We Have Gathered Here Before: The Beginning
We've been here before, can we do better this time?
Welcome to the first installment of We Have Gathered Here Before - a book / multimedia project on female connection, how it was nearly been broken and how it can help us all rise again, if we’ll learn to let it.
This introductory post is available to all. Future installments will be for paid subscribers only.
TW: There are references to bullying, mental health issues, suicidal ideation, domestic abuse and sexual assault.
Female gatherings are having a moment. Women’s circles, red tents, motherhood communities, witch’s covens, wilderness retreats… coming together as women to celebrate femininity and honour our cycles and life stages in alignment with the seasons and shifts of the natural world seems, now, to be everywhere. It seems like a hot new trend - it certainly wasn’t something that was around when I was growing up, trying to make sense of what it meant to be a girl - but of course it’s not.
Women have been gathering like this for milennia, but somewhere along the way we stopped.
Not like other girls
I was born at the tail-end of 1983. As a child in the 80s and 90s, it wasn’t cool to be feminine. The trailblazers, the icons, were mostly women who were achieving power and status by doing it like the boys. I was a child in the age of power-dressing, the “greed is good” Thatcher era, the “ball-breakers” and “angry feminists” who were leading a new generation out of the kitchen. I was a teenager in the days of the “ladette”; women who could down pints faster than the boys, who swore and slept around, and didn’t need a man. I found it thrilling and empowering and exciting. But it still meant that I grew up believing that success and status were linked with masculinity.
To be “good”, to be doing life “right”, I needed to be one of the boys.
I was quite happy with that for a long time. I certainly didn’t feel like one of the girls. Not only because I rejected the dominant cultural view at the time of what it meant to be a girl - passive, quiet, soft, delicate, irrational, incapable, shallow, unintelligent - but because I didn’t feel comfortable in female spaces.
At my all-girls secondary school, I was badly bullied. Not only did the teachers not stop it, they seemed to condone it. I remember one lesson, during the summer when I must have been around 13 or 14, where the teacher had clearly given up for the year - when one student asked if she could show the video of her birthday party, she abandoned whatever she’d had planned for us and allowed this to take over the whole class. When the video showed several of my classmates making cruel comments about me, I looked over at the teacher to see if she would turn it off. She didn’t. She just sat there watching, looking bored, while the class laughed. Clearly no woman, of my peer group or of those with authority, was going to help me.
The bullying was relentless. At the age of 17, I had a breakdown and considered taking my own life. I somehow managed to finish my A-levels and get decent results. I took a year off, and then dragged myself to university, which I thought would be a fresh chapter. Except the bullying continued there, too. I was, on reflection, still in an emotionally vulnerable state, and lacked the confidence to go out and make new friends. So I was largely at the mercy of the girls in my hall of residence, who were not kind. It all culminated in me being sexually harassed by a female housemate, and spending the end of my final year hiding in my then-boyfriend’s house.
I felt safer with men. They didn’t say things about me behind my back, they didn’t seem to set out to be cruel. I was always seen as a bit of a “tom boy” - never a girly girl, always wanting to ride bikes and climb trees with the boys on my street rather than playing with dolls with the girls. In my 20s, I liked to hang out in the pub with the lads, drinking, smoking, swearing - I felt cool, but, also, I felt accepted. Most of my friends were male, and I took pride in being told that I wasn’t “like other girls”. This was a common trope in 90s movies, always seen as a great honour to be bestowed on the female lead by her love interest. It made me feel special to have those words said to me, too.
It makes me shudder, now, to remember it, but, like all of us, I was a product of the society in which I’d been raised. I considered myself to be a feminist, and I come from a long line of strong women who defied societal expectations of femininity; I was raised to believe, powerfully, in equality and female empowerment. But, somewhere along the line, I had drunk the patriarchal kool-aid and become convinced that being empowered as a woman meant being more like a man. That “masculine” was better than “feminine”. That I needed men’s approval to be valid.
The crumbling
In hindsight, I tell myself that I should have seen it coming. I feel that I was naive. But I was young - of course I was naive. I’ve never done this life before, how could I know the mysterious rules and the repeating patterns? Even if you believe that some of us have been here before - and I don’t know what I believe on that score - I’ve been told, repeatedly, that I’m a brand new soul. By anyone’s measure, I’ve never done this dance before, I am still getting to grips with the steps.
So, perhaps inevitably, the patriarchy fucked me over. I wish I could say that there was one incident that woke me up and set me on a path to find worth on my own terms. But it was a series of events - a long, slow arse-kicking from the patriarchy, that ground me down until I was such a find powder that there wasn’t enough substance to me to be caught by their net any longer. I slipped through the gaps. And realised there was something underneath. That there could be another way of life.
After all those experiences - including emotionally abusive relationships, sexually threatening bosses, street harassment, sexual assault, maternity discrimination, birth trauma at the hands of professionals who refused to believe my experiences, and a stalker - I finally recognised the patriarchal system for what it was. That it would screw me, and anyone else, over in its pursuit of power. I also came to realise that the men that I had put my trust in, the people who I had believed were my friends, who cared about me, had only ever wanted to screw me. I found myself fending off one drunken pass after another, until I found myself alone. There was no one left.
Finding a tribe
I did, finally, in my late 20s, find real connection. I went back to university at the age of 27 to study a masters degree, and had an entirely different experience from my undergraduate years. I met a group of close female friends with whom I could be truly myself. With whom I could relax, knowing that they wouldn’t gossip about me behind my back, wouldn’t suddenly turn around and drop me. People that I could disagree with, navigate issues with, and still come away as friends - problems weren’t sources of drama and dysfunction, they were to be solved and repaired. Together.
I loved those girls. I still love them. I still consider them to be some of my closest friends, part of my chosen family. Yet time has taken its toll - it has scattered us to the winds. We are now separated, living all around the world. Keeping in touch, getting to see each other, gets harder and harder as everyone follows their own paths of careers and families in different directions.
I found myself alone again.
But now I had a greater sense of direction. I knew that the world needed to change, and I’d had a glimpse of how it could be better. I wanted to build a new world, and it was other women who offered to work with me.
I started to be part of women’s networks, and I found healing in the solidarity and support that I received from other women. As I heard other women’s stories and shared my own, I began to find the courage to put myself back together out of that pile of dust that I had become. I felt able to fight back.
I co-founded a diversity and inclusion consultancy with one particularly incredible and inspirational woman, and we set out to make the world a fairer place for everyone. We are still working towards a vision of the future where no one will feel ground down, degraded and devalued like we have been.
I started writing about my experiences, and using my words to help other women find the same validation and support that I had been gifted. I found confidence in my words again, having previously submitted to demands for me to be silent. To shut up and get on with it. To stop complaining. I wanted to make my voice heard again. I wanted, I still want, to tell people that life doesn’t have to be this way. Doesn’t have to be society’s way.
Then I discovered women’s circles. This opened up a whole new world to me, one where women came together to find strength in femininity. Where power wasn’t only to be found in the masculine; where different kinds of power could exist. Where women could share, openly and honestly, and be held and validated. Where, together, we could challenge the dominant ideals of womanhood, of society, of the ways we live. I made some incredible connections through those gatherings, with women who I now consider to be dear friends. But, unfortunately, it wasn’t all as beautiful on the inside as it appeared from the outside.
I was driven out of the women’s circle that I had found such comfort in. Essentially, I didn’t show enough deference to the leader. Maybe this is the result of having a neurodivergent brain - of not understanding the unspoken rules that everyone else thinks are obvious. Maybe it was the outcome of two women struggling under the weight of life, and not knowing where else to direct their pain. Whatever the reason, I found myself feeling lonely and outcast once more.
Can women ever get along?
This experience left me wondering about how much the women’s movement is truly benefitting women. I’ve known for a long time that it often feels uncomfortable and non-inclusive for many women of colour, disabled women and members of the LGBTQIA+ community. I had thought that, in my work, maybe that was something I could help influence, but I see time and again that people leading women’s spaces are resistant to change.
I thought that I’d found security and strength in women’s circles, but I’ve come to realise that many of these spaces are still founded on patriarchal ideas of control. Someone feels they need to be a leader, that power is a marker of success, of importance, of value. The space is there to serve the creator, first and foremost - any benefit to the members is secondary.
This is hardly surprising when you consider the conditions within which women are creating these spaces. Firstly, as I said before, we are all products of the society that raised us. It’s inevitable that we will internalise patriarchal, colonialist ideas, and that we will all be indoctrinated with sexist, racist, ableist, homophobic, transphobic and all manner of other biases that we are largely unaware of - it’s the work of a lifetime to unpick and unlearn these. As a neurodivergent woman with a disability, who spent so much of her life being frightened to admit that she was attracted to women as well as men that she lost the opportunity to ever fully explore her sexuality, I know I have internalised a great deal of shame about who I am, never mind about how I view other people. Every space we create will always be biased because human beings cannot avoid being biased.
Secondly, our society has created economic conditions that make these spaces a matter of survival for many women. 54,000 women lose their jobs every year in the UK alone because of maternity discrimination, and a further 390,000 mothers experience discrimination in the workplace.1 The gender pay gap is 14% in the UK2, and 23% globally.3 Women are significantly less likely to have a regular pension after retirement, and only 28% of employed women worldwide have access to paid maternity leave.4
Becoming a mother drastically limits your ability to earn money. Lack of earning power limits your freedom and independence. It limits your opportunities. Women have had to find their own solutions. 1 in 10 women who return to work after maternity leave do so self-employed5 (oh, hello, I am one of them) - and not because we are a particularly entrepreneurial bunch. Necessity is the mother of invention, and motherhood necessitates some pretty creative invention. Self-employment gives you the flexibility to drop your children off at school and pick them up again (or, potentially, to educate them yourself), to be there during school holidays and to look after them when they’re unwell. Employment rarely enables any of that.
But, whilst self-employment offers freedom, flexibility and empowerment, it also provides little security. You’re out there on your own, trying to make ends meet - and supporting a family while you’re at it. It’s hard, it’s stressful, and it does encourage a competition mindset. Once again, our culture pushes women to see each other as the enemy, as it paints a picture of scarce resources that we need to fight over. It tells us that there is only a limited amount of business, of money, available, and that we must grab as much of the pie as we can. With so many mothers being forced to sell to other mothers, how can they fail to view each other as a threat?
The end of female gathering
This is how the patriarchy almost eradicated women’s gatherings in the first place. By convincing women that other women were the enemy, the competition. By convincing everyone that groups of women were silly, spiteful or even sinful.
First, they belittled us. The word “gossip” is derived from the contraction “godsibb”, which referred to a very close friend - originally someone that you would choose to be a godparent to your child, and later a woman who would be invited to witness you giving birth.6 It was used to refer to close female friends, and had highly positive connotations of love and sisterhood in female gatherings. Then men took control of the word and used it to mock and disparage women’s talk.
Then, they painted us as dangerous. The idea of women living alone, particularly older women who were no longer “useful” to men, and being independent was distasteful to the patriarchal system for a long time before the witch trials, and this is where the idea of witches and malevolent women lurking in the woods began. It was a way to warn younger women away from following such a path. They depicted them as ugly hags, they stripped them of their rights and even their safety. They drove them away from society.
That wasn’t enough, so they began to kill us. Between 1450 and 1700, 35,000 people (mostly women) were killed in Europe alone because of accusations of witchcraft. It is estimated that around 50,000 women were murdered globally. Witchcraft only ceased to be a crime in the UK in 1951, which tells you a great deal about where justice and protections for women sit in the priority order.
Of course, after that, women became afraid to come together. Women’s gatherings didn’t die completely, but they were largely driven underground. They had to frame themselves in ways that were acceptable to the partiarchy if they were to be visible at all, and they were seen as frivolous and irrelevant. They were mocked, they were treated with disdain. We end up, by the 1990s, in a place where young women are eager to be seen as “not that type of girl”, “not like other girls”.
Can we do better?
Yet something has shifted now. There is a yearning coming to the surface to recapture the power of female connection, to restore respect for femininity and to find greater balance in masculine and feminine. To find sisterhood again. Why? What’s motivating this comeback? This is one of the questions I’m keen to explore in this project, along with the uncomfortable discussion as to what exactly it is that we’re trying to bring back.
Are we seeking a “good old day” that never really existed? How empowering were spaces like red tents and moon lodges originally, and how much were they spaces to send women away when they were considered unclean? Menstrual taboos still exist around the world, causing some girls to miss school, putting barriers in the way of women in the workplace, and, in some parts of the world, putting women in physical danger. Perhaps we’re wildly romanticising spaces that have always been problematic, and consider to be so to this day.
Furthermore, how much cultural appropriation is involved in holding these spaces? The leading voices in women’s circles and red tents are predominantly white and western, yet many of these practices originate in Africa and indigenous communities of the Americas. Are we taking control of something that isn’t ours? Do we fully understand what it is that we are seeking to be part of?
Does separating women from men and celebrating feminine energy alone, preaching only to the choir, really do anything to move feminism forward? How do we make these spaces inclusive for trans women, for women of colour, for disabled and neurodivergent women, for women who don’t have periods, who can’t or choose not to have children, and for people who don’t identify with binary notions of gender at all?
Women have been gathering for many hundreds of years, but we’ve also been hurting each other for many hundreds of years. There’s no doubt that patriarchal, colonialist conditioning has played a role in that, but we’re kidding ourselves if we think we can unlearn all that overnight, or that there’s some utopic former state of being that we can go back to.
We can choose to move forward in a different way, though. Can women learn to stand together? Can we find ways to gather that benefit all of us? That benefit the whole of humanity, even the whole planet? We have gathered here before, and they drove us apart. Can we do better this time?
https://pregnantthenscrewed.com/about-maternity-discrimination/#:~:text=The%20Problem,almost%20doubled%20in%20a%20decade.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/earningsandworkinghours/bulletins/genderpaygapintheuk/2023
https://www.un.org/en/observances/equal-pay-day#:~:text=Women%20earn%2077%20cents%20for,to%20enjoy%20paid%20maternity%20leave.
ibid.
https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/smallbusiness/article-7873743/One-ten-mums-returning-work-maternity-leave-set-business.html
https://www.thewomens.network/blog/the-evolution-of-gossip
This is such a hard and important read. You are doing beautiful work. Thank you for sharing part of your soul and your journey. Onwards! ⭕️✨💫
Really important questions here. I did my PhD in feminist theology MANY years ago and an area I dived into deeply was language -- how words are changed and appropraited or mis-translated to write women out or make women's discourse less than. And when you add in the way language is skewed towards ablism, racial exculsion and a completely binary view it only gets worse. There is a lot to overcome and I also love that you ask the question about seperatism -- I brought my sons up to be feminists too and I'm painfully aware that the world is a very harsh place for my trans-daughter and for my son who has chronic illness -- anyone who doesn't fit the imaginary 'norm' so our experiemce as women has allies there too. But sometimes, just sometimes, a woman's cicle arises -- an organic, beautiful place that is so nourishing and that will take that nurture out into the whole world.