À Versailles, À Versailles du 5 Octobre 1789. The British Museum.
Carl Jung’s patient and colleague, Toni Wolff, created the term a hundred years ago to describe the woman who combines the four personality traits Jung found to exist separately in most men. Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, long one of my icons, daughter of non-English speaking refugees who grew up in a now almost-disappeared oral tradition, built on Wolff’s structure, describing women as potentially combining the four traits—feeling, thinking, sensation and intuition—to become “the fierce and loving force of the blessed mother” and “to untie the strong woman.”
To combat the panic many of us feel during the onslaught of misogyny being perpetuated by the Trump government, we need to commit ourselves to this version of the feminine: the fierce and loving force of the mother, the untied strong woman.
What does this mean?
We have been trained for hundreds of years to provide the sweetness and acceptance that keeps the wheels of conventional society all over the world rolling, to offer excuses, apologies, love, and understanding to all the men in our lives. In ordinary times, this is a useful office, but now it is destructive. There can be no apologies, no understanding for men who are wreaking our Constitution or for the many women who apparently support them or at least voted for them.
This group may include our husbands, lovers, boyfriends, fathers, brothers and sons. Even more challenging, it may include our mothers, sisters, daughters and friends.
How do we change our useful habit of compliance and gain the courage to confront?
By remembering, first, that we are the life force. Without us, there would be no men to run amuck. Then, it means considering the role we played in conditioning our sons to accept or deny their own aggression and cruelty. The old “boys will be boys” has led us to this place.
Then we must practice using our voices. How often in a mixed gender group I find that the women are silent during questions and answers. It’s not easy to raise a soprano voice in a group of basses, it’s not easy to speak into a tide of silent derision or outright aggression. But now that we have lost an influence on our government, it is essential.
We have no representatives in the cabinet; with the exception of two women, there are only men around the president now, and the two women appear to be sycophants to the same degree as these shameless men who in the Senate confirmed unworthy cabinet members with the greatest display of cowardice I’ve ever seen.
But remember: the Senate hotline is being jammed today with 1,600 protest calls A MINUTE compared to the usual 40 calls.
There is resistance and it is effective. U.S. Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee in 2017, has blocked his order placing 2000 employees of USAID on paid leave. Senator Angus King, Independent of Maine, rose yesterday to excoriate his fellow Republican senators for abrogating their oaths to defend the Constitution.
There are men like Judge Nichols and Senator King who are fighting the good fight but apparently they are few and outnumbered by the “good” men—millions of them—who may silently question the destruction going on all around us but are able to distract themselves and remain silent.
But action alone is not enough. Dr. Estes goes further in her evocation of the medial woman. She writes that we are all endowed with a mystical nature at birth which cannot be bought or sold; culture dies without it. She advocates practicing in our daily lives the medial way of seeing that knows what it knows even when all around dispute that knowledge: the immense value of kindness not as a passive niceness but as a weapon against destruction.
We must rely on traditional myths, chants, songs and herbal healing to strengthen us, and on collective action such as the gathering of self-proclaimed old women I will attend today. In our old age there is wisdom, and there is also strength.
I propose to counter panic with specific remedies, for panic only hands more power to the oppressor. It matters that the slice of hot buttered toast tastes good and the cup of hot herbal tea with honey is strengthening. It matters that the woodpecker in my yard is again thundering on a telephone pole in the hope of attracting a mate. It also matters that we write letters to our newspapers, expressing our powerful resistance, and speak out in any public gathering we attend, drawing on those deep universal springs of mystical understanding that are our birthright.
Yes, mystical: that abused word whose power we have long failed to recognize. But when the practical and pragmatic fail us as they have in the present situation, it is our connection to the mystical, the deep springs of faith and intuition, that will sustain.
Sing, dance, bake bread, sit in the warming sun and call on all your sisters to join in rebellion direct and unapologetic.
The twisted hearts of these destructive boys demand it.
Finally, there are protests happening all over the country, and they will continue, reminding me of the housewives who marched on Versailles at the beginning of the French Revolution, demanding bread.
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