The Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd Page B

moment of truth descends kerplunk! at her feet—that in this family, this church, this culture, female is the less-prized gender. She starts to feel that her gender has somehow “dropped the ball.” And without even being aware of what she’s doing, she may try to make up for it by going through life trying to win love, validation, and esteem from the father-world.
    The Silent Woman
    Throughout all this unnaming I was doing, I kept thinking back to the sketches I’d drawn of the mouthless woman. I knew they were attempts to capture the pattern of the Silent Woman in myself.
    I began to reflect on the ways I’d withheld my opinions, muzzled disconcerting truths, refrained from expressing my true feelings, squelched my riskier ideas, or thwarted my creativity. When I did that, I was living out the script of the Silent Woman. Being a Silent Woman is not about being quiet and reticent, it’s about stifling our truth. Our real truth.
    I wondered, Had silence encroached as I internalized the message of inferiority? Had I learned that silence was a safe place?
    Some of the scripting concerning silence has come from the church, from Bible verses like this one: “Let a woman learn in silence, with all submissiveness” (1 Timothy 2:11, RSV ). We may not claim this verse as a guiding principle, but it’s there inside us nonetheless.
    Overall, women’s voices have not been encouraged unless they spoke as mouthpieces for the party line. Quiet ladies who held their tongues were loved and lauded. Uppity, pioneering women who spoke their minds and said bold things were attacked and sanctioned. “And that plays into our greatest fear, which is goingagainst convention and having love and approval taken away,” says writer Erica Jong. 38
    Very often silence becomes the female drug of choice.
    I grew aware that while I spoke a lot, much of the time my deepest words, my outrage, the voice of my feminine soul, were silent. For the first time I began to feel the confinement of my creative voice. There were things I wanted to say, needed to say, yet they didn’t lie within the boundaries of “Christian writing.” In Gail Godwin’s novel, A Southern Family , one of her characters, a writer, wonders if she writes “to satisfy the tastes of the culture that shaped me.” 39 Now I wondered, Had I? Where had I hedged, pulled back, or diluted my truth?
    As I reflected on these questions, I stumbled by chance upon the Greek myth of Philomela. It is the story behind the Silent Woman, and it goes like this: While traveling to see her sister, Philomela was raped by her brother-in-law, Tereus. Outraged, she threatened to tell her sister and the world what he’d done to her. He responded by cutting out her tongue and banishing her to a guarded tower where she was forced to live in silence.
    Eventually, though, she seemed to know that if she continued to be silent she would die. So Philomela began to weave a series of tapestries that became her voice and told her story. She then enlisted an old woman to take them to her sister, who came and liberated her.
    The myth is about the loss of women’s voices. It suggests that the source of female silence is the rape of the feminine—the devaluation and violation of femaleness. It suggests that when women protest this violation, their voices are frequently squelched through ridicule, sanction, and fear of reprisal. In the public arena, at church, work, and home, women’s tongues are often silenced when we dare to speak our anger, truths, and visions.
    In 1993 the Councils of Churches in the Twin Cities and Minnesota sponsored a Re-imagining Conference. I didn’t attend but I read about the multiplicity of women’s voices that were raised there expressing women’s truths, imagining bold feminine imagesof God, and presenting new challenges to the church. I also read dozens of editorials and letters to denominational