Research Catalog

Title

Women's mysteries : toward a poetics of gender / Christine Downing.

Author

Downing, Christine, 1931-

Publication

New York : Crossroad, 1992.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xii, 196 pages : illustrations; 24 cm

Summary

In Women's Mysteries Christine Downing celebrates the gains and achievements of women, psychologically speaking, as they have been recovered, reclaimed, repossessed by women over the past several decades. Her title is itself a conscious appropriation, in homage, of a book Esther Harding wrote fifty years ago and an extension of her own much celebrated book The Goddess. Believing that women have "become stong and clear enough to move outside our sequestered circle," Downing argues that "it is time to move beyond a focus on the psychology of women to a psychology of the human." Specifically what she works toward is a "poetics of gender," seeing gender as a created reality always in the process of being made and remade, exploring the ways we humans imagine sexual difference and what longing and fears these images betray, admitting that "man" and "woman" are fictive terms, images that hide as well as reveal. Women's Mysteries is a marvelously humane mix of the intellectual and the personal, the conceptual and the poetic, the mythological and the psychological, a book "written from a female perspective... about and for all human beings."

Subject

• Femininity
• Women > Psychology
• Sex differences (Psychology)
• Feminist psychology
• Weiblichkeit
• Feminismus
• Psychologie
• Frau

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. [179]-188) and index.

Contents

1. Initiation: A Tribute to Esther Harding -- 2. Rites of Incorporation -- Speaking Among Ourselves -- Foremothers and Forefathers -- Rites of Separation -- Poetics of Gender -- 3. Rites of Exorcism -- Jung and Freud -- Herstory of Psychology -- Beyond Psychology -- 4. Body and Soul -- Anatomy and Destiny -- Poetics of the Body -- Mysteries of Female Embodiment -- Women Born of Woman -- Bleeding and Ceasing to Bleed -- Sexual Awakening and Fulfillment -- Birth Giving and Nurturing -- Aging and Dying -- 5. Rites of Ancient Ripening -- Figure of the Crone -- Ambivalent Gifts of Aging -- 6. Even the Gods Will Die -- Poets and Prophets -- Beginning at the Beginning -- Beyond the Anthropomorphic -- Egyptian Goddesses.

ISBN

• 0824511972
• 9780824511975

LCCN

92017501

OCLC

• ocm25874339
• 25874339
• SCSB-1965459

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library