See spirituality in ideals of feminism
Gloria Steinem. Bella Abzug, Billie Jean King. They were the priestesses of the era of progress for women's rights. But most people would consider that a metaphor; few think of them as spiritual leaders.
In the public mind, said Elizabeth Debold, the drive for women's equality was ``a secular movement [with] nothing to do with spirituality or religion."
But many in the first wave of American feminism in the 19th century would not have seen a clash between women's rights and Christian ideals.
Leapfrog the Steinem generation, and you come to a third wave that Debold hopes will be grounded in spirituality.
Last Saturday, in an oval conference room in Cambridge, Debold, a psychologist who worked with Harvard's renowned Project on Women's Psychology and Girls' Development, led 35 women in a day of discussion and meditation aimed at what she calls ``total women's liberation."
The day was another attempt at ``a new human consciousness and culture," in the view of EnlightenNext, the nonprofit group that sponsored the event. Based in Lenox, the group seeks to enact the vision of its founder, Andrew Cohen. A similar workshop by Debold last fall at EnlightenNext's Cambridge center drew more than 100 women in their 20s to 70s.
``The older women who were part of the '60s movement are saying, `I thought [feminism] was dead, and I feel now that it's alive,' " said Barbara Waldorf of EnlightenNext. ``The younger women [were] saying, `Oh, my God, I never heard that, I never knew that.' "
The women's movement of the 1970s overcame many institutional and legal barriers to women in areas such as employment.
Women today ``have been born into, for the first time in history . . . a situation where men and women are social equals, and that is remarkable," Debold said.
So why can't women call it a movement and enjoy equality? Debold answered that the expansion of choices has multiplied the stress of balancing work and home, forcing many to seek the easiest choice, which often means bailing out of a career.
Yes, more women are getting college degrees than men, but in one indicator of an opposite drift, fewer women are applying to business school, she said.
Partisans may debate forever whether women have an innate, gender-based preference for parenthood.
Debold believes that what women hold inside is more like an internal glass ceiling on their ambition, a ``sense of limitation [and] our deep conditioning to look for safety in relationship, to peg our entire identity on getting affirmation, particularly affirmation from men."
Tossing off this instinct represents ``spiritual liberation" that is ``beyond gender, that is pure consciousness itself, that is an expression of spirit in human form," she said. ``We can begin to consciously engage with this other dimension, give ourselves to, in a conscious way . . . this other intelligence, this other dimension of life that has been called God in the past."
A lapsed Catholic herself, she calls it consciousness.
Some 19th-century feminists were even more uncomfortable with the language of faith. They saw institutional Christianity as a male contrivance with its foot firmly pressed down on women's equality. But other female activists were moved by Christian conviction, Debold said, citing as one example Lucretia Mott, a Quaker minister who was active in antislavery and women's rights efforts.
Such women aspired to ``the spiritual principles that founded this nation, which are about human equality, human justice," she said. ``. . . Many of them had profound spiritual experiences where they got a vision of what was supposed to be on earth," though they may have believed that institutional Christianity had detoured off the path of Jesus's message of equality.
Many women who took up the cause in the 1970s talked about ``consciousness-raising," which Debold called the type of spiritual enlightenment she's talking about. ``When you read what they say about their experience, they talk about it as being like a spiritual conversion," she said. ``This dimension gives one a confidence and courage and allows one to be an expression of a higher . . . intelligence that has an agenda, and that agenda is to create heaven on earth, basically."
Questions, comments and story ideas can be sent to spiritual@globe.com. 
