Sue Monk Kidd

The acclaimed spiritual memoir from the author of The Secret Life of Bees I was amazed to find that I had no idea how to unfold my spiritual life in a feminine way. I was surprised and, in fact, a little terrified when I found myself in the middle of a feminist spiritual reawakening. Sue Monk was a "conventionally religious, churchgoing woman, a traditional wife and mother" with a thriving career as a Christian writer until she began to question her role as a woman in her culture, her family, and her church. From a jarring encounter with sexism in a suburban drugstore to monastery retreats and rituals in the caves of Crete, Kidd takes readers through the fear, anger, healing, and transformation of her awakening. Retaining a meaningful connection "with the deep song of Christianity," she opens the door for traditional Christian women to discover a spirituality that speaks directly to them and provides inspiring wisdom for all who struggle to embrace their full humanity.

The Dance of the Dissident Daughter

on women being against women demanding the right to vote: "I pondered what caused one group to support the system that subordinated and wounded [women] and the other group to believe their rights as women were worth fighting for. Looking at those two disparate groups of women, the things I'd learned during my awakening had never seemed more true - that women internalize the feminine wound or feminine inferiority so deeply, there's little or no female authority and esteem to fall back on. So they seek it by adopting and pleasing patriarchal standards. And my heart went out to these women, too, despite their blindness, because once upon a time, I'd been there too."

"My religion is being in awakened relationship with all that is and doing so with a kind and pure heart, with an authentic feminine soul and a vision of justice."

"The Divine cannot be contained solely in a book, church, dogma, liturgy, theological system, or transcendent spirituality. The earth is no longer a mere backdrop until we get to heaven, something secondary and expendable. Matter becomes inspirited; it breathes divinity. Earth becomes alive and sacred. [...] [I]f we discover Herself in the earth, we will not be so inclined to rape her forests, pave over her jungles, poison her rivers, dump fifty million tons of toxic waste into her oceans each year, or wipe out whole species of her creatures. Sin becomes defined as refusing to befriend and love the earth, for in doing so, we refuse to befriend and love the Divine." 

"In Christianity God came in a male body. Within the history and traditions of patriarchy, women's bodies did not belong to themselves but to their husbands. We learned to hate our bodies if they didn't conform to an ideal, to despise the cycles of menstruation -- 'the curse,' it was called. Our experience of our body has been immersed in shame" 

"Restoring the feminine symbol of Deity means that divinity will no longer be only heavenly, other, out there, up there, beyond time and space, beyond body and death. It will also be right here, right now, in me, in the earth, in this river and this rock, in excrement and roses alike. Divinity will be in the body, in the cycles of life and death, in the moment of decay and the moment of love-making." 

"This earth is my sister; I lover her daily grace, her silent daring, and how loved I am how we admire this strength in each other, all that we have lost, all that we have suffered, all that we know: we are stunned by this beauty, and I do not forget: what she is to me. what I am to her" - Susan Griffin

"Indeed, if you highlighted all the references to the [Wisdom, a feminine reflection of God]'s acts in the Bible, they would far exceed references to the Old Testament giants we are so familiar with - Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Isaiah. [...] When Christianity came along, Wisdom was not completely lost, though specific references to her are far less frequent. There she's referred to by the Greek word Sophia. [...] [In 1 Corinthians] Paul's words say boldly that Sophia became the Christ. [...] Later the masculine term Logos is used in place of Sophia."

"The deletion of Sophia from Christian tradition arose because Gnostics recognized and proclaimed Jesus as Sophia. [...] So naturally, the churches who came to be represented in the New Testament, not wanting to appear to align themselves with Gnosticism, referred to Sophia only in the most muted ways."


"The root word for the idea of compassion or mercy in Hebrew is rechem, or womb." - Rosemary Radford Ruether

"[El Shaddai] has been traditionally translated as 'the almighty' or, more exactly 'God of the mountain.' But shad is also a Hebrew word for breast. The ending ai is an old feminine ending, therefore a probable ancient meaning of El Shaddai was 'the breasted one.' God, the breasted one."

"'If we leave our father's house, we have to make ourselves self-reliant,' writes Marian Woodman. 'Otherwise, we just fall into another father's house.' If we don't keep up the work of burying patriarchy, we may climb out of one oppressive situation only to land in another. We may get rid of one facet of the Bishop only to have him show up in another guise, sometimes a far subtler one. He may turn up as a benevolent, kind-faced dictator who gets you back in line, not through bullying, but by his 'caring': 'Father knows best.' But benevolent patriarchy is still patriarchy."

"Starhawk says the voices from patriarchy, which attack our inherent worth, become internalized as the self-hater. It is the old king, she says, with five faces: the Conqueror, who treats the self and those around us as enemies to be feared and destroyed; the Orderer, who inflicts a rigid control; the Mater of Servants, who demands that we deny our own needs and desireds to serve others' ends; the Censor, who keeps us silent; and the Judge, who offers to restore value to us in exchange for obedience"

"Our psyches begin to realign and remold to compensate for the damage, usually favoring the 'other side.' For instance, if the feminine 'ankle' is crippled, we learn to shift our weight to the 'standpoint' of strength. That is, we compensate by identifying with and supporting male dominance. We become good daughters to the cultural father."

"I am a slow unlearner. But I love my unteachers" - Ursula K. Le Guin

"When a woman is exhorted to be compliant, cooperative, and quiet, to not make upset or go against the old guard, she is pressed into living a most unnatrual life - a life that is self-binding... without innovation. The world-wide issue for woman is that under such conditions they are not only silenced, they are put to sleep. Their concerns, their viewpoints, their own truths are vaporirzed"- Clarissa Pinkola Estés

"I was trying... to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one can't build little white picket fences to keep the nightmare out" - Anne Sexton

Maureen Carter

"A masterpiece of women’s wisdom."—Christiane Northrup, M.D. "The journey to capture her feminine soul and live authentically . . . makes a fascinating, well-researched and well-written story."—Publishers Weekly In celebration of the twentieth anniversary of its publication, a newly reissued edition of the bestselling author’s classic work of feminine spiritual discovery, with a new introduction by the author. "I was amazed to find that I had no idea how to unfold my spiritual life in a feminine way. I was surprised, and, in fact, a little terrified, when I found myself in the middle of a feminist spiritual reawakening."—Sue Monk Kidd For years, Sue Monk Kidd was a conventionally religious woman. Then, in the late 1980s, she experienced an unexpected awakening, and began a journey toward a feminine spirituality. With the exceptional storytelling skills that have helped make her name, Kidd tells her very personal story of the fear, anger, healing, and freedom she experienced on the path toward the wholeness that many women have lost in the church. From a jarring encounter with sexism in a suburban drugstore, to monastery retreats and to rituals in the caves of Crete, she reveals a new level of feminine spiritual consciousness for all women—one that retains a meaningful connection with the "deep song of Christianity," embraces the sacredness of ordinary women’s experience, and has the power to transform in the most positive ways every fundamental relationship in a woman's life—her marriage, her career, and her religion.

The Dance of the Dissident Daughter

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