Salmacis

By Sophia Siedlberg

6 November 2008

It has to be a generational thing which I find particularly ironic. If I know anything about feminism, it certainly does touch on my internalized thinking in many ways. Much of my internalized thinking seems to involve a lot of things normally associated with “female spirituality”. I am not sure how that came about because I tended to avoid writings and works specifically about “female spirituality” because again for me it is distinctly dimorphic and that is something I really do not like.  But feminism has in an ironic way managed to fit almost exactly with this internalized thinking that has been going on since I was a kid.

There is an old tradition that goes on about three women. I think this would be familiar to Wiccans as the “Maid, Mother and Crone”, but my own religious sources are essentially a mix of Sumer and later Semitic belief systems. I am a monotheist, but here is the paradox. This stuff was a part of monotheism, certainly during the Second Temple Era of Judaism and Christianity. My grandmother named me after it, “Sophia”, meaning “wisdom”. Though the name is Hellenic (in Hebrew this would be Bina), to me it conveys something about “feminine wisdom”. Then why the religious stuff? Well, it is purely symbolic, but there were three phases of feminism, and for me there were three distinct phases to my life which I often associate with that symbolism. The way I have interacted with feminism seems to correspond with it quite well. (Hence the three “Non-rite” illustrations.).

When you look at feminism as it evolved, (yes my grandmother was a first wave feminist and my mother was (without any doubt, she probably still reads Greer as if she were a prophet.) a second wave feminist, would that make me a third wave feminist? Probably not because my experience of life is rather mixed and blended in terms of what would be considered masculine and feminine. It is however interesting that third wave feminism is accepting of a wider diversity of people. We still get “female exclusive places”, but they just happen as they did in Wales with my grandmother’s friends, rather than be created as a forced concept to make a point. There is certainly a lot less talk about class, race and biological fatalism, where a “Woman” is white, middle class, has XX chromosomes, a copy of Germaine Greer’s stupidly entitled “Female eunuch” and annoys people for the sake of it. No, this third wave stuff seems to be a lot more open and would be associated with today’s very well read generation. You get a complete library of resources about people in different cultures. I remember reading about Sojourner Truth, who was an African American woman who was treated no better than an animal during the times of slavery. And she spoke out against it, protesting about how the white women were getting all the perks in life while she was used and abused.

I was told about her by third wave feminists (they called themselves that). What interests me is this woman who lived centuries ago, who could not be more different from me, rang true when railing against exactly the sort of injustice I rail against now. OK, I am a “Half Jewish, intersex antichrist” (to quote the pointlessly superstitious) who is as white as a ghost. But what Sojourner Truth said rings down the ages and speaks to me, and no it is not just the “Ain’t I a woman” bit either, but in the context of what she said:

“That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?”

Then she came out with a very astute remark:

“Then that little man in black there, he says women can't have as much rights as men, 'cause Christ wasn't a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.

If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.”

Believe it or not, that is third wave feminism. OK, we have the words of a woman in her fifties delivering a speech in 1851. So what has it got to do with predominantly younger women today? Well, that sort of oppression still goes on, and only certain types of women get justice, not all. Third wave feminism seems to speak against that. With me it is an issue of being oppressed because I was actually born sexless, certainly not an issue of race or slavery. But the common thread is clearly the same for me at least, and it was someone professing third wave feminism that told me about this, and saw that common thread.

Am I a third wave feminist? Well, only if I am invited, I am still what I am, a hermaphrodite from birth. Not that I am being separatist or anything like that, but I am in this habit of saying “Ain’t I human”, just as Sojourner Truth was also saying when you read it more closely, consider the fact that her children were sold off into slavery and in comparison to the white women, she was treated like a dog, Sojourner Truth was talking as someone living in very brutal times. Third wave feminism echoes with voices like hers.

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