Finding The Door Of The Wound: The Door Of The Mind

Part two of a collaborative series by Team 3

Finding the door of the wound: a choose your own adventure

THE DOOR OF THE BODY (MariJean Elizabeth Wegert)

THE DOOR OF THE MIND (Sarah Spurlock)

THE DOOR OF THE SPIRIT (Elian M. Ortiz)

“The doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious,” writes Clarissa Pinkola Estes in Women Who Run with the Wolves. “If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.”

If you’ve been following along, you can feel the longing thrumming up in you like the deep rush of a living spring. Something needs to change. 

You’re watching it happen – around the world, we are mobilizing. We are protesting. We are writing and crying and creating and screaming and refusing and weeping and shapeshifting and rising. 

But, like any transformation, a hesitancy to join the revolution can arise from a myriad of fears – like a rough scar that coils around the fascia where the edges of the knife cut, the resistances that arise from our psyche come from centuries of being forced to cope with our own oppression by hardening our edges. We have to approach our own freedom softly – we have to woo it like a wounded animal.

What follows are three pieces written for just this tale. Like any wound, there is more than one medicine. Because trauma is so often created by the forced powerlessness of the victim, it's often the return of that stolen agency that can create space for healing. Empire has dismembered us, not only from one another, but also from ourselves – divorcing the roles of spirit, body, and mind from their roles as symbiotic forces within our psyches. Our collective healing requires the slow and patient tending and reweaving of the three. 

These pieces are designed to give you the agency to choose your door: perhaps you have been taught that your mind alone can be trusted – so start there. Perhaps you have an intellectual understanding of the dire situations at hand, you want to let the blood of revolution rush to your fingertips; your face. Start there. Perhaps you can feel your spirit orienting you like an ebbing tide; start there. You’ll have to walk through each of these doors in turn eventually, but you can choose where to start.

THE DOOR OF THE MIND:
OPPRESSION BLINDERS (Dismantling the white Christian patriarchy from within)

Fellow white women: whether or not you identify with the term feminist, it is undeniable that we are called to use our position to dismantle arbitrary power structures from within and to support women outside of our social strata in their fight for liberation. This is a revolution that starts with each of us, and it can’t happen without us first affirming our own pain under white Christian patriarchy. And an honest, good-faith acknowledgment of our suffering - within the broader context of intersectional gender discrimination - is not something white women are accustomed to undertaking. 

Throughout the centuries, white American women have been conditioned to ignore their own oppression - sometimes, even uphold it - for various reasons, ranging from fear for their material safety, peer pressure to fall in line, unwillingness to sacrifice power and status, and above all, deeply internalized misogyny. Without grasping the context of our own historical oppression under white Christian patriarchy, we cannot effectively hold space for the pain and suffering of other women. This empathy is non-negotiable if we want to co-create a new world for all women, especially for those who need access to our hearts, and more importantly, our wallets – such as migrant women, women facing food or housing insecurity, or the women and girls of Palestine, among so many others.

Photo by The Gladis Photographer Leann Wishnic

In the US, we can trace this phenomenon to colonial witch hunts, an event that followed centuries of similar movements in Europe resulting in the executions of between 40,000 and 50,000 people between 1450 and 1750. During its European precursor, women comprised 75-80% of those executed, and it is reasonable to theorize that colonizing white women feared the same fate in the New World. When the witch hunt movement accelerated in the colonies at the end of the 17th century, white women’s fear for their own safety caused little incentive to acknowledge the pain of their accused sisters, which could also cast them out of their colonies’ precarious economic and material safety nets. Similarly, the scarcity of resources in the colonies led to people of all genders pointing fingers at single white women who enjoyed outsized individual power or wealth; many white women would benefit from their own confiscation of an accused woman’s desirable property. Finally, in the hyperpious environment of Puritanical America, white women were conditioned to fear risking God’s wrath, and an unrepentant woman who allegedly engaged in witchcraft wouldn’t be deserving of empathy. Holding space for the suffering - or even acknowledging the personhood - of non-white women, such as Indigenous/First Nations or enslaved women, simply wouldn’t register for colonial white women at large.

Almost two centuries later, Josephine Dodge founded the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage (NAOWS) to fight the ratification of the 19th Amendment. Comprised mostly of wealthy white wives of politicians or other men of the ruling class, these women helped defeat nearly forty suffrage proposals and passed out pamphlets outlining the harms of allowing women to vote. Despite their awareness, if any, of the working and living conditions for lower-class women and women of color - for example, a new classification of round-the-clock work in the home as “nonproductive” and therefore unwageable - the women of NAOWS lacked the ability to see beyond their status to hold space for the oppression and suffering of their lower-class and darker-skinned sisters; to do so would threaten their prime sociopolitical position. 

This is an example of what I call oppression blinders, which signify a white woman’s unwillingness to sacrifice her comfort within white Christian patriarchy despite her awareness of its burdens, resulting in a dangerous lack of empathy for other women’s suffering. NAOWS set the stage for the STOP ERA movement 50 years later, led by Phyllis Schlafly, founded to fight the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1960s and 1970s. Like the anti-suffragists before them, the religious, suburban white women of the STOP ERA movement activated their own Cold War oppression blinders, unwilling to sacrifice the comfort, status, and safety (as well as personal gain) awarded to them for their patriotism and submission. To the contrary, second-wave feminism - which rightfully deserves critique - drew much of its inspiration from the coinciding Civil Rights era, a form of acknowledgment that other white women at the time avoided.

Photo by The Gladis Photographer Leann Wishnic

This model of fear and comfort-based oppression blinders underwrites the lack of empathy today among white women. In the past twenty years, we witnessed the rise of the Tea Party and far-right ideology, which carved a new space for previously uninvolved populist women to shape the discourse around the suffering of women outside of their social sphere. This “mama grizzly” era, marked by neocon women such as  Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachman, and today, Nikki Haley, combined the religious piety and fanaticism of Puritanical America’s blind-eye method with the STOP ERA movement’s point/counterpoint to modern feminism. However, there is one new development in this discourse: in the post-Roe era, old ideas such as “abortion ban” or “birth control restrictions” are now being replaced with “pro-woman” rhetoric, even though the oppressive policies and ideology remain the same. This “pro-woman” dialogue, however, only cements this lack of acknowledgment of the suffering under white Christian patriarchy. 

As we can see, although specific environmental and ideological circumstances shift with the times, turning a blind eye to the ways in which our system endangers us is a far too common trap. This leads to our inability to hold space for women outside of our demographic, which perpetuates the status quo and continues to do great harm. If we want to dismantle patriarchy and create a new world for all, we must start by disrupting our reflex to ignore the ways in which patriarchy oppresses us.

//Part three coming on Friday