That someone or something always appears when she needs it makes her grateful.Īs the book ends, Sandy is driving them home from dropping off daughter Ann at college. Sue is happy for all she has gone through, before and after reconstruction. Sue begins to heal and yearns to bear brave witness to the world. She achieves peace with male-dominated Christianity as she sees hopes that the feminine can achieve balance. She opens to the Divine Feminine, overcomes the Judeo-Christian taboo of speaking of Goddesses and feels her consciousness expanding to connect to the whole earth. Sue feels at home in a circle of trees, learns to dance, to make rituals, to open herself to myths, to face off internal patriarchal voices, and to bury them. Sue moves forward for herself, for Ann, and for all women. Sue fills with both fury and fear but feels stuck in place, until she is energized by seeing two men laughing at her daughter Ann stocking toothpaste on her knees. Sue studies patriarchy critically, discovering how systematically and subtly it creates in women a gaping inner hole. At best, she touches a turtle shell - and turtles become a powerful and recurring force in her life. At a Jungian retreat, she watches dancing women by the sea but cannot join in.

Sandy's transformation takes years of reading, questioning, and struggling.ĭuring the quest, Sue sometimes wants to run away from what she sees but cannot. Sandy surprises her by saying he has realized how he has been defending the status quo and excluding her experience. She learns much and pours out everything when she returns.

She takes time off for a spiritual retreat, which Sandy resents. Feminist works of art, ancient and modern, move her and inspire her to study. In the forest at the monastery, Sue builds a Big Bird nest and begins nurturing her Feminine Wound. At a retreat, she embarrasses herself by introducing herself as Fr. Sue's quest begins slowly when she sees herself giving birth to herself in a dream. Sandy is not rigid or authoritarian, never demands that Sue 'submit,' but he initially resists her journey based on non-verbalized fears about what will happen to their relationship. They are married 19 years when Sue's quest begins.

Husband Sandy is a Southern Baptist minister, religion teacher, and college chaplain. Sue Monk Kidd, a successful freelance writer of articles for Christian publications and lecturer on spirituality begins to feel constricted by her Southern Baptist faith and examining earlier mystical traditions and liturgical churches leaves her feeling left out as a woman. THE DANCE OF THE DISSIDENT DAUGHTER is writer Sue Monk Kidd's memoir of her odyssey of feminist rebirth, shaking off the chains of patriarchy, learning to embrace her feminine soul, and telling the world some badly-needed truths.

The dance of the dissident daughter