It was in 1969 that Joyce Weir and I decided to create a long retreat for women. We had struck up an alliance built on our own shared needs as women. We had been working inside complex organizations, with individual women and with small women’s groups in the USA. We knew that life in the all female group was very different from life in the mixed gender context. As both of us worked in organizations, we also knew that the politics of sexism, heterosexism, homophobia and misogyny were making life inside organizations very difficult for powerful women, younger and older. We determined ourselves to create a container, which would hold anything a woman needed to explore. And we did just that.
. Women’s Way is still very strong. The faculty today reflects the world we currently live in. We represent many of the diversities present in our world. We travel to Hope Springs each year to recreate this venerable learning form for the women who can join us for this year’s retreat.
, is a cultural anomaly in our times. Projects come and go in a year or two. We seem to be able to endure. I think we are in an ancient line of mystery traditions for women. We go as far back as the Greek mysteries at Delphi where the stories of the great Demeter and her daughter Persephone were revealed. We reach back into India where the living forces of the Divine Feminine wrapped the Hindu tradition in their arms. We reach into the Muslim world where women have deep and beautiful traditions and back into the world of the Hebrew Goddess, the Shekhinah. Many women of African descent can reach back into African traditions for strength. The indigenous traditions of all continents are welcome at Women'sWay.
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We are the seedbed for many, many other learning collaboratives in the USA and in other countries. Our experience-based teaching methodology is built around a group dynamics theory which has emerged through these three decades of work. It might be the first female-identified group dynamics theory which has emerged in a very long time. We teach from this theory. We build a community, which is utterly female-identified. We work from the female body, from women’s dreams and from the internal politics of the all female culture. Women can restore themselves here as well as challenge themselves to re-enter their lives with much stronger resolve to become activists in their worlds.
. I like that name because what really matters today is how you actually practice your own feminism, your female authority, your politics and your spiritual beliefs in your own small life. Activism is the result of creating the right balance of all these threads in your own life.
. We create economic access by working consciously with the money issues we all have. This work is expensive. You have to leave work, travel, get childcare for some, and sacrifice income. It is an expensive proposition. So we deal up front with these real time issues. We welcome young women who have a dream of becoming leaders. We welcome unemployed women who need a place to regroup. We welcome tired out working women. We do our best to deal with all the diversities that are present. |
