The Feminine Mystique: my mother, Betty.

Loving Woman
Edvard Munch 1894

all that I am, I will not deny.....it's the core of me

I was one month shy of turning two when The Feminine Mystique first came out. I have never read Betty Friedan's classic call to arms and growing up in the tyranny of distant Australia, it was Melbourne's own Germaine Greer who I was most familiar with.  Although I didn't come to an interest in reading any of her books until I was in my late 40s and, even now, I have yet to read one of her books all the way through.

I have lived for over 50 years.  I was there.  I don't need to really read about what I experienced although it helps to see myself a part of a greater cycle.  It soothes the ancient hurts to know that it wasn't personal after all.  There was no particular dislike of me, only my femininity.  It still astonishes me though that in 20th Century Australia, I was met by attitudes that I had no idea were the subtext of my life.  I, and my generation, were a little too young; born to be kept dumb.

Pluto in Virgo: the Bridge generation.  Trolls beneath, scapegoats crossing.  Aye, I can live with that imagery.....a beautiful bridge over an old old stream.

It was the 1970s glossy woman's magazine, Cleo, which provided bite-size morsels from the front-lines of the Women's Liberation Movement for my generation to puzzle over.  Born in 1961, I was only 16 when feminism reached fever-pitch in Melbourne and I was too adolescent to know what the core issues were, yet I was the right age to absorb the ideas, that zeitgest which was being generated by those fierce women, who themselves had been surged forth by the fierce women before them.  Those unknown and nameless pioneers, the women who blazed a path for their grand-daughters and great-grand-daughters to follow.

We all feel those pioneers. Their stories hum in our genes, their legacies of flesh and blood gaze back at us from every mirror, the contours of their lives dwell in the Void of ours.....waiting. 

Anticipating joyfully our visitations; for our thoughts to alight on them like feathers from our dreams.  Their eyes the eyes behind ours wondering at hemlines, clucking over 1001 tales of what we think their lives were really like. 

How little we know. 
How much they love us. 
The notion of us...

We owe it to our ancestors to put right that which they did in-advisedly.  We owe it to our ancestors to look back with kindness and compassion and say:  Do not be afraid.  I know you that you were not aware of that which you were doing.  It is enough that I know what to do and that I remember you well,  and in the remembering, all shall be well.  All is well.

I am one of Betty Friedan's spiritual daughters. 
We are all the children of Ceres,
Siblings to Persephone


Further Reading:
The Feminine Mystique’: ‘All that I am I will not deny’
Looking Back at a Domestic Cri de Coeur

Gaia Is a Tough Bitch

"For more than a billion years, the only life on this planet consisted of bacterial cells, which, lacking nuclei, are called prokaryotes, or prokaryotic cells. They looked very much alike, and from the human-centered vantage point seem boring. However, bacteria are the source of reproduction, photosynthesis, movement — indeed, all interesting features of life except perhaps speech! They're still with us in large diversity and numbers.

They still rule Earth.

Symbiosis has nothing to do with cost or benefit. The benefit/cost people have perverted the science with invidious economic analogies. The contention is not over modern symbioses, simply the living together of unlike organisms, but over whether "symbiogenesis" — long-term symbioses that lead to new forms of life — has occurred and is still occurring. The importance of symbiogenesis as a major source of evolutionary change is what is debated. I contend that symbiogenesis is the result of long-term living together — staying together, especially involving microbes- -and that it's the major evolutionary innovator in all lineages of larger nonbacterial organisms.

......animals are very tardy on the evolutionary scene, and they give us little real insight into the major sources of evolution's creativity.

The Gaia hypothesis is a biological idea, but it's not human-centered. Those who want Gaia to be an Earth goddess for a cuddly, furry human environment find no solace in it. They tend to be critical or to misunderstand. They can buy into the theory only by misinterpreting it. Some critics are worried that the Gaia hypothesis says the environment will respond to any insults done to it and the natural systems will take care of the problems. This, they maintain, gives industries a license to pollute. Yes, Gaia will take care of itself; yes, environmental excesses will be ameliorated, but it's likely that such restoration of the environment will occur in a world devoid of people.


Lovelock would say that Earth is an organism. I disagree with this phraseology. No organism eats its own waste. I prefer to say that Earth is an ecosystem, one continuous enormous ecosystem composed of many component ecosystems. Lovelock's position is to let the people believe that Earth is an organism, because if they think it is just a pile of rocks they kick it, ignore it, and mistreat it. If they think Earth is an organism, they'll tend to treat it with respect. To me, this is a helpful cop-out, not science. Yet I do agree with Lovelock when he claims that most of the things scientists do are not science either. And I realize that by taking the stance he does he is more effective than I am in communicating Gaian ideas.

Gaia is a tough bitch — a system that has worked for over three billion years without people. This planet's surface and its atmosphere and environment will continue to evolve long after people and prejudice are gone.

Extracts truffled from Gaia is a Tough Bitch, read full interview with LM at The Edge

LYNN MARGULIS in her life and times was a biologist; Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst; author of The Origin of Eukaryotic Cells (1970), Early Life (1981), and Symbiosis in Cell Evolution (2d ed., 1993). She is also the coauthor, with Karlene V. Schwartz, of Five Kingdoms: An Illustrated Guide to the Phyla of Life on Earth (2d ed., 1988) and with Dorion Sagan of Microcosmos (1986), Origins Of Sex (1986), and Mystery Dance (1991).