The Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd Read Free Book Online Page A

talking about my surface revelings in being feminine. It was telling me something much more complex. It was telling me that I’d lost the voice of my native soul, or as novelist Ursula K. Le Guin put it, the innate mother tongue. I had learned instead to speak the father tongue, the dominant cultural language. 11
    Inside I felt like something submerged in me from the beginning of time had slit the surface. Some awful, sunken truth I didn’t want to acknowledge had floated up to awareness. Maybe that humiliating Father Sue comment had dislodged it. Or maybe the comment was merely the debris of a truth already rising. For a moment I tried to pretend the thought hadn’t come, but it was too late. My body had recognized it as the truth even before my mind could allow it. My heart was thudding, and my stomach was doing slow rolls into my chest.
    Next I was crying one of those shoulder-shaking cries. A girl, I thought. I was born a girl with three brothers. I felt utterly cheated. My anguish was so intense it shocked me. It was as if I felt inferior simply for being female—that as a woman I was damaged goods or at least “seconds.”
    I had somehow never known this about myself. It was terrible to admit, but even worse was feeling the pain that came with it. I thought, If I’d been born male, dear God! the things I could have done! I longed for parity with men, the freedom and choices of men, the ability to quest without worrying about who would cook dinner or pick up the children. I longed for the power men had to name the world, for the world had been largely male defined. Even God “himself” was defined by men and envisioned in their image.
    Being female had always seemed vaguely limiting, confining, lacking in power, second-class. As I tried to understand why, I found myself thinking about Eve. Some words played in my head, the old litany about women I’d heard in church: “second in creation and first to sin.” Some years before, the Southern Baptist denomination had passed a resolution saying that women should not have a place of authority over men in church because of this. It had come straight out of the epistle of 1 Timothy (2:11–14) written in the second century:
    Let a woman learn in silence with all submissiveness. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. (RSV)
    As I brooded over this, I remembered the first time I’d heard the words first to sin, second in creation. The memory was still vivid, undulled after more than twenty-five years.
    It was a Sunday morning, and I was around twelve. I sat in church in my childhood Georgia with my mother and father and two of my three younger brothers. We were listening to a visiting preacher give a sermon. It had to do with the “God-ordained family.” The preacher had a portable chalkboard beside the pulpit, and on it he diagrammed the family for us. He wrote God at the top, then in a descending chain of command he wrote husband, wife, children.
    I remembered the downward-pointing arrows he drew between each word, showing us the line of authority. When he got to the part about why wives were below husbands, I was on the edge of my pew. “Woman was the first to sin and the second to be created,” he said. Then he went on to talk about Eve, how she was created for man’s benefit, that she was unworthy because she disobeyed God and offered Adam the forbidden fruit.
    It was just like that day in Vacation Bible School when the teacher had informed us the Bible put men in charge. I felt the same rush of disbelief and betrayal.
    By then I’d heard the message many times, but that day it fell like the proverbial last straw, the one that breaks the female camel’s back. I listened to this “man of God” taking his message right out of what we