a Woman? From what I can tell, feminism and femininity got into a tangle that has not even been clearly recognized yet and that points to the need to define our identity in a deeper way, free from the surface structures that make up man or woman.

When we turn for answers to feminism, we meet almost as many strands of feminism as there are women. All of them hold important messages, but many of them are at odds. And besides that, feminism is considered to be passé. After the passionate outburst of the second wave of feminism in the sixties, feminists seem to have fractured, each going their own way, and the new generation of women don’t seem to think feminism is relevant anymore. So where does a woman turn in search of a new identity? How do we re-invent ourselves?

These are questions that have been increasingly pressing themselves upon me, ever since I recognized that in spite of my extraordinarily free and privileged upbringing, a lifelong interest in the development of consciousness, and a successful career, I still felt like a second class citizen inside myself, and did not really know how to be a woman in the 21^st Century. This recognition didn’t come out of the blue; it was inspired by many years of deep inquiry with my spiritual sisters and teacher Andrew Cohen, whom I feel greatly indebted to for his unceasing encouragement to question our identity in a free, spiritually liberated context. And once I admitted to my own cluelessness as a 21^st Century woman, I could not but look deeper into the question of who a woman really is; a question that, in my eyes, needs wrestling with in order to find answers that are adequate to the complexity of the 21^st Century. So with that, I hope to contribute to the discussion that should lead us to new, unseen horizons of being for women.

How to Even Begin to Look at This…

Given that our main struggle now seems to be that there are so many feminisms that the younger generation is fast turning away from the whole idea of women’s liberation, I felt the urge to find a deeper and more unifying current of women’s being; one that is able to support the many various ways we interpret our existence and envision our future. I found a welcome tool in Integral Theory, proposed by Ken Wilber, which provides an unprecedented meta-theory that allows us to look through multiple lenses, from multiple perspectives, without dismissing any a priori. This provides us with a radically inclusive framework that yet brings out clear differentiations between its various elements, so we can actually begin to make the subtle distinctions that reveal previously unseen vistas. It is also a theory that takes into account the evolutionary context in which our lives take place; the fact that our future is not a pre-given, that we are developing beings unfolding into that future, and that we enact our own past forms and present worldviews in our environment.

One of the basic premises of this theory is the fact that our existence arises in four different dimensions: the individual, the collective, the interior and the exterior. Each of those dimensions or quadrants can be seen or experienced from the inside as well as the outside, thus providing eight perspectives to use as a lens to view our existence. For this article, I will use four of these perspectives to look at a woman’s identity: her interior as experienced directly (inside) as well as seen from one step removed (outside), and her exterior biological and behavioral reality, again as seen from the outside as well as experienced from the inside. I will pass each of them through history in order to get a sense of the way each of these views have unfolded over time.

This may all seem more technical and complicated than it is; by simply going through these perspectives one by one and seeing them together, you will be able to appreciate how differently we see through them, yet how common they are to all women, and how closely they are intertwined and influenced by each other. We can appreciate that a woman, like every phenomenon in life, does not belong in dimensions, nor does she own dimensions, but she is an evolving, developing being that arises simultaneously in these various dimensions of existence (called tetra-arising in Integral Theory). If we are to find a whole, truthful approach to ourselves, we must look at the whole of woman, in all her developmental, tetra-arising, ever-developing complexity.

The aim of this exercise is not to find definite answers, but to question our identity as women in a multi-perspectival way; a way that enables a new mode of inquiry to establish itself, encouraging a development of identity, rather than the one-perspectival one-size-fits-all solution that we too often try to find (and which usually fails to fit any one of us).

I’ll end this section with a quote from Simone de Beauvoir, who asked herself the question of who a woman is in her 1949 masterpiece “The Second Sex”:

“It is only in a human perspective that we can compare the female and the male of the human species. But man is defined as a being who is not fixed, who makes himself what he is. As Merleau-Ponty very justly puts it, man is not a natural species: he is a historical idea. Woman is not a completed reality, but rather a becoming, and it is in her becoming that she should be compared with man; that is to say, her possibilities should be defined.”

 

This was the first of 6 posts. Next week: Part 2 – Four Perspectives, the first of which is: The Feeling of Being a Woman

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