Womanhood Archives

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Womanhood: The Complete Collection

In order to make our way in the world, many of us as women feel that we need to distance ourselves from aspects of the feminine such as being too emotional or passive, as they’ve been labeled as negative traits and a barrier to success for women in the masculine dominated workforce. Being a feminine

It starts with restlessness

I wonder if it started this way for you, the path to waking up. To realizing that there was something more waiting for you than what you had been told, or seen, or believed. To seeing a glimmer of light in a crack of your life, creating an opening into your womanhood. Perhaps you started

The heroine’s journey

A woman’s journey is not linear. It’s not a straight line, and you can’t plot it on a graph. It’s cyclical, seasonal, emotional, relational. Women’s lives take place in the community, sitting in circle, gathering in tribes and in councils. The path of The Heroine’s Journey as developed by Maureen Murdock represents this, perhaps for

Daughters of the patriarchy

Patriarchy. It’s a word I have only really come to understand in the past decade. That may seem surprising for someone who has researched women’s studies, diversity, gender, and feminine power so intently. With a naiveté that still makes me curious, I worked inside the structures that define the very patriarchy itself – the all

Moving away from the mother

“You look just like your mother.” It’s a sentence that used to make me cringe. As a teenager going through a decade-long rebellion, the very last thing I wanted to be told was that I looked like my mother. My mother was beautiful, feminine, gracious, polite and charming. She was the epitome of a lady.

I’m fine thanks

Here’s a revolutionary thought: There is nothing wrong with you. And another: You are not broken. You don’t need to be fixed. Do you believe me? I’m not sure you do. I’m not surprised. You have, after all, been told your entire life what to do, who to be, how to act, how to dress,

Conscious parenting

I’ve been a single parent for most of my son’s life. His father and I separated when he was 18 months old, and divorced a year later. We agonized over the decision: went to counselling, patching things up for a while only to have them fall apart again. We could both see that everyone would

Father’s daughters

Disowning the feminine and aligning with the masculine shows up in our lives in many ways. Cloaking ourselves in the armour of masculinity. Seeking validation, approval and recognition from the masculine, represented as the individual and collective father. Striving for external success. Using that outward success as our barometer of self-worth. Bypassing what we deem

The feminine betrayal

Maureen Murdock, in the opening lines of The Heroine’s Journey: Women’s Quest for Wholeness, writes about her work as a therapist. She details the cry of dissatisfaction with the outward success she saw from women, particularly those between the ages of thirty and fifty. That the dissatisfaction would often show up as a feeling of

That night at Gloria Steinem

I’d been waiting months for this night to come. Gloria Steinem, the iconic writer, feminist activist, trailblazer and change maker was speaking, and I was going to be there. I had followed her work for as long as I could remember, especially in the years I conducted early parts of my PhD research. I was