Urgent Message from Mother: Gather the Women, Save the World

""Gather the women,"" says Jungian analyst Bolen, is ""an urgent message from Mother to her Daughters,"" a call for the women's movement (after the suffragists and the movement of the 1960s and 70s Bolen calls this third movement ""the women's peace movement"") to end conflict and violence in the world. Drawing on the archetypal gender differences she elaborated on in Goddesses in Everywoman and Gods in Everyman, Bolen believes women have the nurturing and caring gifts that the world needs right now. But Bolen, who is a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California Medical Center, draws on scientific research showing that women's brains make them better able to be ""whole people,"" able to develop both their intellectual and emotional sides, and thus better able to respond to the needs of children and the suffering world as a whole. Bolen's history of the relationship between patriarchy, authoritarianism and violence focuses only on the three monotheistic religions, overlooking the history of warfare in Asia; and she is not fully correct in saying that Judaism, Christianity and Islam have banished the Sacred Feminine; the Jewish conception of God does incorporate a feminine side (the Shekhinah), and the Virgin Mary is certainly a sacred maternal presence in Christianity. Nevertheless, women attracted to Bolen's Jungian and spiritual approach will find inspiration and sustenance here.