I am finally getting back to reading in the Women's Reality book that I started back in August. Anne Wilson Schaef relates religion, math and the white male system (WMS) as interconnected. She says that the WMS has faith in the validity of numbers. I am not sure what to think about that. I do not think that is true for all men.
She goes on in chapter two to talk about the Original Sin of being born female and how that affects women.
Several items that I noted:
1. Women do not like or trust each other. I wonder if that is as true today. I have close female friends but I have not gotten friendly with the female pastors with whom I have worked. I think that they find me intimidating. My experience has been that they get very angry with me for things I say that they think are slights or insulting towards them. I have working to establish better connections to women in the last 8 years. I realized that I was putting most of my energy into friendships with males and made a conscious effort to put more energy into female friendships.
2. Women have basic feelings of self-doubt. There is something wrong with them fundamentally. I can agree with this. I know that I had a lot of anxiety about people liking me for who I am not for what I can do. I am afraid people will not like me if I mess up, say the wrong thing, show too much emotion, or challenge their comments.
3. Women cope with the Original Sin of being born female in five ways:
a) developing a capacity to remember details of events
b) becoming very good
c) being very concerned about fairness and issues of injustice
d) following the rules
e) developing the capacity for understanding and gathering lots of information to assist in that understanding.
4. Women blame their unhappiness and lack of fulfillment on some flaw within their character. They develop excuses to explain who they are.
5. Women need to be validated by a male to have worth. I have an interesting story to connect to this. When my daughter Katie was in seventh grade (about 1993), she came home from school one day to tell me that she had to get a boyfriend. I wondered why. She said, very seriously, that her self-esteem would be better if she had a boyfriend. I think that as a younger woman, male validation was much more important to me than it is now that I am in my 60's.
I think that many of these coping mechanism are true for me. I think it has changed as I have aged.
More about this book in the future.
