Truly Feminine

By Dr. Linda N. Cameron

Truly Feminine translates insights from Jungian psychology into Christian terms so the average woman in American culture can understand them. It distinguishes masculinity from femininity differences denied by the traditional feminist movement and points out that a woman must become aware of and deal with her inner masculine side or it will block the true expression of her femininity. Samson, David, Paul, and Jesus are used as images to symbolize the four aspects of a woman’s masculine side. Truly Feminine discusses both the positive and negative sides of these four inner masculine aspects and how they can distort and disrupt the true expression of a woman’s feminine nature. A number of negative feminine types are discussed including the clinging vine mother, the social climber, the judge, the boss, the door mat woman, the spinning top woman, the mermaid, the scholarly woman, the nagging wife, the patriarchal woman, the medium, and the witch woman. Biblical as well as contemporary women are used to illustrate the various negative feminine types.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Aug 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9781663223685

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Copyright © 2021 Dr. Linda N. Cameron.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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Scripture taken from The Holy Bible, King James Version. Cambridge Edition: 1769; King James Bible Online, 2018. www.kingjamesbibleonline.org.

ISBN: 978-1-6632-2367-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-2368-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021910543

iUniverse rev. date: 08/18/2021

CONTENTS

Chapter 1: Femininity to Masculinity

Chapter 2: Masculinity to Femininity: Sampson

Chapter 3: Masculinity to Femininity: David

Chapter 4: Masculinity to Femininity: Paul

Chapter 5: Masculinity to Femininity: Jesus

Chapter 6: Truly Feminine

Bibliography

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I began writing Truly Feminine in the 1970’s when I was searching for some answers about my own femininity as I could not identify with the traditional feminist position espoused by Gloria Steinem and the Now gang at the time. Since the 1970’s, I have updated the material twice and the current book was completed in 2021. As a result, the number of family and friends who have contributed to the writing of this book have grown significantly therefore I have divided the acknowledgements into several phases. The earliest phase of thanks goes to my parents. My mother, who provided a good model of the transformative feminine, taught me how to work to give form to my creativity while my father taught me about my inner Samson and Paul—my inner strength and reasoning abilities. This next phase occurs during the 1970’s when the original manuscript was written. During this period of time, I had many religious mentors including Lorri Khoury and her father Chaplain Fremont Blackman, and Chaplain Frank Dickason and his wife Juliet who taught me during the crawling stage of my Christian understanding. Reverend Bill Littleton former rector of St. Paul Episcopal Church in Waco, Texas introduced me to Jungian Psychology and opened the door to relationships with Dr. James Hall and Dr. Flo Wiedeman, Jungian analysts in Dallas, Texas. Another mentor during this time was Luanne Klaras who taught me about creativity and how an idea can take many forms. During the final phase of my writing, I would like to thank individuals in my personal life particularly those in my weekly spiritual groups whose questions challenged me to refine my thinking about some of the ideas presented in this book. So here is a salute of gratitude to Rosalee Kinast, Pat Griffing, and Martina Griffing.

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Chapter 1

FEMININITY TO MASCULINITY

And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: but of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. Genesis 2:16-17

T raditional Christianity has interpreted the above scriptures as the fall of man following disobedience of God’s command. But could this story also point to the birth of humankind’s individual ego consciousness? In the beginning humankind lived in a state of unconscious oneness with God. Adam and Eve did not even know that they were naked but when they ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, their eyes were suddenly opened. Christianity focuses primarily on the split between good and evil that occurred in this fall, although our newly developed consciousness actually involves the awareness or perception of all opposites. In order to have consciousness, we have to have the ability to separate ourselves, a subject, from what we are observing and experiencing, an object. This notion is called the subject-object dichotomy and is spoken of in many Eastern religions. The belief here is that our spiritual journey in life is to transcend this split and reconnect with God in full conscious awareness rather than live in the original unconscious state of oneness with God. In the development of our consciousness we separated from God but our final relationship with God is one of actively and consciously choosing to be in an aware connected and loving relationship with the Divine. Isn’t this a much higher state of being than that of unconscious identification with God. So, what is the ability we have that allows us to develop consciousness and an awareness of the world of opposites? God gave humans the gift of free will or the ability to freely will what we want with no limitations placed on its use and with this ability we freely separated from God. This separation involves a shift of our attention away from God to our own needs and desires and onto the world around us. We now become the king or queen of our kingdom. But unfortunately, when we shift away from God, we fragment our wholeness and unity and this gives birth to the world of opposites that we call ego consciousness. This book, Truly Feminine , focuses on one of these resulting opposites—namely the split between femininity and masculinity. It discusses how our newly developed ego can negatively impact these opposites within us as well as how to bring them back into balance so that we can again experience wholeness but this time with the addition of having conscious awareness of our wholeness and unity.

At the beginning of my spiritual journey, I focused my energies on understanding the feminine aspect of my being because I did not realize at this time that to be truly feminine involved reuniting the split between my masculine and feminine sides. I started my search by reading about the feminist movement. Books on femininity and women’s issues reveal a diversity of viewpoints. Chris Beasley points out that feminism involves a number of social, political, economic, and religious movements centered around the issues of sexual inequality. The main idea is that women have been unfairly treated in patriarchal societies and efforts need to be made to undo gender stereotypes and establish opportunities for women that are equal to those of men.

In the western world, writers such as Maggie Humm, Rebecca Walker, and Prudence Chamberlain have divided feminism into four different waves. The first wave of feminism occurred in the late 19th and early 20th century and focused on getting women the right to vote. It is typically called the woman’s suffrage movement and in the United States had such leaders as Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton who, according to Rosemary R. Reuther in Women and Redemption: A Theological History were influenced by the Quaker theological view that men and women are equal under God. This wave of feminism is considered to have ended with the passage of the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution, which granted women the right to vote in all states of the union. Although I am very happy to be able to vote as a woman, this wave of feminism occurred before my time, thus I have very little emotional connection to this trend within the feminist movement.

The second wave of feminism, called the women’s liberation movement, began in the early 1960’s and was dedicated to obtaining legal and social equality for women. Betty Friedan’s 1963 book The Feminine Mystique is considered by Margalit Fox to have ignited the second wave of feminism in the United States. The NOW (National Organization for Women) was formed in 1966 and tried to get the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) passed but never achieved this goal. Betty Friedman (President of NOW from 1966 to 1970) and Pauli Murray described the purpose of NOW as To take action to bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society now, exercising all privileges and responsibilities thereof in truly equal partnership with men. The Now Organization focused on six main issues including abortion rights and access to reproductive health services, domestic violence, constitutional and economic equality, racial diversity, and lesbian rights. Marches, rallies, lobbing, and conferences were employed to accomplish these goals. Women did gain reproductive rights during this time with the supreme court decision in the Roe vs. Wade case and reliable birth control medications. Now women were able to choose both a career and a family. In the United States, Gloria Steinem, often considered a liberal feminist, was a prolific author and activist during this time. She introduced to the American consciousness the activity of female genital mutilation in an article published in 1979 and concluded that men in a patriarchal culture used this to control women. I was in college and then graduate school during this wave of feminism and for all practical purposes appeared to be part of this movement of women out into the world. However, I could not identify with this movement because of my religious orientation and it seemed to me the feminists during this time were actually denigrating certain forms of feminine expression to the same degree that they were accusing men of doing. I could not accept the idea that I had the right to murder my own child and that such forms of femininity as being a homemaker were better than other forms of femininity.

A third wave of feminism began in 1992 and according to Charlotte Krolokke in her book Three Waves of Feminism: From Suffragettes to Girls was devoted to a focus on individuality and diversity. The beginning of this wave of feminism has been associated with Riot grrrl an underground punk movement in Washington state that combined the ideas of feminism with a punk style of anti-establishment views and Anita Hill’s 1991 televised testimony of sexual harassment by Clarence Thomas, nominee for the Supreme Court. The second wave of feminism was criticized for focusing too much on the experiences of upper middle class women and set about bringing race related issues within the feminist movement. Debates among these feminists centered around whether there were innate psychological differences between the sexes or whether the observed differences were due to social conditioning. Other psychological issues addressed at this time can be found in the work of Georgette Mosbacher who talked about using her Feminine Force to overcome self-doubt and to gain her own power by becoming materially independent in the world. Gloria Steinem, in her book Revolution from Within, still blamed the patriarchy for her problems in being a woman in this culture. In A Woman’s Worth, Marianne Williamson, who was a big proponent of A Course in Miracles, talked about anchoring her feminine worthiness in the eternal. Having completed my training as a psychologist at this time, I could readily relate to these issues as I was also actively searching for inner knowledge about myself and the true expression of my feminine nature.

The fourth wave of feminism began around 2012 and was committed to stopping sexual harassment, rape, and violence against women. This wave includes the 2017 and 2018 Women’s Marches and the recent Me Too Movement in 2017 in which various women came forth accusing certain men in the public eye of sexual harassment and even rape in some cases. Forth wave feminists also focused on campus sexual assault and workplace harassment issues using social media technology such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and You Tube.

This diversity of viewpoints and battling over what it means to be a woman and how to achieve the true expression of femininity not only left me feeling frustrated and confused but brought forth a number of questions in my mind. What approach best explains what femininity is all about? What approach will lead to the full actualization of the feminine side of one’s being? Can an approach be found to extend the feminine principle in the world as we move forward and broaden the view of what it means to be feminine in the 2020’s?

Whenever I run into varying viewpoints and theories regarding some issue in life, I remember D.E. Harding’s concept of errors of omission. In his book entitled Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth, Harding states that in our search for truth we commit errors of omission. We see only fragments or opposites and fail to integrate these into a wholistic view of things. It is in this light, a wholistic view of femininity, that I began to focus my search. I wanted to develop a view of femininity that was inclusive rather than divisive. I then studied the works of such woman as Georgette Mosbacher, Gloria Steinem, Naomi Wolf, and Marianne Williamson who focused on identifying and undoing different blocks to their feminine development. It was at this time that I felt moved to use a Christian paradigm for several reasons. First, it seems to me that the average Christian woman in the culture and her views of femininity have for over twenty years been stereotyped and attacked by the more vocal, media-prominent feminists. I wanted to show that femininity manifests in many forms within the Christian tradition as illustrated in the lives of various women in the Bible. Secondly, books such as Dr. Este’s, Women Who Run with Wolves, use stories and mythologies that most women in this culture have no connections with to illustrate aspects of feminine development. I wanted to use stories from the Bible as examples of femininity that the average woman in this culture could relate to and understand.

Like Mosbacher, Steinem, and Williamson, I began my search as a personal struggle to understand my feminine nature and its place in the world. However, the resolution that I found, though similar to theirs in some ways, turned out to be more wholistic and, I think, more inclusive of all women at differing stages of development of their femininity and in the expression of their particular form of femininity. It is to this