Navigating Self Actualization and the New Feminine

This week, over a civilized lunch at Jacque's Omlettes with my friend Sarah, the conversation turned to the complex place in which we find ourselves and our women friends. It's like we're shooting the rapids at the confluence of two great psychological and social rivers.  And it promises to be a long ride.

Challenge #1: Self-Actualization

We are a privileged group by world standards: well educated and enjoying an unprecedented level of personal security and social freedom.  If you picture psychologist Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of human needs, we are fortunate to have the basic business of shelter and survival in hand.  Also social support, and a measure of achievement.  Increasingly, we are trying to navigate the less-traveled terrain of self-actualization.  Maslow described self-actualization as "the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming."  It's easy to dismiss any terrors and growing pains in this process as nice problems to have.  And indeed they are.  But the need to grow in this way is no less insistent than the need for food or friendship.  And the anxiety, when this need is blocked, is intense.

I am reminded of my doctoral program.  The early years -- classes through comprehensive exams -- were quite structured, as we all marched lock-step through together.  But then most of those support structures fell away.  We were left flailing about, crafting researchable proposals, carrying out our research, and writing the dissertations.  Each candidate had to find his or her individual path: by definition, unique and uncharted.  The paradox was that it was virtually impossible to navigate alone.  There is no way I could have done it without guidance from my advisors, companionship and intellectual play with my colleagues, and the support of friends and family.  And so it is with self-actualization, with expressing our whole selves and full potential in the world: by definition a unique and ultimately personal endeavor, while also impossible to manage alone.

Challenge #2: Redefining the Feminine

Meanwhile, we're entering this stage of our lives at a time when our feminine identities, our roles as women, are also in a state of flux.  The women's movement of the 1960s reflected a large-scale collective hunger to stretch beyond the traditionally feminine roles of wife and mother, care-giver and home-maker.  A hunger to push and express and hazard ourselves in the wider world.  The courage and determination of that generation of women, and the generation that followed, have given Sarah and me, and our peers, the platform to ask "are we there yet?  Is this it?"

My sense is that western women, collectively, are feeling that this is not "it", not yet.  Too many of us have, in the immortal words of Gloria Steinem, "become the men we wanted to marry".  We have adopted, often with great success, traditionally masculine ways of thinking and acting at work.  Then we go home and try to assume more "feminine" ways in our personal lives.  The result is a pervasive feeling that something is missing, that life doesn't quite fit either at work or at home, that some essential light has gone out.  Others, who have chosen to stay at home and raise their children, do so with a nagging sense that their choice is somehow unsupported or out of step.

Fortunately, this discomfort is balanced by an equally strong feeling that something new is trying to be born through us.  What if we could evolve new ways of being women, that were:

• Powerful and generative in the world
  
• Deeply connected to our inner selves, other people, and the planet
  
• Supporting the fullest development of our potential, individually and as a society
• Grounded in love and respect for our bodies, and our value
  
• Beautiful, brilliant, joyful
• In loving partnership with men
  

What might that look like?  We don't fully know yet.  But something new and alive and hopeful is already beginning to come through.  We're catching glimpses of it in other women and in ourselves.  That itchiness you're feeling?  It's collective.  And the good news is that there are lots of passionate pioneering women exploring this frontier.  I'll introduce some of them in my next post.

So that's what Sarah and I were talking about at lunch: the complexity of living at the intersection of these two powerful impulses, in the Wild West of so much uncharted territory.  Only one thing is clear to me: the two must be engaged together.  I cannot be fiercely whole as a person without being so as a woman as well.  Who else is here, too?  How can we help each other as we go?  And what wonders can we create?

Comments

[Elliptical reviews]

No offense, but if there's a facebook like button, it'll be much easier for me to share.