Books: Just finished, just started

I recently finished reading Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times by Elizabeth Wayland Barber, originally published in 1994. It's a fascinating look at the invention and evolution of textile work, from the discovery of how to spin thread, to the weaving of cloth, to the economic impact on various cultures over the millenia, and the ways in which we still hold on to habits followed for thousands of years. I'm not really going to go into depth on everything I loved about this book, but it's an easy read and will definitely open one's eyes to the not-so-rigid roles of women and men in ancient times.

That led me to pick up a book that's the perfect follow-up: When God Was a Woman, by Merlin Stone (originally published in 1976) is even more of an eye opener. The preface alone is enough to make my feminist blood boil when I think about all the insidious ways patriarchal thinking has warped thousands of years of knowledge. Just take this one sentence in her preface: "Paying closer attention to semantics, subtle linguistic undertones and shades of meaning, I noticed that the word 'cult,' which has the implicit connotations of something less fine or civilized than 'religion,' was nearly always applied to the worship of the female deities, not by ministers of the Church but by presumably objective archaeologists and historians." Again and again, women are objectified and vilified in the same breath. (And why oh why did she feel the need to capitalize the word church?) For millennia, early civilizations revered women not only for their childbearing ability, but for their wisdom and strength, and for their equal ability to contribute to the community both physically and intellectually. In short, both men and women valued the whole woman. It wasn't until the advent of male-deities and male-worshiping religions (dare I say cults?) that had to violently destroy female deities and female-worshiping religions to assert dominance. That pattern exists to this day, so how can we truly start to understand how deeply all of us, women and men, have been forced into an unnatural and unbalanced relationship with our own humanity? It seems to me to be all the more natural to worship a female deity, even if only from the point of creation myths. Women are the bearers of the world, after all. We are creation incarnate. Worshiping a male deity is just plain weird. I'll talk more on this when I've gotten deeper into the book, or maybe after I've finished it.

In lighter reading (fiction), I tend to listen to the same audiobooks over and over again because I like comforting background noise when I'm driving or working in the studio. I love listening to Persuasion by Jane Austen, read by Juliet Stevenson, Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne, read by Jim Dale, and A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness, read by Jennifer Ikeda. All of the narrators are brilliant and I just love these books.