Who Is A Woman? In Search of Female Identity – Part 2

Four Perspectives

“For many years I supported the very reasonable idea that I was equal to men. But over the years, it became clear that this was not the whole picture. After years of denial, I had to admit that I still felt inadequate compared to men.”

The First Perspective: The Feeling Of Being A Woman

This perspective is the view of a woman’s interior experience, viewed from within. This is called a phenomenological perspective: it shows us the interior of a person as it arises. Ken Wilber says about this: “Mental objects exist in a mental space… whether they do or do not [also] exist in a sensori-physical space”. This means that mental objects do not depend on sensory proof like exterior phenomena do, but that phenomenology “brackets” phenomena (which nevertheless must be verifiable) and studies them as they arise, the way they arise. The experience can be felt, not seen, and its proof of existence is the feeling.

From the earliest times of civilization we have few direct accounts of human beings, and even fewer of women; women were not taught to read or write, and much less encouraged to speak out. Even when history started to be preserved and human beings started to record their individual existence, the basic structures of patriarchy meant that women were not part of the public sphere and had little access to that history. Most of the very rich accounts from medieval mystics were written by men; the great twelfth-century Hildegard von Bingen kept her visions silent for half her life for fear of being condemned as a heretic. Feminist historian Gerda Lerner, who meticulously researched the role of women in history, points out a widespread “internalization by women of their inferiority”.

With the arising of the Enlightenment women started getting access to education and some began to speak out. Eighteenth-century Mary Wollstonecraft wrote her brilliant, scathing commentaries on women’s carefully cultivated inability to reason. Yet even she did not write explicitly about a woman’s actual experience, although hers can be deducted from her impassioned writings.

Only in the 19^th Century, encouraged by the suffragettes, women started to write novels. What they were not allowed to say directly, they started to convey through their novels, impressing an indirect, but acutely felt experience of being a Victorian woman. E. M. Delafield, for instance, was a master in describing the excruciating gulf between women’s conformity to an imposed image, and their awkward, authentic suffering; simply being alive meant that a woman could only be in breach of a rigid image that utterly failed to reflect the woman of flesh and blood.

It wasn’t until the second wave of feminism in the mid-twentieth century that women started to speak out directly. One of the first examples of this change is Betty Friedan’s study on women’s experience of deep unfulfillment and frustration, that served to liberate millions of women in the decades to come. Developmental researcher Carol Gilligan identified that women speak “in a different voice” (relational rather than agentic), and she created for the first time a dedicated space in the gender discourse for what women feel and think, the way they feel and think it, uncensored by deep-seated male assumptions.

As women started to take the stage and became feistier, reams of books were written about liberating women’s experience, yet when I was looking for academic work focused on women’s direct experience, I realized that much of it is about women and their position in society or culture, rather than disclosing women as autonomous beings. Some theorists are disarmingly candid in bringing their own voice into their work, like Luce Irigaray and Simone de Beauvoir, and Carol Gilligan has been instrumental in disclosing woman’s true voice, yet it struck me that most writings are still resisting false expectations more than revealing authenticity.

So how are we doing now? A recent study from Stevenson and Wolfers in 2009 asked women over a 35-year period whether they were happy, and came to the startling conclusion that women’s happiness had declined. This study was quoted in all major newspapers and caused a widespread furor, because how could it be that with so many more freedoms, women feel less happy? But something odd occurred to me: few questioned what it is in women’s experience that makes us assess ourselves unhappier. Could it be that the very focus on women’s social and cultural position that has brought so much more freedom but also exposes the huge gender gaps to be bridged, overlooks a big part of women? What about women’s actual interior experience, where does this figure? And, it occurred to me, might this be a reason for the increasing trend of spiritual initiatives with a strongly feminine bias? For instance, the Feminine Power movement of Claire Zammit and Katherine Woodward Thomas, started in 2010, grew in a mere month to 24,000 women worldwide and is now even bigger than that. These are women who in spite of the fact that they are already socially liberated seem in search of a more authentic experience of themselves.

Curious, I decided to turn to the one place I have unlimited access to: my own phenomenological inquiry. For many years I supported the very reasonable idea that I was equal to men. But over the years, with the help of my spiritual teacher Andrew Cohen, it became clear that this was not the whole picture. After years of denial, I had to admit that I still felt inadequate compared to men (in spite of holding equal status), intellectually impaired (in spite of being smart), and hesitating in the face of responsibility (in spite of being a natural leader). I became aware of an ongoingly dual experience: that of my own independent, confident personality; and that of a deeper, parallel identity that was impaired and lacking.

Going through my writings of the last 12 years, I picked several examples. In 1998 my spiritual teacher asked me to write uncensored about my motivations in a conflict I struggled to see objectively. What came out was a candid account of my attempts to protect my agreeable self-image of a good woman: “My self-image has nothing to do with who I really am… yet I spend all my time trying to keep running this show perfectly”. Eleven years later I wrote down a dream in which I was talking with a sophisticated, impressive woman. But, strangely, I lacked the breath to speak. Next, “the core fell out of both of us, it disintegrated in all its sophistication, and I saw that both of us were living with a hole at our core. I saw that this is Woman”. A few months later I wrote to Andrew Cohen: “I am amazed at my own female terror of the very simple action of taking responsibility for my own life… What does it mean to be a real woman and take risk and responsibility??”.

If my own experience can serve as any guidance, these insights point to some paradoxical issues. There is no lack of capacity for interior development and access to highly sophisticated states of awareness in women. However, there also seems to be the ongoing shadow of a lack of confidence, an inhibition that seems to cloud these very experiences, which are free and know no gender-differentiation. Twelfth-century Hildegard von Bingen took 37 years to speak about her powerful visions; I as a liberated 21^st-century woman logged a dual experience of freedom and inhibition over many years.

This is the second of six posts. Next week: The Second Perspective: The Look of Feeling a Woman.

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