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This book is the outcome of an extraordinary convergence of three remarkable female minds:
Hazel Henderson — world-renowned futurist, evolutionary economist and consultant on sustainable development;
Jean Houston — advisor to UNICEF in human and cultural development;
Barbara Marx Hubbard — president of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution and a co-founder of Washington D.C.’s Committee for the Future.
Introduction by Barbara Delaney
It was through Hazel Henderson that I first met Jean Houston and Barbara Hubbard in 1976 while spending some time with Hazel at her home in Princeton. Hazel had been very excited at the prospect of an informal meeting with Barbara and Jean, and suggested that perhaps I, too, as a young woman, might be interested in what was to be the focus of that meeting: feminine consciousness. Would I like to make tape recordings of those conversations?
The Henderson home is an older, rambling house full of inviting corners, intriguing books, plants, sunny spaces. When everyone had arrived on that icy January day, we gathered cozily in the living room amongst discretely placed tape recorders…
I have tried to recreate this meeting, which lasted until the evening of the following day, in the form of a collection of dialogues transcribed from the tapes made at that time. I have chosen to preserve the spontaneous and informal quality of the experience, and to evoke a sense of the rich and dynamic interplay of feelings and ideas…
Although the conversations encompass a broad range of themes and an interesting juxtaposition of perspectives, the central proposition comes through clearly – that the minds of women differ from the minds of men! Where not explicit, this distinction is nonetheless manifest on several levels—in the method of exploring ideas as well as in the points of view. The result is an abundance of themes filtered through the alembic of the female sensibility…
There is no fear of exposure: these are women who dare to be vulnerable; to express the inner sources of their motivations, their pain, their uncertainties – and indeed, their strengths. The kind of thinking that takes place is a wonderful manifestation of “yin” thinking: there is an integration of the feeling and intuitive functions with rational, objective faculties; a healthy mix of earthy female body wisdom and forceful intellectual clarity.
“Yin” thinking, to use the Chinese symbolism, is by no means accessible only to women; it is central to the New Age consciousness evolving in both women and men. The terms masculine and feminine, or yang and yin, are useful ways of describing, by way of metaphor, two distinct but complementary modes of consciousness and a complex of mutually defining qualities – analysis/synthesis, rational/intuitive, object/subject, and so on. Western culture has for centuries been strongly overbalanced in favor of the so-called “masculine” principles. We are taught at an early age to cultivate linear, analytic, dichotomizing patterns of thinking at the expense of the more diffused, intuitive, holistic “yin” patterns. Women, having a broader range of experiential knowledge and less rigidly defined intellectual commitments, seem to be more attuned than men, at this point in time, to these other worldviews. As the chief bearers of feminine attributes, we as women have a critical role to play in the transformation of our masculine culture into a more balanced, more human order…
As a woman, I am deeply affected by the peculiarly feminine vision that emerges from these dialogues. The women of my generation are beginning to experience the positive effects of changes accomplished through the efforts of the feminist movement; we need no longer be obsessed merely with the struggle to improve our status as human beings. We are beginning to explore the myriad possibilities of female beingness, to define ourselves in new and authentically female ways, to devise our own calculus of human value. The endeavor to achieve sexual parity does not mean recreating ourselves in the image man: we must allow ourselves to think as women, to act as women, to commit ourselves as women. It is only through the uninhibited celebration of our femaleness that we can hope to realize the full potential of what we as women have to contribute to the next stage of human evolution.
We offer these dialogues not only for the value of the ideas and insights they contain, but also, and more important, in hope of generating more dialogue, more evolutionary exploration, more genuinely yin thinking.
Excerpted from Barbara Delaney’s Introduction to the Power of Yin.