Lughnasa, though named for Lugh, is really Tailtu’s festival, being dedicated to her. Cheryl Straffon writes that Tailtu is “a Goddess of Sovereignty” (2007, 162), which seems reasonable as she lived on the hill of Tara, was married to the last Fir Bolg king (before the arrival of the Tuatha de Danaan in Ireland), brought great wealth to their marriage, and died after clearing a forest and building her palace (Monaghan 2000, 290). In the Madron ritual group, with whom I worked for my Ph.D. research, Lughnasa was always celebrated as a festival of sovereignty and harvest. As such, I hope this article is an appropriate accompaniment to the festival and Tailtu herself, focusing as it does on the ways in which Goddess Feminist women embody transgressive models of femaleness and through this embodiment, re-construct the world.

Despite large-scale moves away from institutionalized religion in Europe and North America, certain forms of religion are maintaining or increasing their popularity. Some sociologists of religion, formerly convinced that religion was dying or dead in the West, now speak of a possible (re)sacralization (for example, Berger 1999). A country or region is more or less religious / spiritual for complex reasons. One of those reasons, only recently receiving much attention, is the role of women in both secularization and (re)sacralization.

Why are women deserting traditional Christianity at a faster rate than men? Why are women the majority of adherents in both traditional Christianity and most alternative spiritualities?[1] Along with a couple of colleagues, I edited a book (2008) which sought to answer some of these questions. In this article, I’ll take a look at some theories about women’s religious and spiritual engagement in the West and I’ll put forward a modest theory of my own about why women are attracted to Goddess Feminism in particular.

Women and Religion
Linda Woodhead (2007 and 2008) and Penny Marler (2008) have argued that “religious change in the West… is strongly influenced by long-term and largely unexamined changes in women’s lives” (Marler 2008, 23). Callum Brown (2001) argues that women’s abandonment of traditional forms of religion is key to understanding larger patterns of religiosity, secularization, and socialization. Along with Woodhead and Marler, Brown argues that social patterns changed as women moved into employment outside the home, demanded more egalitarian relationships between men and women, and fought for the right to make choices about their lives.

These changes altered the expectation that women belonged in the private realm, while men belonged primarily in the public realm. In the West, religion has been perceived mainly as part of one’s private life, thus associated with the feminine. When women entered the public realm, the stability of religion changed.

While Brown, importantly, took women’s religiosity seriously, Linda Woodhead has gone further in suggesting a theory to explain why the huge changes in women’s lives over the last 40 years have had such an impact on their religiosity or spirituality. However, before I can present Woodhead’s theory, I must introduce the work of two others. 

Carol Christ, Johanna Stuckey, Linda Woodhead
Early on, Carol Christ tried to map feminist women’s differing approaches to religion in the West, especially Christianity, Judaism, and Goddess Feminism. Christ and Judith Plaskow argued in their introduction to Womanspirit Rising (1979) that there were two broad categories for feminist women’s approach towards religion: reformist and revolutionary (10). In a later essay (1983), Christ developed these categories, arguing that there are three main approaches that feminist women take in negotiation with traditional religion:

These categories offended some women, who felt Christ was implying that only the “revolutionaries” or “rejectionists” adequately resolve the problems of male hierarchy and male-gendered deity, language, and symbolism.

Johanna Stuckey (1998), whom readers will be familiar with for her work on ancient Goddesses of the Mediterranean, has developed Christ’s work and offers four categories of engagement:

However, the rejectionist approach presupposes that Goddess Feminists (for example) have left Christianity (or some other traditional religion). In reality, many Goddess Feminists previously had only loose affiliations with Christianity and even more claim never to have felt entirely comfortable in that tradition. Thus, the rejectionist label applies only because Goddess Feminists define themselves against the dominant Western religious form (i.e., Christianity). Christ and Stuckey’s theories go a long way toward explaining women’s different approaches towards religious engagement. They also imply that religion or spirituality can be not just positive, but liberating for women.

Linda Woodhead (2007) has developed a typology to highlight the strategies regarding gender relations and other power issues that women (not just feminist women) may take in relation to religion. Woodhead plots her typology on two axes:

(after Woodhead 2007, 570)

Using this typology, religious feminists tend to be on the Challenging side of the horizontal axis, with Goddess Feminists firmly at the Marginal end. This positioning implies that most Christian feminists have a “tactical” approach to dealing with the churches, accepting “prevailing patterns of meaning and power-distribution” and, while working within the existing systems, attempting to maximize any advantages for women (Woodhead 2007, 537). I argue that this approach is not radical enough for many Christian feminists, who are closer to the counter-culturals in actively opposing and working to change “the existing gender order” in the churches. However, what I think important about Woodhead’s typology is how it highlights the marginality of women who are counter-cultural in their religiosity or spirituality.

Rhoda K. Unger and “Marginality” 
Marginal identities can lead to stigmatization, which can have considerable impact on one’s sense of self. If this is so, how can some people redefine their marginal position positively and, in the process, reinforce and shape their sense of self? Unger has identified some factors that are likely to make such a redefinition easier or more difficult. For example, “a marginal position can be a risky one” (witness the position of feminist ministers in many Christian churches). “Those who already possess some degree of social power” (2000: 168) (for example, white middle-class women as opposed to women of color or working-class women) will find it less risky to embrace a marginal religious identity and easier to redefine marginality as positive.

Similarly, Unger argues that a marginal identity may be easier if one is part of an identifiable group (175). That is, there is power in naming oneself as part of a group: It provides a group identity, a group history and, in the case of Goddess Feminists, a body of literature on which to hang one’s beliefs and a language to express them. In the same way, the ability to choose one’s marginality is likely to make it easier to redefine as positive. For example, one may often choose whether or not to reveal one’s religious affiliation depending on context. Also, marginality can sometimes allow a sense of freedom from normative social expectations and practices since, in one’s marginality, one “is already free from some aspects of societal control” (167).

Positive Marginality and Goddess Feminists 
In my own research, I have found that the majority of Goddess Feminists are non-traditional in some significant way: first of all in their feminism, but also through career, sexuality, or family positioning. This finding is confirmed by others’ work. For example, Winter, Lummis and Stokes (1995) find that lesbian women are less likely to be members of local churches than heterosexual women (appendix, table 4).

Cynthia Eller (1993) concludes that women are attracted to Goddess Feminism because it compensates them for “power deprivation” (211) in other aspects of their lives. I am not convinced that Goddess Feminists in general want the sort of power of which they are deprived. In my work, they repeatedly critiqued “power over.” That aside, I do not think that deprivation or compensation theory can adequately explain women’s attraction to Goddess Feminism. To me, such theories smell a little patronizing and, I suspect, do not take religious power seriously in an individual’s re-valuation of marginality and identity. Religious power affects not just an individual’s sense of self, but also her struggle in society as a feminist. To me, also, deprivation theory takes away from the genuine devotion to and experience of the divine that are fundamental to the participants in my research.

Goddess Feminism also offers women a way to make positive their marginality.

I argue that Goddess Feminism does indeed enable practitioners to revalue a marginal identity and to cope with the “deprivations” of being a woman in a male-centered society. However, while most Goddess Feminists are marginal in their non-traditional identities, and while Goddess Feminism is itself a marginal identity, Goddess Feminism also offers women a way to make positive their marginality. Positive marginality is not simply “compensation”; rather, it is a stance toward difference that is “affirmatory, even celebratory” (Woodhead and Heelas 2000: 265). Goddess Feminism thus helps women to cope not just with power deprivation, but also with the particular stresses of women’s lives in the 21st century (juggling home and work, for example). So while Eller assumes that the relationship between Goddess Feminism and marginality is one-way, I suggest that for Goddess Feminists “positive marginality can be both a cause and effect of self-construction” (Unger 2000:177). That is, while Goddess Feminism may initially help to compensate for a marginal identity, it also re-evaluates and confirms that identity.

I have suggested in previous issues of MatriFocus that Goddess Feminism provides liberating models of femaleness (through goddesses) and enables transgressive ways of being female. To return to Woodhead’s typology, counter-cultural religion (such as Goddess Feminism), “is not only marginal to the existing gender order, but actively opposes it and strives to change it and/or forge alternatives” (2007, 576). In other words, Goddess Feminists go beyond individualized compensation for power deprivation in their own lives. After all, as Unger suggests, “If one can construct oneself, why not the world?”

Notes

Bibliography

Graphics Credits

MatriFocus Cross-Quarterly is a seasonal web journal (zine) for Goddess Women and others interested in Goddess Lore and Scholarship, Goddess Religion (ancient and contemporary), Feminist Spirituality, Women's Mysteries, Paganism and Neopaganism, Earth-based Religions, Witchcraft, Dianic Wicca and other Wiccan Traditions, the Priestess Path, Goddess Art, Women's Culture, Women's Health, Natural Healing, Mythology, Female Shamanism, Consciousness, Community, Cosmology, and Women's Creativity.