The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman's Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine (Plus)

The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman's Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine (Plus)

Selected Book Details

  • Paperback
  • Author: Sue Monk Kidd
  • Publisher: HarperOne
  • Release Date: January 2007
  • ISBN-10: B002PJ4I5M
  • ISBN-13: B002PJ4I5M
  • List Price: $13.95

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Summaries and Customer Reviews provided by Amazon

Summary

"I was amazed to find that I had no idea how to unfold my spiritual life in a feminine way. I was surprised, and, in fact, a little terrified, when I found myself in the middle of a feminist spiritual reawakening." ––Sue Monk Kidd

For years, Sue Monk Kidd was a conventionally religious woman. Then, in the late 1980s, Kidd experienced an unexpected awakening, and began a journey toward a feminine spirituality. With the exceptional storytelling skills that have helped make her name, author of When the Heart Waits tells her very personal story of the fear, anger, healing, and freedom she experienced on the path toward the wholeness that many women have lost in the church. From a jarring encounter with sexism in a suburban drugstore, to monastery retreats and to rituals in the caves of Crete, she reveals a new level of feminine spiritual consciousness for all women– one that retains a meaningful connection with the "deep song of Christianity," embraces the sacredness of ordinary women's experience, and has the power to transform in the most positive ways every fundamental relationship in a woman's life– her marriage, her career, and her religion.

This Plus edition paperback includes a recent interview with the author conducted by the book's editor Michael Maudlin.

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: Score = 4.5 Score = 4.5 Score = 4.5 Score = 4.5 Score = 4.5

An excellent example of Snake medicine.

Rating: Score = 5 Score = 5 Score = 5 Score = 5 Score = 5

Snake medicine is the power of transmutation. It is the energy of wholeness, cosmic consciousness, and the ability to experience anything willingly and without resistance. This willingness to experience is extremely courageous, as it brings into question many if not all of the "things that we know".
It is the knowledge that all things are equal in creation, and that those things which might be experienced or regarded as poison (both physicaly and spititualy) can be integrated and transmuted if one has the proper state of mind.
This medicine teaches you on a personal level that you are a universal being. Through accepting all aspects of your life, you can bring about the transmutation of the fire medicine. This fire energy, when functioning on the material plane, creates passion, desire, procreation, and physical vitality. On the emotional plane, it becomes ambition, creation, resolution, and dreams. On the mental plane, it becomes intellect, power, charisma, and leadership. When Snake energy reaches the spiritual plane, it becomes wisdom, understandig, wholeness, and connection to the Divine.
This is heavy magic, but remember, magic is no more than a change in consciousness.
Sue Monk Kidd appears to be well on her way to acheiving her personal goal of becoming a whole and healthy being. What astounds me is that she put it down in writing for the whole world to see and let the change in the course of her life happen both privately and publicly.
We should all have such courage.

Thouight Provoking Excellent Read!

Rating: Score = 5 Score = 5 Score = 5 Score = 5 Score = 5

This book has been the most thought inducing I've read in many years! An amazing read!

The Dance of the Dissident Daughter

Rating: Score = 5 Score = 5 Score = 5 Score = 5 Score = 5

Amazing book; one of the five books that most changed my life. Great spiritual guidebook, great resources for us women in recovery from broken patriarchal systems.

Past the beginning it's boring

Rating: Score = 1 Score = 1 Score = 1 Score = 1 Score = 1

The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, by Sue Monk Kidd, tells about a conventional Christian woman nearing her forties who is suddenly at odds with the religion she has followed her entire life. Kidd's "awakening" was fueled by an event involving her fourteen year-old daughter. The author picked up daughter from her job at a drugstore, and saw her daughter on her knees stocking shelves. Two middle-aged men walked by her and one man said, "Now that's how I like to see a woman--on her knees" (Kidd 7). This statement forces Kidd to think about the ways many Christian religions place women beneath men, or on their knees. She explores what it means to be spiritual woman free of the insubordination of men. Her purpose for writing the book is for women to reexamine their spiritual life and realize that they have been searching for the Sacred Feminine all their life, even if they hadn't realized it (Kidd 3). To Kidd, the Sacred Feminine involves seeing God as a woman, feeling empowered as a women, and being in tune with the world around you.
I found the first 35 pages of the book to be eye opening, but in the end I didn't feel the need to seek the Sacred Feminine. Kidd researches how other women found the Sacred Feminine and includes this in her book. I think Kidd does this because her goal in this book is to convince women, especially traditional Christian women, that they should find the Sacred Feminine. However, I feel that the route Kidd takes to find the Sacred Feminine, exploring Greek Goddesses and nature, would not be taken by most Christian women. While Kidd has a strong message in this book, that message is mostly developed in the beginning of the book. After that it is easy for the reader to lose interest.
Throughout the book Kidd never explicitly defines what the Sacred Feminine means. I think she does this on purpose because she believes the journey to the Sacred Feminine is different for everyone. For her, the Sacred Feminine means being in tune with herself and everything else in the world, such as nature and other people. It means not being ashamed of being a woman and instead feeling empowered. Kidd finds the Sacred Feminine in Goddesses of ancient Greek mythology, nature, and in the Bible.
I find the beginning of Kidd's book to be enlightening. She examines the ways that traditional Christian religions suppress women. I find many of these to be true in the church that I attend. She also discusses how the church uses a language that leads people to believe God is a man, when actually, God is genderless. This point is further developed later in the book when Kidd shares a story about a little girl who kept referring to God as "he". When her mother asked why she thought God was a man, the girl replied, "I guess because God thought that was the best thing to be" (Kidd 138). Kidd says "there is something infinitely sad about little girls who grow up understanding (usually unconsciously) that if God is male, it's because male is the most valuable thing to be" (Kidd 138). I agree with this statement. Kidd says to solve this problem we need refer to God in feminine terms just as frequently as we use masculine terms.
Referring to God in feminine terms is one way to empower women. The way Kidd came to empowerment involved abandoning the beliefs of Christianity, and I believe that there are ways to empower women within Christianity. Kidd says she finds a way to balance the two (Christianity and the Sacred Feminine) in the end, but I don't believe this happened. In Christianity, idolatry is not acceptable. This is stated in two of the Ten Commandments: "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" and "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven images (Exodus 20:2-3). She travels to places that worship Goddesses, and sets up an altar in her back yard where she often presents gifts and performs rituals to honor Mother Nature.
Although I found a couple good points in the book later on, it was hard because the book became hard to follow after the first 35 pages. I thought this was in part because of the excessive number of quotes Kidd included in her writing. I felt Kidds' journey was interrupted by other writers. The first section of the book consists of 64 pages. Of those pages there are 63 references to different people, some of which she references twice. I felt most of these quotes were completely unnecessary. Kidd also spent a large part of the book recounting Greek myths of Goddesses. She related the myths to her own journey, but again I found these myths to be more of an interruption to the author's personal story than a valuable addition.
Another reason I feel the book is slow after the beginning was because it is mostly Kidd's thought process. I think Kidd does this to show her readers this is not a change she entered into lightly. She completely strips away what she had thought about herself as a wife, a mother, and a Christian. She wants the readers to know that her change did not occur overnight, but was at times painstakingly slow. Unfortunately I think this part of the book is painfully slow for the audience to read as well. I found myself waiting to hear less about her thought process, and more about how her new spirituality influenced her life.
I had thought that the end of the book would show how Kidd's life changed as a result of her new spirituality, but it didn't.This book is subtitled A Woman's Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine and that is all you get from Kidd -- a journey. Kidd does not give much information on how her life changed as a result of her journey. She briefly says that she decided to leave her successful career as a Christian writer and begin writing fiction (which led to her write The Secret Life of Bees, a New York Times best seller). However, little else of her life after her journey was explained.
I would recommend the first 35 pages of the book to all Christian women. However, I would only recommend the remainder of the book to women who are already search for the Sacred Feminine. And even then unless readers are interested in Greek mythology and nature, I would not recommend this book to them. I believe most readers would only find this book frustrating and it would not have an impact on their spiritual life.

A DELIGHT TO READ

Rating: Score = 5 Score = 5 Score = 5 Score = 5 Score = 5

I really enjoyed reading this book. When I started reading it, I couldn't put it down. This book is about one woman's struggle to find the feminine divine. It's about her struggle and dissatisfaction with the patriarchal view and how so much is revolved around the male point of view and the exclusion of women. From everyday living to how our society views god as male.
As the author states in this book "Madonna Kolbenschlag suggests that if an awakened woman forgoes innocence and denial, is she refuses to make compromises with herself and defect to patriarchy, then her only option becomes deviance. I chose deviance. I chose to be a loving dissident. To dance the dance of dissidence." The author also says that becoming empowered as a woman required three very similar things (referring to an interview with Maya Angelou's on television on what it takes to be a good writer), a soul of one's own, the ability or means to voice it, and the courage to voice it at all. What powerful words.
I'm very impressed with her courage to search for what is true for her. I'm also impressed that her husband stood by her, although difficult for him at first. The author gives plenty of examples of how her search leads her to where she is today.