Moonstone Angel Pendant. Courage to be ourselves.
Its a long road back for women. Two thousand years of persecution and suppression in the hands of patriarchy make a woman weaker, but no less a woman. It is a miracle that even after generations of widespread violence against women we are still fighting, working, studying and having babies. Even after the sustained and brutal attack on the sexual and productive autonomy of European women under early capitalism. Even after the witch hunts, when hundreds of thousands of women were tortured and killed, including any woman peasant or artisan showing independence of spirit, especially women healers and midwives.
What is it about womanhood that is feared so much? Why would any religion teach a man to suppress and demonise his mother, his wife, or his own girl child.? Why do thousands of women loose their lives in domestic violence each year? Why is it that in war zones women are in more danger than soldiers?
So much of the oppression that women confront on a daily basis is a product of male insecurity; Wether it is the husband who beats his wife for looking at another man, or the family which forces a child to undergo female genital mutilation, it points to one startling fact; a fear of women’s sexuality.
The real problem women are facing now, is that women have absorbed this misogyny; they have internalised it to the extent that women fear woman; even hate women, and in a particularly pervasive way now hate themselves. We have a disdain for the very things which make up our womanhood…mothering, nurturing, caring; women should be helping women, including them, not oppressing them.
Untill we stop trying to be like our oppressors we will never begin to realise out true potential.