Sharing our Stories in 2022 – January

Understanding how and why women make connections has been an important part of the continuing evolution of my personal feminism over the past fifty-plus years.  Vv’s thinking about connections between women and girls has been growing through her first nine and a half years and perhaps she will share about this sometime in the future.  My thinking has been shaped by reading  feminist authors and by relationships with so many very smart and collaborative feminist friends.  Somewhere in the 1970’s, I read Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. Her idea that connections that isolated housewives made through “consciousness-raising” groups could be both life-changing and culture-changing hit my isolated twenty-five-year-old woman self like a ton of bricks and made me think.  Later, reading Carol Gilligan’s 1982 ground-breaking work,  In A Different Voice , made me reconsider what I thought I knew about women’s moral development and development of sense of self. I began to wonder about the concept that women might make connections in ways different from men.  Over the years, these writers  along with such others as Adrienne Rich,  Maya Angelou,  Margaret Atwood, Ellen Bass, Miriam Greenspan, Mary Oliver, Marge Piercy, and Rupi Kaur have shaped the ideas about women’s connections that I hold today. Perhaps even more importantly, personal connections to women and girls have helped me (through short chats, long intense discussions, personal challenges, and my work as a feminist therapist)  to come to a place where I ever more deeply value the power of connections women and girls can make.