Who Is A Woman? In Search of Female Identity – Part 3

“Mary Wollstonecraft revealed how women’s interior experience was determined by a forced structural typology that caused her to use her self-awareness exclusively to censor her own critical faculties. In understanding woman’s interior through the cage that was holding it captive, she started liberating the woman who did not dare allow herself to know she was caught.”

The Second Perspective: The Look Of Feeling A Woman

This perspective is the 3^rd-person view of the 1^st-person experience, or in Ken Wilber’s words: “The look of a feeling”. Our own direct internal experience is a 1^st-person perspective; by either removing ourselves one step from this, or gaining access to someone else’s direct experience, we can establish a 3^rd-person view of the 1^st-person experience, which enables us to detect the internality codes that govern an interior “I”. But we can take this one step further: by discovering these interior patterns or structures through access to an individual’s experience, we discover the deeper Kosmic patterns of existence, beyond this moment and locality, and this in turn helps us to read anyone’s interior experience.

As we saw earlier, in the earliest times of civilization there was little notion of a woman’s interior, and therefore we do not have much to go on. Gerda Lerner shows how in early patriarchy women were thought to have little interiority, and what interiority they had was considered devious because of its difference from men. Later, this provoked strongly paternalizing Church commentaries to keep those devious tendencies under control. The Enlightenment broke up the moral grip of the Church, but rather than relaxing these gender steriotypes, the great power shift in culture that resulted meant that the structures of gender types became strongly dichotomized and even more cemented in culture, but in a new way. A newly sophisticated contempt of women’s perceived lack of interiority emerged; woman was now a weak, feminine being with no will or intellect of her own.

Thankfully, the rise of individuality of that period also meant that some women took a step back and started to view themselves objectively. Mary Wollstonecraft, as the unparalleled female commentator of her time, set straight the prevalent image of the feminine type: “Their senses are inflamed, and their understandings neglected, consequently they become the prey of their senses, delicately termed sensibility, and are blown about by every momentary gust of feeling”. With this, she revealed two things: in her observation, she not only enacted a rise beyond the prevailing pattern that defined woman’s identity (that of the rationally impaired being), but she revealed how women’s interior experience was determined by a forced structural typology that caused her to use her self-awareness exclusively to censor her own critical faculties. In understanding woman’s interior through the cage that was holding it captive, Mary Wollstonecraft started liberating the woman who did not dare allow herself to know she was caught.

So ingrained was the idea of women’s interior vacancy, in men and woman alike, that throughout the Victorian times most women’s view of themselves did not change significantly, although the shockwaves of the first wave of feminism, brought about by the 19^th-century suffragettes, slowly brought about a new legitimacy of women’s rational capacity beyond the feminine ideal. But it was only by the second wave of feminism in the mid-20^th century that women started rising beyond their limited view of themselves. Betty Friedan observed the shift that took place in the sixties: “When we were growing up, many of us could not see ourselves beyond the age of twenty-one. We had no image of our own future, of ourselves as women”. As with Wollstonecraft, this observation does not only reveal the structural limitation in women’s sense of identity, but by noticing the inadequacy of the generally accepted outside view of a woman’s interior, it enacts one woman’s departure from that limited view itself.

The sixties, of course, brought a major breakthrough; women were suddenly seen as individuals, with a future, and personal preferences. So now that the old feminine ideal was being smashed, did this mean that men and women were deemed equal? Carol Gilligan found through her research on moral development that in spite of external changes, women spoke in a different voice from men, seemingly following a different trajectory of development (or, at least, this is what she suggests, without drawing firm conclusions). This begged the question whether psychological and developmental methodologies suffered androcentrism; a question that has not been answered to date. To me, who is looking at this thirty years later, it begs the question whether the theories are as of yet incapable of fully capturing the very gender differences that they bring to light, or whether perhaps women’s different typology shows an inconsistent level of development in which, under the force of history, individuality has not equally matured in men and women. Either way, it means that we have an insufficient 3^rd-person picture of woman’s 1^st- person interior, and don’t clearly see what is going on.

In the meantime the theme of femininity has been picked up by the new wave of feminine self-development, hoping to unlock women’s 1^st-person experience through the very specific 3^rd-person lens of the feminine structure. The previously mentioned Feminine Power movement announces on its website: “The world is aching for the return of the feminine”; a claim that, given the number of previous renderings of feminine identity structures we just saw, might sound a little less new than intended.

Finally, if we return to the 1^st-person quotes from my own writings and interpret them through a 3^rd person lens, we see a hopeful development: where eleven years ago the contemplation of my uncensored motivations needed to be (sternly!) prompted from outside because I lacked the resources to access them spontaneously, the later quotes were written in a voluntary desire to inquire into my experience, establishing an objective perspective on my interior experience as a matter of habit, and thus uncovering the deeper Kosmic meaning hidden under the surface-structures of every-day female experience.

This is the third of a six-post article. Next week: Part 4 -The Third Perspective: Woman As A Species

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