From I Am A Woman Finding My Voice by Janet F. Quinn, PhD, RN

INTRODUCTION

    We sat in a small circle of women on the reddest earth I have ever seen. There had been a recent rain, and the new desert growth was so brilliantly green and shiny that it looked almost plastic. Some of us played the musical sticks, hitting them together in time with the clapping of the old ones as they sang a song of beginning. The sticks are hand carved by the men, then elaborately decorated by the women as they all sit together around the central fire singing. The wood itself is Mulgar, which is plentiful in that desert, and which has an unforgettable, pungent smell that is released with the warmth of ones hands around it or as it burns in the fire. Sometimes still I hold those sticks until the aroma gives itself up to me, and I remember.

    The singing quieted and Nganyinytja, the Aboriginal elder who had invited us to her place in the heart of the Australian outback, spoke through the translator. Her fingers never stopped drawing in the soft, silky dirt, illustrating her words with symbols and images. "We will talk now of women’s business. This business belongs only to the women. Women must never speak of this business to men, or when men are present. The men have men’s business, and will not speak of it to the women."

    I was quick to respond. I asked the translator to query Nganyinytja about which is more important, women’s business or men’s business. Our teacher looked at me curiously. She shook her head slowly back and forth, and I assumed that she had not understood the question, so I asked it in a different way. Which has more status in the tribe, I wanted to know, men’s business or women’s business? I was, of course, assuming that I already knew the answer.

    The translator once again queried our teacher. Nganyinytja again shook her head back and forth and finally spoke, drawing a circle in the sand and moving her fingers around it, over and over, deepening it with each pass. Diana translated. "She says she understands your words, but your question makes no sense. There is no business which is more important than any other. All business, women’s business, men’s business, is needed for the sake of the whole. All the work must be done, it is all important to the whole tribe."

    Nganyinytja looked away, paused, and then began our lessons in women’s business. And while all of these teachings were meaningful to me, the first teaching I received from Nganyinytja will always be the most powerful. In that one moment, hundreds and hundreds of miles from any form of modern life, and thousands of miles from my civilized, politically correct, academic world, I had been given a new understanding of feminism. I have never been the same.

    This book is a celebration of the feminine soul. Perhaps it is still not politically correct to speak of such a thing as a uniquely feminine soul, but in finding my own voice, I must speak of it anyway. The feminism of the 1960’s and ‘70’s was a critical step in the achievement of equality for women. We fought for equal pay for equal work; equal opportunities for education and employment, and the right to choose whether we would marry or not, have children or not, stay at home or not. These battles needed to be fought, positions needed to be articulated, laws needed to be created. As a woman who came of age during the Women’s Movement, I have both contributed to and benefited from the advancements which have been made in women’s rights. It had to happen, and maybe it happened the only way it could.

    But somehow, here at mid-life in the late nineties, it seems to me that we may have lost something at least as valuable as the rights we gained. Somehow we decided that to be equal to men meant we needed to be the same as men. Somehow we decided that to be heard, we had to speak in men’s voices, to be seen we had to wear men’s clothes, to count we had to do men’s jobs. Off we went, a whole generation of women, into every facet of American work life, double-breasted suits and hard-hats; briefcases and lunch pails. Whatever they could do, we could do, maybe even better. And certainly whatever we had been doing, we didn’t have to do anymore.

    Yet as a friend said recently, a lot got lost in the pinstripes. Somehow in the process we lost our own authentic voice, the voice of the deep feminine soul, and settled for a genderless, neutered equality. This book represents an attempt to regain that voice in all its dimensions; to reconnect with what it means to be a woman, and to celebrate it with joy and passion. For as Nganyinytja taught us, we need "all the business" for the good of the whole. It does not serve us or our world to value one voice more than the other, the masculine more than the feminine, men’s business more than women’s business. Nor does it serve us any longer to keep denying that men and women are, well, different. The world needs all the tender, loving, caring feminine energy women can give it, not instead of our power and our strength, but served by them.

    Finding our voices as women is not a matter of picking out one note and singing it for life; it is not so simplistic an idea as the reduction of women to some predetermined list of traits or qualities. Women’s voice is far more like an orchestra than a single instrument; more like a complex harmony than a single chord. Finding our voice is discovering all of the notes that comprise our deepest self and claiming our right to express them as the song which is uniquely ours to sing. Finding our voice is about allowing the full volume and tonal quality of our whole being to be expressed; it’s about the liberty to compose a unique and personal rendition of the essential womanliness which is expressing itself through each of us.

    Most of all, above all, beyond all, is this: a woman who has found her full voice, who can express the symphony of her heart’s passion, her soul’s wisdom, her body’s phenomenal strength and beauty, and her mind’s knowing is a woman who is free to be fully who she was born to be. As long as there are notes and chords and melodies of experience within us which we disown, or which we remain fearful of expressing, or which we are prevented from expressing, we are not free.

    This freedom matters mightily, not just to the individual woman but to all women, to all beings, because we are not separate from one another. When one woman becomes more free, all women become more free. And as more and more women become free, there is more freedom for the feminine energies, the energies of relationship and connection, to pour forth on a world that desperately needs more, not less of this essential stuff.

    When we find our own, authentic voices as women, we use our power to nurture life, love, relationship and community, not corporate takeovers and the accumulation of wealth. We become unafraid of sounding weak when we are speaking like women; we refuse to be embarrassed when we use our hard earned freedom to pursue our feminine visions of a world in which love really does matter - it does, you know, it matters the very most.

    When we recover our full song we come to a new place of understanding that we do not, never did, belong only to ourselves. We recognize that all our hard work, the painful, tediously hard work of giving birth to ourselves and becoming whole was for only one purpose. It is not simply to become the best that we can be - that is a means, not an end. We become healed, whole, and free so that we may become instruments for Love itself; so that we can give ourselves away, pour ourselves out in the service of life, and be filled again, over and over in the infinite circle of love and care and connection which is the whole. This is not pathological; this is not dysfunctional; this our birthright as women; this is the sound of singing ourselves home.