Up a Brambled Path in Growing Our Wholeness: Women's History Month, 2025
by Holly Timberlake, PhD., March 15th, 2025
The article I would have written even as late as early winter would have been much different. Just two weeks ago, I learned something about who funded the Women’s Movement in the 60’s and70’s when I was an impressionable young adult. It has really given me pause. And trying to write this post, which i agreed to do before finding this out, has become a challenge causing me to write and rewrite, and think and rethink.
My daughter who is in her 40’s says that she pays little attention to Women’s History month and believes that it just reminds us that inequality is still a thing. Agreed. Maybe it doesn’t mean much or really do much anymore and maybe it does more than I know. But I am learning, regardless, that there is a darker side to this history than I knew, and now knowing this, I have to write something about it. Women’s History month is inextricably tied to the Women’s Movement and it this history of the Women’s Movement and curiosity about it’s effect on me that is the heart of this post.
Funding for the Women’s Movement
Support for the Women’s Movement (originally the Women’s Liberation Movement, prior to funding from the powerful elite) came from an unlikely coalition of the women’s movement, the decolonization movement and the industrial barons, many of the latter, whom favored eugenics and had long worked to try to control population in the “South (both of this country and of the globe), by among other means, forced sterilizations.
They realized by supporting this movement, they could use this movement to carry out their eugenics agendas, but now the women would be doing it, rather than the heavy handed and top down control from these wealthy, white men. If they supported women working, the country would almost double what it took in in taxes…which would then make it’s way back to them through the “philanthropic” organizations that were fronts for their agendas and money laundering. David Rockefeller is credited with this shift at the United Nations World Population Conference in Bucharest in 1974, much to the surprise of everyone there. To add insult to injury, it also turns out that Gloria Steinem, a heroine to my liberating generation, was actually a CIA operative beginning back in the late 1950’s when she was in charge of one of it’s sham NGO’s, the Independent Research Service, which actually sent college student operatives to Russian student gatherings as disruptors. She has defended her work with the CIA and said she would do it again, describing it as “liberal, non-violent and honorable.”
Questioning My Beliefs
Learning of this subterfuge at the heart of what I believed was a pure arising, has been disappointing and has shaken my beliefs, much like the woman who learns her husband/partner is having an affair, begins to wonder what was really real. It’s shaken my foundations in my own sense of the world and in the institutions I have trusted. I find myself now wondering how my choices as a young woman came from my idealism about equality and how much was engineered by people who were to benefit in ways I could not have seen from my innocence. How much of my femininity did I leave on the roadside as I espoused an androgynous appearance, grew disdain for more traditional ways of living, and increased my own confusion about relationships, sex, and what I really valued in all of it? And how has this affected me through my life? No answers exactly here, but a process that will continue to grow me as a human being and as a woman.
So what do I write in the midst of this internal shake up?
If the women’s movement was subverted to meet the interests of the wealthy so therefore was focused on getting women to work as the hallmark of freedom and independence, what has been left out?
It’s been focused on us breaking down barriers, breaking through glass ceilings, and breaking into previously male dominated spheres, etc. These “breaking into” efforts have been powerfully successful and have improved the lives of women and their families in socioeconomic ways, paving a way for women’s increasing contributions to the world polity. Yet, I’m now wondering what the hidden costs may have been. What distortions are we now living; what aspects of our lives as women have been disappeared; what ways has our wholeness been fragmented and our perceptions of ourselves skewed to meet others’ needs?
I can only keep asking these questions now; the answering of them will emerge through time.
A Bit of My Own History
In the 80’s and 90’s I taught a 3 hour class at Kent State University that I entitled, “Empowering Women: Reclaiming our Voices, Reclaiming our Lives.” It was quite successful and transformative for the hundreds of women who took the class. And I loved teaching it!
My emphasis was on helping women to free themselves from the ways we’d been privately and publicly muted through abuse, devaluation and discrimination. To see diverse women of all ages blossom, out of the ravages of feeling like second class citizens was thrilling for us all!
My emphasis still is on healing hearts and souls and on helping to free the human spirit to soar in whatever ways that spirit is here to live and contribute.
And so, I want, this Women’s History Month, to acknowledge women’s history of being the ones to nurture, support, educate, lift up and help rise together in all areas of human life, from our own personal wounds and challenges, to those of our beloved families, to our communities, even to the world! Women’s place, I absolutely believe is in the home…and that home is the whole world.
We need new ways to do this so that our families, our relationships and ourselves are not suffering from being pulled in too many directions, from work that takes us away from our children in ways that gives the state (agencies, systems, etc.) more influence over our children than we have, in ways that are making us sick and our children sicker.
So…a story…
Being a feminist in the early 70’s did mean, as I’ve heard people say in more recent time, acting like a man to get equality. I didn’t see it that way, and yet, I was embarrassed to be feminine, since everything feminine was reviled as superficial and unintelligent. As such and as a survivor of significant emotional neglect, I couldn’t be weak, couldn’t depend on another, and as a member of the counter-culture, financial well-being was also looked down upon, so my husband and I lived on ideals…until those realities began to hit us square in the face. And that broke us apart. We were far more clueless and wounded than we had any idea about how to navigate well through life and we didn’t make it through with our family able to stay as an imperfect whole.
Towards the end of the marriage, this lack of awareness and skills really hit home when he informed me that he wanted to stay at home with the kids while I got a Master’s degree and supported the family. For some women, that’s a good arrangement. For me, it was a sucker punch to my gut and heart. I had always found a way to make some income while being at home with my children (who were then in early elementary school), then, just before this, we were living on my income, as he took a break from working. We were so not prepared for adult life and so unaware that we weren’t prepared, too. We were poor and struggling; having let go of traditional values and patterns; his attention was more on other aspects of life then; and I was managing.
Honestly, I remember the first time I heard somebody say that women look for men who are going to be good providers, that it’s biologically wired into us. I was startled by that because the thought had never occurred to me.
Ironically, what he proposed was what ended up happening basically. I was a single parent while I worked on my Master’s, then my Ph.D. I held multiple part time jobs; had people living in the house to help with rent…and tried to be with my children as much as I could, saying always that my children were my priority, that being the best mother I could be was my highest value. I meant it and yet couldn’t live it enough for their highest good and for congruence with my belief and my deepest yearnings. I’ve forever been torn about pursuing my education while raising my children…and now as we are all adults, I can see the effects of all of these dynamics in our relationships currently. They came through whatever the disruptive dynamics their father and I created with flying colors. What I am most proud of in both of them is that their highest value has been being the best parents they can be…and their children are a testament to that, and yet there are wounds that remain. And I can now envision a lifetime in which I could give them so much more than I did.
Back to then…I remember my daughter’s first grade teacher…saying at her first grade parent conference gathering, “your children now spend more time with us than they do with you in a day.” Hearing that was another sucker punch, but I didn’t have the wherewithal to challenge it, to change my life such that I could be with my children more while I developed my skills to offer to the world.
What May Have Been Some of the Costs?
In this long winter of social turmoil, families are not as cohesive as before (even as some things improve), and certainly, with over 60% of this country now facing chronic health challenges both physically and psychologically, our homes are not as healthy as before either in many ways. While some have significantly increased their capacity for emotional regulation as adults and have been wise enough to help their children develop emotional strength and awareness, they are the leading edge of our evolution and our transformation as beings, many are still trapped in unresolved trauma and programming and have become increasingly emotionally reactive in ways that are destabilizing at every level of human society.
Certainly divorce is a very central aspect in this, as is all the pollution, the decreasing quality of the food supply, the plethora of manufactured, “processed” food that destroys our guts, the lack of connection to the land, of learning how to make things in a very real way (I promise I won’t get started here on how destructive the idea of 15 minute cities are to humanity’s spirit). But how might we have been subtly manipulated to devalue ourselves and be devalued as we have earned more money? Certainly, abuse of all forms has not decreased; addictions are rampant in our world (especially when you add the psych meds, some of which are so addictive to the body that they are harder to get off of than other more obvious forms of addiction) and our children are becoming sicker, and they haven’t fared well through what was the Covid lockdown in this country. If things are getting better, why are women now more stressed than ever?
What Can Be Discovered & Recovered?
What is missing? What is possible in the lives of women that has perhaps been disappeared, snuffed out that we can hardly see from where we stand?
Since I can barely begin to see what these might be in my own life, let alone in the lives of women in general, I choose this Women’s History month to applaud women for what I can see from right here, right now. Writing this post next week, I would undoubtedly write of applauding us for different things, that is to say, that this following list is incomplete; it is skewed in ways I see and likely ways I’m missing; it’s inaccurate; and yet in this moment, this is what is arising from within me and my heart.
This year, I applaud our beginning to recover some of what was disappeared in this rise to greater equality, so that we can open to a nuanced equality, where as humanity or as people of the West, we can remember there is nothing more important than bringing up the next generation of people and honoring women for all that we contribute to this, for all that we sacrifice to engage in this most profound of human endeavors. Remembering that it takes a village (usually mostly of women) to do this and that women for whom motherhood is not a part of their experience, are included not only as beloved aunties, but as healers, teachers, reformers, transformers and way showers for women in the world and more.
I applaud our capacities for tenderness and nurturance, for bonding with our children, our friends, our partners, for being process-oriented, for seeing the nuances, noticing the details of what helps to create a beautiful life, for helping each other to rise up, for encouraging our children and grandchildren to rise up. For teaching our boys to love & appreciate women and our girls to love and appreciate men… and most importantly, to love themselves (no matter their sexual orientation and identity). I applaud our efforts to make others welcome, to reach and extend ourselves to and for others in need, to recognize our commonalities amidst differences and to grow from opening our hearts to all.
I applaud us for leading the way in the world in terms of loving each other, loving life and the earth, in being so willing to take what we know and have learned and share it with others, growing the wisdom of the world and of the human energy field. I applaud us for leading the way in increasing the skills of emotional presence, of taking responsibility for our actions and their effects on others, for wanting more love in life…both the giving and receiving of it. I applaud us for leading the way in doing the hard work of healing from our pasts to create new possibilities for ourselves and those we love.
I applaud all women who have survived through and risen through, who are surviving and rising through, all the personal violence to which we are so often subjected by those who harm, whether intentional or not. Personal violence is said to be the kind that most often leads to PTSD. And it makes sense…when those who are supposed to love and care for us, hurt and abuse, there’s no place to retreat into for safety. And I especially send out prayers and healing light to those who didn’t survive and all their loved ones who have been left behind, bereft and to those who have suffered at the hands of women whose wounds are unhealed.
This Women’s History Month, I invite each of you to consider all the ways through history that women have been the weavers of love and connection, the knitters of community and harmony, the crafters of the comfort of connection, the makers of home, and the visionaries of peace, love and possibility throughout the world. Consider all the ways you weave and knit and make and vision, growing the world more towards a higher love for all every day. And allow yourselves to consider what aspects of your own femininity you want to embrace and grow now?
