Free The Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd

Elizabeth Dodson Gray points out, this naming tended to benefit men’s needs and concerns and in lots of cases to oppress women. Was it such a wild thought that women might start naming God, sacred reality, and their own lives themselves?
    I wondered how the world might have been different if women had been equally involved in the act of naming. How might sacred experience be different? How might we as women be different? Would there be a feminine wound for us to name and heal?
    Naming allows a woman to embrace her own experience, to utter her female truth, perhaps for the first time. Since my waking had been precipitated by an encounter with feminine woundedness (as it frequently is for women), that summer I began the process of naming by acknowledging and expressing the feminine wound in myself.
    In an interview, novelist Alice Walker says,
    You think you can avoid [pain], but actually you can’t. If you do, you just get sicker, or you feel more pain. But if you can speak it, if you can write it, if you can paint it, it is very healing. 24
    I began to paint pictures of my wounded female life. Through the summer I painted images that were painful and even startling to me. As I painted, deeply buried emotions boiled to the surface.
    They were emotions that for many years had influenced my behavior in unconscious but profound ways. Unacknowledged feelings about our womanhood operate like the so-called wizard inOz who sits hidden behind the curtain pulling strings, creating large, unwanted, sometimes frightening effects. Not only do they control our lives in unwanted ways, but unfelt feelings stay in the body “like small ticking time bombs,” says Christiane Northrup. “They are illnesses in incubation.” 25
    A lot of women have told me, “I don’t really know what I’m feeling half the time.” Perhaps that’s because when uncomfortable feelings come, we push them aside. After a while, we’ve blocked them so well, for so long, that they no longer get through at all.
    Once we begin to acknowledge wounded feelings, though, it’s almost a relief. We may feel like Dorothy when her dog, Toto, drew aside the curtain, exposing the man who was scaring everyone with his behind-the-scenes machinations. We can see then what has been controlling a lot of our life. We can see where the self-doubt, the silencing, the drivenness, the need to fulfill collective expectations come from. But most of all, in seeing the wound for what it is, we take charge, just as Dorothy, seeing the Wizard for what he was, mobilized herself to stand up to him.
    I found myself painting a woman without feet, a woman without a mouth, a woman without hands.
    Why these mutilated women?
    In painting my female life without feet, I was uncovering an inability to “stand” firmly on my own feminine ground, to “stand up to others” or “stand up for” myself. Several years after I painted those images, I was visiting the High Museum in Atlanta when I came upon a striking sculpture of a pair of feet. Just feet from the ankles down. They were surrounded by a field of large glass spheres that appeared to be oversized teardrops. The title of the work was Mother.
    So there are our feet, I thought, in this bed of tears. I felt the artist Kiki Smith had captured the universal severing of women from their female “standpoint.”
    In painting a woman without a mouth, I was revealing to myself a female life unable to adequately voice the Feminine Self, which is always a woman’s truest voice.
    The woman without hands spoke to me about a life severed from the power to grasp one’s deep life as woman, to hold onto one’s inherent power. One day that summer while browsing in a small shop, I happened upon an illustration of the Virgin Mary drawn in detail except for one thing. She had no hands.
    As I looked at the print, I realized that over the long course of church history, Mary had been