Goddesses in Every Woman

 Jean Shinoda Bolen’s Goddesses in Every Woman discusses the archetypes that have powerful effects on the way women define themselves. They stand for the forces and potentials inside a woman’s personality, and provide the basis for self-identification either through the predominance of one archetype or the combination of several archetypes at once. The understanding of the seven discussed archetypes provides the key to women for their self-knowledge and wholeness. The archetypes used by Bolen are based on the Greek mythology and as a Jungian she uses them to define female possibilities of personality. In this role, she addresses how these archetypes show up in the individual as well as the collective Western culture and influence women and society in positive and negative ways. The spectrum of archetypal possibilities reaches from the autonomous Artemis, distant Athena to the nurturing Demeter and creative Aphrodite, and explains how to decide which one to foster, cultivate, or overcome, as well as how to employ the power of these enduring archetypes to gain further understanding and control of one’s life. This knowledge is useful, because it helps women and their society to understand the existing stereotypes and enable the individual woman to rise above the predominant archetypes within her and gain awareness and control of these forces by employing them in the way that is most suitable for her. Understanding the mechanisms and behaviors behind archetypes also enables women to analyze and comprehend the important female relations in their lives.

I found it encouraging that Bolen detaches herself form the reductionist stereotypes that are most common in Western culture to describe a richer and more rounded potential of women. She calls women to take initiative to know themselves and become aware of their potentials, as opposed to comply with the roles others have defined for them in their lives. She calls on them to become heroines, and to start writing their own storyline in a conscient way rather than flying on autopilot. Women are invited to learn about the variety of their inner potentials to improve their own lives and the relationships with those around them, especially other females.

Bolen also emphasizes at the end of her book that a woman needs to achieve wholeness as her path to ‘home’. This conquest ends in the union of opposites or the inner marriage of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, being active and receptive, being autonomous and intimate, in short developing a rich and well rounded personality.

For once, Bolen’s Goddesses in Every Woman provided me with a better understanding of the        struggle of women for their identity in the Western culture.

Having  girls of my own, I appreciated the insight into the potential forces within a woman that she is encouraged to explore in order to achieve self-knowledge and self-actualization. It is important to encourage our daughters to explore their possibilities and potentials with the awareness and self knowledge that enables them to look behind the ‘obvious’ and explore their deeper inner being to help them to overcome narrow stereotypes and roles that are tailored to small and limited to fit their wholeness.

I personally believe that it is a good thing to remind women of the reality that they are more likely to face ‘natural’ life stages of being throughout their life time than men are, because of their ability and the accompanying psychological needs of women to be mothers and caretakers. Very often the image most represented in the Western culture is the woman that ‘lives like a man’, independent and successful. While this is absolutely possible to achieve, it comes at a prize, as well as the decision of having children, which carries the potential to dramatically change a woman’s life in many unexpected ways. I appreciate the reasonable and realistic way Bolen addresses these life stages and points our awareness to them.