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“Be who God meant you to be, and you will set the world on fire.”[31]

“I will give you what no eye has seen, and what no ear has heard, and what no hand has touched, and what has not occurred to the human mind.”[32]

Portal 3

From Inferiority to Equality: Reclaiming Your Feminine Giftedness

Invitation

We are moving into a scientific topic, psychological in nature, to create space to consider the differences between genders. Before we explore this area let me assure you that gender stereotyping puts people in inescapable boxes and can be quite harmful. There are legitimate gender trends that describe tendencies in men and women, but these trends are always subject to the unique individual realities that highlight each human’s characteristics, choices, and identity.

Historically, patriarchal culture has used gender stereotypes to describe and reinforce inequality between the sexes. For this reason, many advocate for uniformity within the sexes and defend these tightly boxed definitions in oppressive ways. This feels hurtful to me because gender uniformity contributes to inequality. Instead, we want to recognize the diversity of energies that empower women and men to interact with the world in sacred ways. In Portal 6 we will look at how these designed differences enhance our way of being.

What Was Lost

When we scan the scientific research archived over the centuries in the field of psychology, it becomes apparent that all research was done by men until the most recent generation. In fact, a leading researcher in the field of women’s psychology, Carol Gilligan, discovered that the psychological development of women’s thinking processes (and therefore the ways in which we live our lives) had been largely based on Freud’s bias toward male superiority.[33]

Freud’s work was based on normalizing masculine ways of thinking, and he concluded that boys develop psychologically by individuating themselves from their mothers; this is important because Freud’s masculine paradigm prioritized the individual’s growth above the growth of a community. And we can see the manifold layers of injury that Western individualism has wrecked in our world. Injuries that could be rightly healed by the feminine gifts.

Where Freud takes this is interesting, “Men orient themselves toward justice and impartiality, which is about the securing and protecting of individual rights and comes from rule-based reasoning. Whereas women orient themselves toward responsibility to the other, which is about relations and the pull of the other on the self.”[34] Women focus on empathy, relationships, and care that flow from contextual and interdependence reasoning. This difference has led our male-dominated culture to believe that women are inferior for their emotional, communal processing. In truth, the way that women perceive is called contextual thinking and is a holistic, more complex way of processing information. Look it up, you will be amazed.

So instead of a mother’s attachment to her child being a strength of nurture, it has been framed by some male psychologists as an inhibitor of individuation. The Church has been a strong proponent in this direction. How many times have we heard women share stories of emotion-bashing from the religious patriarchy?

The exploration and naming of Patriarchy leads to deep and troubled waters, so I want to give you warning that this next section is going to be about women’s bodies and harm.

When we think of the word “voice,” we need to consider the whole person. Voice is synonymous with being—It represents the ability to feel, to think, and to articulate thoughts and actions in this world. It is the very essence of our presence. Women have been told in countless ways that their voice has no consequence in the world of patriarchy; therefore, we don’t count.

Historically, women have mostly been considered frivolous, weak, and good for only one thing—our sexual bodies. Our sexuality has been demeaned and commoditized for entertainment and procreation. Our beautiful bodies have been blamed for men’s impure thoughts and their lack of control over their own bodies. We are the temptress and at the same time we are their object. This is hard to hear and feel but women have always been sexual prey in patriarchal societies.

Women are seen through the lens of domination and subjugation. We live in a rape culture, where women’s bodies, spirits, and souls are subjected to every kind of evil. Patriarchy believes that they have the right to be in control of every part of us. They see women as disposable, a replaceable product to serve their wishes and demands. The word “frivolous” means having no serious purpose or value, and if you have been a victim of this type of patriarchy, I grieve deeply with you.

What Is Found

More recent research has shown Freud’s model for psychological development to be at best misguided and at worst misogynistic once we recognize the unique and remarkable gift of female relationality. One of the authors of A General Theory of Love wrote in 2001, “Total self-sufficiency turns out to be a daydream whose bubble is burst by the sharp edge of the limbic brain. Stability means finding people who regulate you well and staying near them.”[35] With this credible finding we ascertain that women’s intrinsic orientation toward relationship and emotional intelligence stabilizes relational webs and is essential for healthy community. Not frivolous at all!

What this psychological backtracking accomplishes is to champion the value of our femininity that was always there. From the beginning of time. The feminine nature is phenomenal because of the natural intuition arising from our more complex thinking and innate ability to listen to our spirit.

Dr. Alice Matthews emphasizes this point in her book Gender Roles and the People of God.

While men’s language functions are specialized in the left hemisphere of the brain, women use both hemispheres for language. With more linking between hemispheres (and thus more input from both sides of the brain), women think more inclusively or bilaterally than men. Whereas men think more linearly, women think more contextually.  The problem for women is that to a linear thinker, contextual thinking doesn’t look like thinking at all. It’s a complex form of thinking, but it has often been discounted by those who do not think contextually.[36]

There's a part of me that I didn't even know I had until recently—instinct, intuition, whatever. It helps me and protects me. It's perceptive and astute. I just listen to the inside of me, and I know what to do.[37]

~From a woman who has recently awakened to the power of herself.

You can trust yourself. Women have all that we need, on our own, to live our lives in fullness and joy. We are autonomous. We have full agency of who we are and who we want to be in this world. Our bodies are sacred and good, our sexuality is sacred and good. We are created by our Mother God who wants to nurture us, and we are cherished by her loving and strong hands. We must reclaim the power of our sacred being and bodies.

The gospel of Phillip says it this way: “The worldly see the All but fail to know their own Self; through Truth you learn to know your Self; what you know you become.”[38]

Write Your Story

Take some time now to reflect upon your experience with our culture’s bias toward men’s presumed cognitive superiority and the power that goes with it. Also reflect upon your experience with women seen as sexual prey in our culture. Write your responses to these prompts in your journal. 

·      What have you personally lost because of the elevating of masculinity and the subjugating of femininity and females as a whole?

·      What do you feel needs to be recovered in your journey toward your innate value and worth?

Meditation

Start the video that leads you to the third portal. When you arrive at this portal, envision yourself entering into the image and sit in quiet contemplation.

·      Let a word arise in the stillness and locate that word in your body.

·      When the music ends, write down your word and where it resides in your body.

Take as much time as you need to hold what has been given, and when you are ready, the fourth portal awaits.

click for Portal 4: From Patriarchy to Honor…

(c) 2025 Kellie Wilder Daley. All rights reserved. No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Top image by Meinrad Craighead. "Catherine of Siena," 1981. Copyright Amy Dosser. meinradcraighead.com. Used by permission.

For footnotes, click here.