Grateful for the Privilege

By Deb Lemire
The Shifting Times Magazine, March 2000

The fact that most of society pays only lip service to the importance of women was something I had grown up with. It had affected me and other women I knew, but we made subtle adjustments- compromises. With the birth of my daughter two and a half years ago, I was suddenly thrown into a panic. I mean, it was okay for ME to have to compromise, but certainly not for MY daughter! How will I teach her to be strong and to know her power and her beauty? Am I equipped to take on this task? Answering these questions was now an immediate, overwhelming need.

Rachel was born in 1997. I was just about to turn 35. I was aware of many issues surrounding the rights and privileges of women in this world, but only peripherally. Something I hate to actually admit out loud. When Rachel was 5 months old, I received a phone call from a professional theatre company looking for female actors to perform a piece at a local library. It was a paying gig. Rachel was weaned and it would be my first venture out from under the veil that surrounds you as you bring a new life into the world and are its only food source. I was looking forward to it. The performance piece was about the suffrage movement of the 1800's and those who fought for a woman's right to vote. I was to play Susan B. Anthony. Okay. I knew who she was. Helped us get the right to vote. Was on the short-lived one dollar coin.

So I went to the first rehearsal and found out there were many women and men (whose names I now know) who worked tirelessly, risking everything, their families, their lives, just so women could participate in a process we take for granted today. I was in awe of their perseverance. I was humbled by their sacrifice.

As it turned out I continued working with this theatre group on a wide variety of theatrical endeavors. Almost a year later I was contracted to direct a play that had come to our attention. The play was Mother Wove the Morning, by Carol Lynn Pearson. When I first heard the title I was drawn to the comfortable feeling it evoked. The play brought sixteen women from history, 20,000 BC to the present, to the stage to speak their lives. Originally it was produced as a one-woman show. A daunting task to say the least. Playwright Carol Lynn Pearson had given permission for her work to be adapted. I adapted the piece for three female actors.

I began my research on the sixteen characters presented in the play. Each character was a true woman from history and the playwright's resources were listed in the back of the book, so off to the library I went. I don't remember exactly what I thought I would find. But I never expected what I did find. God was a woman! Not just in a funny, ha ha, bumper sticker kinda way, but for real. There she was. For 30,000 years the human family knew their creator as female. There was even proof! Proof in artifacts and prehistoric drawings and tools that have been uncovered. Our ancestors worshipped a female deity. I was shocked to find so much written about it. Where has all this information been? Why didn't I know about it before? I have come to find out that in many feminist theory- minded circles, these are loaded questions.

I read everything on the resource list and more. I still have a huge stack on my dining room table. I read about Rachel in the Old Testament, who risks her life to hold on to her right to keep a piece of her matrilineal heritage so her children will know their ancestors. Lydia from 1000 BC who remembers a painful story of her father's willingness to sacrifice her life in exchange for the life of a Levite priest. I was captured by the delightful musing of Io the Greek after attending the play The Eumenides by Aeschylus and the wry wit of the witch waiting for the stake in 1432. Overwhelming was the conflict Emma Smith, wife of Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, struggled with; and the gratitude of a woman freed from slavery by Mother Ann Lee the founder of the Shaker movement. And so they go on. Each woman fighting in her own way for the right of equal value and importance, encouraging us to do the same.

It has been a privilege to work with Ms. Pearson on her play. It had such a profound impact on me that I started my own production company, Queen Bee Productions.producing staged works that promote equity for women. I want to enable as many people as possible to see this powerful work.

Needless to say, my concept of the universe was expanded. And I am both grateful and troubled. Grateful that I can look at the whole history of the human family and realize that, for most of our species existence on this planet, the Goddess was the center of life as society knew it. Troubled that most people only acknowledge the recent years of our society's plunge into patriarchy. Grateful that I now know that male supremacy was a male invention. Troubled as to my inability to do anything about it. Grateful that I have a dining room table full of books that explore beyond what I have always been told. Troubled that the history books found in our schools give very little space to the accomplishments of Susan B. and her contemporaries.

Grateful that I have met, (married!), read and worked with many people who realize the importance of being female. Troubled that I will not be able to protect my daughter from all of those who will want to crush her spirit because of her femaleness.

Grateful that I can now answer those questions for my daughter.no trouble there.