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| woman carrying bag walking on long road |
Women's Power
What does that mean: women who openly display their power,
knowledge, and skill, receiving public recognition and honor? But also females
who manage to wield power in societies that try to limit it or decree female
submission; where their leadership is stigmatized and their creativity
disdained, and women who resist and overthrow oppressive traditions and regimes,
who break The Rules in defiance of unjust legal and religious "authorities;"
who pursue their vision in spite of the personal cost.
Women have determined the course of events and the forms of
human culture. We originated, founded, governed, prophesied, created great art,
fought for our rights, and for our peoples. These are the women edited out of
history, their stories omitted, distorted, and replaced with an endless litany
of men (and the occasional queen or meddling concubine). Our ignorance of these
women is greatly compounded by the omission of information on societies, which
accorded females power in public life, diplomacy, religion, medicine, the arts
as well as family structure and inheritance. Both racism and sexism are
implicated in these silences and gaps.
So we need a remedial history that reconstructs the female
dimensions of human experience and achievement, and recovers the distorted and
obliterated past of Africa, the Americas, and all other regions neglected by
the standard textbooks and mass media. This will be a provisional history,
because all the facts are not in yet, and previous interpretations are being
reevaluated for gender, race, and colonial bias. More importantly, the
indigenous oral histories have only barely begun to be integrated into
mainstream narratives.
Women have often been relegated to the footnotes of history,
and even those are highly selective. As Sandra Cisneros wrote of her
search for Latina sheroes, "We are the footnotes of the footnotes."
Yet the heritages of women of color, especially the indigenous cultures, supply
the most dramatic examples in recent history of open embrace of female power.
But even Europe looks different when we look at the common women and encompass
places like Bulgaria, Estonia, Corsica, or Iberian Galicia.
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| Maori beauty from Mereana Taki |
Women's history demands a global perspective. There's far
more to it than Queen Elizabeth I, or Susan B. Anthony. We need to refocus
historical attention from the school of "famous women" (often royal
females) to encompass broader groupings of women with power: clan mothers and
female elders; priestesses, diviners, medicine women and healers, market women,
weavers, and other female arts and professions. These "female spheres
of power," as I call them, vary greatly from culture to culture. Some
of them, particularly the spiritual callings, retain aspects of women's
self-determination even in societies that insist on formal subordination of
female to male in private and public space.
There's a striking interplay between women's spiritual and
political leadership, especially in many indigenous societies. I'm thinking of
the Evenki shaman Olga who was both chieftain and religious leader of
her Siberian village about a century ago, and the Machis of Chile,
shamans who are deeply involved in the Mapuche sovereignty effort. But
this overlap occurs even in imperial contexts, as when the aged Mikogami
Pimiko was chosen as ruler to save Japan from a chaotic struggle for power
in its early history. Another example would be the important role the Candomblé
Maes de Santo have played in the African-Brazilian community since
early modern times.
Priestesses or diviners have often led liberation movements:
Nehanda Nyakasikana in the Shona revolt against English
colonization of Zimbabwe; María Candelaria in the Maya uprising
against the Spanish; and Toypurina in the Gabrieleño revolt in
southern California. In 1791, the old priestess Cécile Fatiman
inaugurated the Haitian revolution against slavery in a Vodun ceremony
in the Bois Caiman. Even earlier, the seeress Veleda was the
guiding force behind the Batavian insurrection of tribal Europeans against
Rome, and Dahia al-Kahina ("the priestess") led Berber
resistance to the Arab conquest of North Africa. And Gudit Isat (Judith
the Fire) who overthrew the Axumite Empire in 10th century Ethiopia was
remembered as a religious leader as well.
Often this female leadership does not rely on institutionalized
authority, but on recognized personal power. The Apache seer and warrior
woman Lozen is remembered for her acts of bravery and her clairvoyant
ability to guide her people away from danger as they fled Anglo settler armies
in Arizona and into Mexico. Granuaile Ní Mhaille (Grainne O' Mailley)
surmounted the absolute masculine monopoly of military and seafaring enterprise
to become, through her pirate fleet, the uncrowned "She-King" of
the Connemara coast of Ireland, and the scourge of the British Navy in the
1500s... (to be continued...)
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| shield of a Warrior Woman |
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| Native American woman Lynn Boots Toootoosis |
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| 2 black lovers naked & embracing by King King |
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