Teaser ~ The Dance of the Dissident Daughter

In The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman's Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine (1996), Sue Monk Kidd says her awakening began on the day she overheard two men talking about her daughter Ann, down on her knees stocking a drugstore shelf. One man said, "Now that's how I like to see a woman -- on her knees." The men laughed, Ann looked stricken, and Kidd herself was enraged, telling them, "You may like to see her and other women on their knees, but we don't belong there. We don't belong there!" That episode began a period of intense searching that, in my opinion, deepened her writing. Look at the beautiful way she uses words:

"There had been a moment, many moments really, when truth seized me and I 'conceived' myself as woman. Or maybe I reconceived myself. At any rate, it had been extraordinary and surprising to find myself -- a conventionally religious woman in my late thirties -- suddenly struck pregnant with a new consciousness, with an unfolding new awareness of what it means to be a woman and what it means to be spiritual as a woman" (p. 7).

Don't you love that phrase "struck pregnant"? I do.