The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman's Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine

by Sue Monk Kidd

Christian history there had been two traditions regarding women. The first we could call the revolutionary tradition, which included Jesus’ “feminist” and egalitarian intent and practice. This tradition, preaching a gospel of liberation and mutuality, treated women as equals. Evidence exists that Christian women carried out priestly functions—teaching, baptizing, and blessing the Eucharist—on a par with men. But soon another tradition asserted itself, the patriarchal tradition with its antifemale, body-negating spirituality, insisting on the dominant cultural taboos and sanctions concerning women. This tradition, which had started long before Christianity, viewed women as naturally inferior and as the property of men, associating women with matter, flesh, evil, and sin. For a while these two traditions—the revolutionary and the patriarchal—clashed, but soon the revolutionary tradition was stamped out, sealing an interpretation of women as inferior that has continued to this day. For a brief moment in history, a window of opportunity to reverse patriarchy opened, and then it was slammed shut. I can still remember the sense of loss that washed over me when I read Elaine Pagels’s words: