Free The Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd Page B

in making it I took my first distinct, albeit tiny, step away from identifying myself as a dependent person. I began to observe myself as daughter instead of merely being one.
    After that it became increasingly clear to me that much of the way I lived and related as a woman and many of the female patterns in my life were, in fact, hidden adaptations to the feminine wound. They were the many faces of my daughterhood.
    A wound to the psyche often causes the same response as a wound to the body: compensation. For example, if you severely injure an ankle, the connective tissue or fascia in that area will remold around the trauma, trying to compensate for the damage. You may begin to walk a little differently, to favor the other side ever so slightly. If this keeps up, over time your posture will change. Whole new patterns of maintaining your structure will emerge as bones, soft tissues, and tendons realign themselves.
    We respond to the feminine wound in a similar way—by making subtle but in the long run profound postural shifts in the psyche. Our psyches begin to realign and remold to compensate for the damage, usually favoring the “other side.” For instance, if the feminine “ankle” is crippled, we learn to shift our weight to the “standpoint” of strength. That is, we compensate by identifying with and supporting male dominance. We become good daughters to the cultural father.
    One of the more delicate phases in the waking process is accepting how we’ve been complicit. Simone de Beauvoir pointed out, for instance, that women themselves condition their daughters to serve the system of male primacy. If a daughter challenges it, the mother will generally defend the system rather than her daughter. 28 These mothers, victims themselves, have unwittingly become wounded wounders.
    Women need to attack culture’s oppression of women, for there truly is a godlike socializing power that induces women to “buy in” or collude, but we also need to confront our own part in accepting male dominance and take responsibility where appropriate. I knew I would have to come to grips with how I’d bought into patriarchy. I would have to look hard at my own daughterhood.
    Cultural Blueprints
    Early that autumn, my husband and I traveled to New York, where we visited an exhibition of Magritte’s paintings. In one painting an ordinary-looking man in a suit was holding a brush and painting an actual woman into existence in his living room. It was as if he were God and she were Eve at the moment of creation. Almost completed, she stood there waiting for the next stroke of creation.
    Wait a minute, I thought. Just how is Everywoman’s life created? How much of my life did I allow to be painted into existence by church, culture, and male attitudes? Down deep, was my life as woman self-conceived and self-created as an original and unfolding work from my own hands, or was it contrived according to hidden blueprints?
    Carolyn Heilbrun has written about the “scripts” for womanhood that are handed to women to live out, culturally defined scripts that are written in advance and passed to females from birth. 29 And historian Gerda Lerner writes that men and women live on a stage, acting out their assigned roles. The play can’t go on without both of them, she says, but
    the stage set is conceived, painted and defined by men. Men have written the play, have directed the show, interpreted the meanings of the action. They have assigned themselves the most interesting, the most heroic parts. 30
    By blindly following the script, we tend to become what Ursula K. Le Guin calls “male constructs” or, in Madonna Kolbenschlag’s words, “formula females.” 31 It is sort of like filling in a paint-by-number canvas, creating ourselves within the outline of stories,wishes, and mindsets projected onto us by a faith and culture that have been shaped and regulated by men. By blindly