(Re)Turning to the Goddess: Women’s Emancipation via Mythically Refusing Oppressive Patriarchal Fables

Statistically, the so-called "nuclear" family is deeply harmful to women. Due to suffering male violence, my study's female and gender-fluid participants all refused the stereotype of women as needing a man's leadership, as is compelled in patriarchal religions. Instead, they configured their families into woman-led configurations—in deliberate defiance of current patriarchal social norms. To do so, they reconstructed their personal identities via religious myth which reflected their realities as women of power, wisdom, and leadership. These individual mythic narratives were adapted to their new circumstances, explicitly created to profoundly reflect their individual, intersectional realities and embody essential truths about their diverse conditions. These transcendent narratives were united only in their exaltation of an inspiring and leadership-authorizing female deity; the actual mythic manifestations ranged widely from Nature embodied as woman, through deeply researched worship of ancient goddesses; from a mythic reinterpretation in which the worshipper becomes Goddess, to collective effervescence achieved through ritual bricolage. All these energizing, reinvented myths beautifully reflect the power, dignity, and diversity of both the women involved and their self-empowering social uses of myth—and clearly demonstrate the importance of women taking back the basic human right to craft their own narratives.