The Women’s Movement as a term may seem retro, passé, out of date, conjuring up images of 70’s pantsuits and Helen Reddy to those, like me who are the daughters of the feminist era.
Understandably we take for granted the liberties we have, simply because ‘her-story’ was not taught to us in schools, (unless you choose to study it on your own time as an elective at a tertiary level.) Instead our education focused on ‘his-tory’, the ‘great battles’ that destroyed sustainable cultures and the environmental destruction documented as ‘industrial progress’.
There are no statues in our parks of the suffragettes who starved themselves in hunger strikes behind bars so women could vote, only a fleeting image of a high society woman donning gloves and a hat to attend a rally for the vote in Disney’s, ‘Mary Poppins’.
So where does that leave us now?
Forty years later we see our Gen Y maidens sporting Playboy branded clothes, waxxxing away their fertile appearance to appear less threatening to their porn addicted boyfriends and starving themselves despite it being twenty years since Naomi Wolfe published, ‘The Beauty Myth’. To some, the concept of a women’s movement may just as well have been some dance style pre-dating hip hop.
Fear not, for as surely as their role models, the pop diva puppets of the music industry are touting skeletal, substance addicted sex slavery as the feminine ideal to emulate, there is a counter movement silently surfacing from deep within the hearts of women awakening to the wisdom and traditions of the sacred feminine.
This is the third wave of the women’s movement!
Unlike the first two waves, the suffragettes who sought voting rights and the feminists who sought equal pay and reproductive rights, this third wave is not a political movement. It is not from the head, it is from the heart. It is about the awakening of inner power rather than the need to stake a claim for external power. This is a huge shift from the shoulder pad wearing women who operated in the old patriarchal paradigm – trying to effect measurable results in the man-made world of business and law at any cost.
Here are 10 more signs we are reconnecting with the universal feminine as we experience the third wave of the women’s movement…
1.Supercrones!
Whilst some still smear expensive placenta filled face creams on their face and spend thousands carving up their bodies or paralysing their face in their eternal quest for youth, these women are viewed by society at large with a mixture of pity and ridicule for allowing themselves to become brides of Frankenstein.
To counter those still clinging to the past, we now have more women than ever before consciously embracing their lives as elders of the community. This is thanks to the ‘Baby Boomer’ generation coming of age. After 20 years of healing and empowering themselves through self help books and talk shows like Oprah, many are online everyday as unpaid social and environmental activists, using the growing clout of social media to effect change and using their increased psychic abilities for personal and global healing. If you doubt the influence of this third age, consider the fact you can’t go into a store without seeing babushka dolls and owls (which are symbols of wisdom) on mugs, t-shirts and notebooks and the number of initiatives being seeded by grandmothers around the world who are gathering en masse around the planet as a force for change.
2. Rites of Passage
There is now an increasing number of women ensuring their daughters are welcomed to their womanhood with sacred ceremony, celebration and wisdom teachings to instruct them on how to live in tune with their lunar cycle so they feel empowered about becoming women rather than feeling a deep sense of shame about their bodies borne out of ignorance and societal taboos. Following in their wake are the growing number of initiation retreats for boys. For the feminine honours milestones as a way of embracing the circle of life and accepting greater responsibility which allows us to age with grace.
3. Detoxifying & Honouring of Sensitivity
More women are becoming aware of the short and long-term effects of food additives, chemicals and toxic substances being added to foods, cleaning products and vaccinations, which is in turn placing increased pressure on corporations to address this public demand and offer more natural alternatives such as steam cleaners, crystal deodorants and colour free medications.
4. Slow and Raw Food Movements
No longer is prime time TV just serving up a patriarchal line-up of crime, politics and sport and relegating cooking segments to daytime TV. Now, almost every commercial TV network has reality cooking and weight loss shows, educating people to take more responsibility for their health and nutrition by learning the value of eating less processed, fast foods. There is also a growing number of people buying from farmer’s markets, creating community gardens and the introduction of cooking and gardening programs to many schools and we can see a generational change taking place. The most blatant evidence our diets are evolving is that the fast foods chains are adapting to consumer driven changes so they don’t become obsolete.
5. Honouring Mother Earth
When we attune to include awareness of the feminine we reconnect with the natural world as the external feminine and honour what is needed for sustainability. We can see this trend, referred to as ‘sea changes’ and ‘tree changes’ as city folk relocate to live closer to nature. Amongst city slickers there are many riding bikes instead of driving cars, using cloth shopping bags and buying second hand ‘retro’ items, along with recycling practices being implemented by schools, homes and businesses.
6. Natural Medicine
We now have natural health clinics dotting the landscape as holistic therapies and eastern medical traditions assist a growing section of the populace to take more responsibility for maintaining their health and well-being with an increased awareness of how their energetic, emotional and psychological stress impacts on their physical state of health. This trend has coincided with many feeling disillusioned with the western health system which has seen it become little more than a dispensary for large pharma companies who seduce GP’s with incentives for prescribing their products.
7. Sacred Space and Goddess Fashion
For many, the Goddess has taken up residence in their homes as candles, aromatherapy and lotuses replace the man-made era of Tupperware, Laminex and plastic on the furniture! Many Westerners are meditating and doing yoga to chill out from the amount of information we are expected to process in a given day, thanks to our technological advances. The Goddess is also replacing beige and black in boutique clothing with ultra feminine eastern influenced clothing featuring sacred symbols such as mandalas, bright colours, flowing fabrics and jewel encrusted designs that catch the light.
8. Herbal Brews
Tea, a more yin alternative to the productivity charged coffee, has now established itself on cafes menus as a beverage deserving of its own snobbery, no longer the standard choice of ‘peppermint or chamomile’ which is then thrown dismissively as a teabag into a takeaway cup when the place next door is offering a full range of aromatic black and loose leaf herbal teas including frappe iced chai lattes!
9. The Return of Magic
The global success of magical films such as ‘Harry Potter’ and ‘Lord of the Rings’ are a far cry from the height of misogyny which saw 9 million women burnt at the stake and drowned for using their subtle senses during the middle ages. It was reported the number one crime recorded was ‘midwifery’ (assisting a woman during childbirth), as these were the women most able to attune to women using their subtle senses and whose knowledge of herb lore posed a threat to the medical establishment. Fortunately Quantum physics has now verified the phenomena described by esoteric sciences by those who had awakened the use of their subtle senses.
10. Sacred Sexuality
For every action there is a reaction so perhaps we can credit the constant pornographic images being thrown at us from every angle in our soul sick culture with the increased interest in sacred sexuality. For today there are more mothers are questioning and resisting the sexualization of their children by boycotting seductive figurines like Bratz and ‘kiddie lingerie’ in major department chains. So too, more couples are seeking ways to reconnect soul to soul through workshops, retreats and books as a way to ‘turn on’ the spark instead of using battery operated, plastic toys and voyerism.
Yes, the Goddess has returned. So whilst everyone was standing around looking busy lest the Messiah showed up, SHE has shown up in a trillion different ways. We do not, however need to be fearful of a vengeful Goddess seeking retribution for our collective ignorance for SHE is simply an awareness awakening in us all.
The third wave of the women’s movement is not about the differences between men and women and arguing about who’s had it worse and who has it better. It is about the honouring of the feminine within all of us, regardless of our physical gender so we can redress the imbalance within us and within our modern culture. As the true feminine complements rather than competes with the masculine. So it is only through us each honouring the feminine in our choices that we will heal our relationship statistics, heal our family breakdown, heal our communities and heal our environment. To do that we must acknowledge the parts of us that are ephemeral, which must be felt. They are our feelings, our subtle senses, our sensitivities, our soulful connection to the cosmos and the natural cycles which teach us how to grow so we may nurture growth that is sustainable all around us.
Put simply, the feminine is our ability to love – ourselves and then others from a place of self awareness.
Nostradamus predicted the feminine would rise at this time in our evolution and transform society as we know it…not just within women but within us all.
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