2
Recognising its importance, yet rejecting its essential status, Joan Wallach Scott refers to the place of mothers in history as a ‘fantasy echo.’1 Through much of history, motherhood has been considered both default position and destiny. It was cast as natural and God-ordained by a wide range of religious, spiritual and state structures, from ancient times into the modern. It is unsurprising then that maternal representations, echoing through history and cultures, are the most common and enduring characteristic of heroines in history. Being ‘super-womanly’ involved possessing feminine nurturing and caregiving qualities most potently displayed through maternal work. With the dominant place of women through history as mothers, there was a strong sense of ‘everywoman’ in maternal heroines. All mothers were united as ideally feminine, life-giving and selfless. Such qualities rendered women anonymous. Paradoxically, as this chapter reveals, the enduring importance of the maternal has resulted in the occasional heroine appearing and enjoying enormous appeal. These exceptional women were revered for their maternal abilities, as well as advanced as role models for other women to aspire to. Ironically, such heroines upheld caregiving and nurturing characteristics that for the majority of women were undervalued, largely taken for granted and considered unchanging. The maternal content of most women’s lives was cast as outside of the realms of history, as challenged by and captured in the feminist call for herstories. And if motherhood placed women as the opposites of history’s men, so too were mother heroines very different from men as heroes.
Mother heroine medals
It is often during times of national crisis, such as war and depopulation, that there is a pragmatic focus on heroic reproduction and mothering. Unnoticed in times of peace, during wartime, everyday women in traditional roles are caught up in agendas of violence and have become modern mother heroines. The example of 20th-century mother medals symbolises the enduring part played by motherhood in women’s construction as heroines. It also serves as a warning against the unfettered celebration of the maternal.
Appearing through history and cultures, medals are awards given to recognise heroic achievement. For example, during World War I, men on both sides received medals for heroism on the battlefield by directly contributing to their country’s war effort through combat and killing the enemy. In the wake of the devastating war, in 1920 France struck a new medal to honour women that judged mothers on their life-giving domesticity. The Médaille d’honneur de la Famille Française (Medal of Honour of the French Family) was awarded to women based on the embodied evidence of how many children they had produced. There was bronze for those raising four or five, silver for six or seven and gold for eight or more children. There was also a bronze medal for widowed mothers of three or more children whose husbands were killed in action.2
In 1938 in Germany the Ehrenkreuz der Deutschen Mutter (Cross of Honour of the German Mother) was struck. In keeping with France’s categories, the ‘Mutterkreuz’ came in a gold cross for mothers with eight or more children, silver for those with six or seven and bronze for those with four or five children.3 The Mutterkreuz was modelled on the Iron Cross medals awarded to men for bravery. In both France and Germany the selection procedure involved thorough investigation into the mother and family. In Germany, being Jewish or ‘foreign’ or producing children with special needs were reasons for exclusion and in both places there were moral checks to rule out considered vices such as alcoholism, adultery and prostitution. Jules Louis Breton, a minister under French President Paul Deschanel, said ‘To deserve this award, it is not enough to bring children into the world. You must also know how to bring them up and endeavour, at all times, to instil a healthy moral code through giving advice and setting an example.’4 Over four million crosses are estimated to have been awarded in Germany, and likely more in France, as the award survives in adapted form through to the present.
Significantly, the medals honoured and promoted women’s perceived place in society as mothers. It was from that maternal position, constructed as complementary but opposite to men, that women’s heroic status was derived. For example, at the time of the German medal’s introduction it was written in the Völkischer Beobachter that ‘the holder of the Mother’s Cross of Honour will in future enjoy all types of privileges that we by nature have accustomed to our nation’s honoured comrades and our injured war veterans.’5 The inscription on the back of the first version of the crosses summed up women’s heroic role in society: ‘Das Kind adelt die Mutter’ (The child ennobles the mother).
It was amidst horrific losses of soldiers and civilians during World War II that in 1944 Russia introduced its Order of Maternal Glory, upping the bar from France and Germany, with class I for nine children, class II for eight children and class III for seven children. There was also a Motherhood Medal in the first degree for six children and in the second degree for five children. Held in highest esteem was the Order of the Mother Heroine, for women who had given birth to and raised ten or more children. Mother Heroines (Mat’-geroinia) were awarded that honorary title and received a certificate from the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union. Adopted children were included, and the awards were made on the fifth birthday of the youngest child, on the condition that with the exception of those lost in war, all other children remained alive.6 Mother heroines received privileges ‘such as a retirement pension, payment of utility charges and food and goods.’7
Together these medals reveal how motherhood was considered the best way for women to be heroic. As Tatiana Karabchuk, Kazuhiro Kumo and Ekaterina Selezneva argue, the Russian awards promoted ‘the image of woman as mothers (of large families) and primary caregivers.’8 There are numerous like-minded examples around the modern world of wide-ranging state incentives and allowances to endorse and promote women as mothers for the benefit of nationalism. They have adapted to local context and social change. For example, the German Mutterkreuz featured a black swastika in the centre, and with Hitler’s signature on it, it did not outlast the Nazi era. The end of the Soviet Union in 1991 also ended the Russian medal. However, at a time of encouraging the birth rate, from 2010 The Order of Parental Glory was introduced for those raising seven or more children. By 1982 the adapted French medal was open to fathers and guardians and ‘honour’ was taken out of the title. After major reform, from 1983, the medal was renamed the Médaille de la Famille Française (Medal of the French Family). Anyone who had raised several children appropriately could apply, including single parents and priests. For example, the Catholic priest Père Mayotte received the award ‘in recognition of his raising the six children of his housekeeper, a widow who died suddenly.’9
Goddesses and matriarchies
In addition to maternal heroines being prominent at times of war and nation-building, the overriding place of spiritual heroic women has been as mother figures. Part of women’s enduring identity as life-givers, stories of heroines were grounded in women’s bodies, their fertility and ability to give birth.10 Across cultures, life-giving women featured in myths concerning the gendered ordering of society. For example, the Chinese Yin and Yang involves a separate yet related and complementary dualism of masculinity and femininity.
In the mid-20th century Carl Jung argued that a mother archetype ‘appears under an almost infinite variety of aspects.’11 He advanced the theory of the Great Mother as the most important and enduring collective archetype for women, most often expressed through transcultural Goddess figures involving fertility. Writing on Goddesses, Shahrukh Husain argues that:
According to the Jungian view, the Mother Goddess as the supernatural source of the world is a concept innate in the human mind prior to birth, partly because the primary, universal experience is of gestation. This pre-natal idea is reinforced after the birth, when the mother nourishes her child with food, love and warmth, and the child depends entirely on her for comfort and safety.12
Jung argued that the Mother archetype contained both positive and negative (evil) meanings. From a child first experiencing its mother as divine at birth, it developed beliefs that separated off into a ‘good’ protective and providing mother and a ‘bad’ mother responsible for discipline. While children grew older and came to see their mother’s behaviours as part of a whole, the majority of Goddesses and then heroines remained split into good and bad, either fairy godmothers or evil crones. Husain argues that the most ‘compelling and powerful mother figures’ are ‘the ambivalent goddesses who combine both negative and positive aspects such as Hera, Aphrodite, Kali and Hine.’13
Extending Jung’s work, Eric Neumann argued that in early religious works the Great Goddesses were in existence before the existence of God as a father figure. According to Neumann’s analysis of the ‘Great Mother’ archetype, ‘the Feminine’ occupied a central and transcultural enduring symbolism offering ‘life, nourishment, warmth, and protection,’ ‘because that which is contained, sheltered, nourished, is dependent on it and utterly at its mercy.’14
These ideas were enthusiastically picked up and developed by prominent second-wave radical feminist scholars keen to develop woman-centred epistemologies. Arguments were made for the recurring presence of mother figures throughout history. Here Mary Daly’s work was a prominent example of arguing for the importance of Goddess and Pagan worship in modern times.15 According to Margot Adler writing in 1979 ‘The modern Pagan resurgence includes the new feminist Goddess – worshipping groups, certain new religions based on the visions of the science-fiction writers, attempts to revive ancient European religions – Norse, Greek, Roman – and the surviving tribal religions.’16
Reaching back to ancient times, in their work on Goddesses in World Mythology, Martha Ann and Dorothy Myers Imel argued that ‘female figures have been found by archaeologists in every civilization throughout the world and in every time in human history since the Upper Paleolithic.’17 Highlighting the positive aspects of Goddesses, and giving the example of Minoan Crete as a Goddess centred society,18 they wrote ‘We want women and men to know that the female has been worshipped as sacred for thousands of years, and we believe this contributed to the women in those cultures being accorded respect and honor within their societies.’19
Modern feminists have often echoed a fantasy that the abandonment of hunter-gatherer society was accompanied by a decline in women’s status. Here the work of E O James on the cult of the Mother Goddess has been influential. James stated that ‘Woman being the mother of the race, she was essentially the life-producer and in that capacity she played the essential role in the production of offspring.’ He argued that as humans left a Palaeolithic age and moved into a Neolithic age, agriculture and herding became important and were accompanied by increasingly prominent phallic emblems. He also argued, however, that the Mother Goddess continued in importance, especially in western Asia, Crete and the Aegean.20 Importantly, pastoralism also saw a Mother Goddess identified with constructions of Mother Earth.21
Often connected to past Goddess worship is the concept of matriarchy. Stories of ancient matriarchies, where there was a strong female presence in society, and where power passed from mother to daughter, often appear to counter a masculine, oppressive and rational modern age. Another 20th-century scholar to influence feminists was J J Bachofen, who developed ‘mother right’ – a form of matriarchy in the ancient world. He argued that mother right appeared transculturally as a ‘cultural stage’ and considered that ‘mother right belongs to a cultural period preceding that of the patriarchal system’ and considered that ‘it began to decline only with the victorious development of the paternal system.’22 As with the decline of Goddess worship, the decline of matriarchies was argued as connected to the rise of agriculture. As men settled down in one place, rather than engaging in hunter and gatherer roaming, their control increased. There were exceptions, such as in the case of central China, where Bachofen argued that forms of matriarchy were preserved into the 8th century.23
Feminists picked up the historical presence of matriarchies as present in a number of societies. For example, referring to ancient Mediterranean societies, Eva Cantarella loosely defines matriarchy as simply constituting a strong female presence in society and as being counter to masculine, oppressive and rational modernity.24 In ancient and pre-colonial Africa, forms of matriarchy included the important presence of Queen mothers who held influence, particularly in matters concerning women’s bodies and life cycles. From their maternal position they were able to exert a social, political and religious influence. Tarikhu Farrar argues that in West Africa Queen mothers played such a role.25 The postcolonial era has seen moves to reinstate the power of Queen mothers alongside that of Chiefs. For example, in 2010, the National House of Chiefs in Ghana announced the inclusion of 20 Queen mothers.26 Indigenous womanist scholars also seek to reclaim stories of their ancestresses such as in New Zealand where a mana wahine approach ‘moves beyond the colonial definitions of gender identity that is constructed within dualistic notions of biology, femaleness or maleness.’27
In contrast, patriarchy involved the domination of women by men, a system whereby inheritance passed from male to male, most usually father to son. Its foundational idea was that it was men’s business to rule and dominate women as the property of their father and husband. Gerda Lerner’s extensive work captured and analysed the creation of patriarchy. She wrote in 1986 that
The system of patriarchy is a historic construct; it has a beginning; it will have an end. Its time seems to have nearly run its course – it no longer serves the needs of men or women and in its inextricable linkage to militarism, hierarchy, and racism it threatens the very existence of life on earth.28
Overall, feminist scholarship over the past half-century has been critical of building women’s identity out of essential biological differences from men. Emphasising heroic maternal identity runs the risk of reinforcing it and, for the majority of women, their subservient place in society and limited life choices. But there is no denying the power of maternal-led feminism. Commenting on the presence of ‘a feminist maternal fantasy,’ Joan Wallach Scott concedes that ‘The fantasy of maternal love has provided feminists with a way of establishing a commonality based on unconscious associations, despite their differences, and this has been its efficacy.’29 In a stand against the tide of social constructionism, Camille Paglia argued in Sexual Personae ‘that Judeo-Christianity never did defeat paganism, which still flourishes in art, eroticism, astrology, and pop culture.’30
Occupying awkward terrain, the construction of modern heroines in history owes much to reinventing a past golden age of Goddesses and woman power. For example, writing on Boadicea, Antonia Fraser has written of belief in a Celtic Great Mother and a matriarchal age where women held some power, as opposed to the invading patriarchal Roman Empire. Fraser commented that
It is certainly tempting to regard the chariot-driving Warrior Queen as owing her authority to deep memories of a matriarchal society where women either held the reins of the chariot or gave the men the orders which enabled them to do so.31
Modern feminists have evoked concepts of spiritual, Goddess and maternal heroines from the past. For example, on Halloween in 1968 Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (WITCH) was founded as part of New York Radical Women. In evoking witchcraft it appropriated the considered most dangerous and derogatory of women’s spirituality.32 WITCH only lasted until 1970 before disbanding, but not before becoming legendary. In 2016 it reformed, taking aim against ‘injustice in all its intersectional forms,’ and ‘the white supremacist patriarchal system that perpetrates it.’ Its new manifesto stated that
for centuries, the dominant culture has persecuted anyone who dares to be different. The gentle healers, the midwives, the queers, the loners, the wise elders, the pagans, the foreigners, the wild women. Dissent is threatening to the status quo, especially when it’s shrouded in unfamiliar customs and the mysterious sacred feminine.33
Religious mother heroines
Across a number of dominant world religions it can be argued that maternal heroism is a persistent feature. For example, arguing for a plural Devi (the generic name in Sanskrit) Goddess, John S Hawley and Donna W Wulff argue that in Hinduism there is no need to ‘resuscitate the Great Goddess.’34 For Kanika Sharma, India worshipped the Mother Goddess for centuries before its late 19th-century emergence as ‘the motherland.’ The Cult of the Devi or Goddess provided ‘the strongest Hindu underpinning’ for the modern emergence of Mother India. In the early 20th century, Mother India’s presence ‘permeated homes and shops, as well as temples and political rallies.’35 For Narendra Nath Bhattacharyya, in ‘primitive society,’ social groups centred on the women and ‘the life-producing mother’ became ‘the central figure of religion.’36 Furthermore, in Hindu culture, the land was ‘often referred to in a female form and is evoked as mother.’ Emphasising maternal life-giving capacity, in Hindi, Dharti Mata (Earth Mother) is also referred to as the Goddess Bhu Devi (Land Goddess).37
For nearly 2000 years Mary manifestations have featured in two of the world’s most popular religions – Christianity and Islam. She was the most common figure in art, an icon, revered and venerated, an ultimate mother heroine. Advocating for Mary’s transcultural significance, Jaroslav Pelikan writes that ‘One of the most profound and persistent roles of the Virgin Mary in history has been her function as a bridge-builder to other traditions, cultures, and other religions.’38 Picking up on the Pagan and Christian roots of Mariology, Stephen Benko made arguments of ‘Marian piety as the natural outgrowth of the Goddess-cults in the ancient world.’39 He argued for Mariology as a way ‘toward a clearer and better understanding of the feminine aspect of the divine and the role of the female in the history of salvation.’40 Mary was advanced as a manifestation of a fertility Goddess, unencumbered by morality and corruption. For Christians, especially Roman Catholics, Mary represents purity and chastity most holy. She has been a figure of great enduring appeal, particularly to women, who have prayed to her as a mediator and an advocate. She is the symbolic mother of the Church, the Queen of Heaven, the mother of Jesus Christ and the mother of God.41
According to Barbara Freyer Stowasser, Mary is an important figure ‘in Qur’anic scripture, scripturalist exegesis, and popular Muslim piety.’ Stowasser notes that Mary is the only woman identified by name in the Qur’an. Demonstrative of her importance, she appears more often in the Qur’anic text than the Christian New Testament. Mary is the title of Qur’anic Sura 19. The Qur’anic revelation celebrates Mary as ‘an example for the believers’ because of her chastity, obedience, and faith.’42 ‘According to classical as well as modern Islamic consensus, Mary was virgin (batul) when she conceived her child from God’s spirit.’43 In the 1000s the Zahirite Ibn Hazm of Cordova (d. 1064) and the Zahirite (‘literalist’) school argued that Mary was a prophet. Stowasser argues that ‘Consensus-based Sunni theology rejected’ that doctrine.44
For Christianity, Mary is very slow to appear in the Bible, first appearing named in Galatians 4:4, the ninth book in the New Testament. Her first unnamed mention involves St Paul emphasising that Jesus was made of a woman. Mary speaks in Luke’s gospel four times, while in Matthew’s she is silent.45 When she does appear she is sometimes called Mariam and seven times Maria.46 The earliest description of Mary, written by the Bishop of Cypress who died in 404AD, is a prescription for ideal feminine features. He writes that she was ‘grave and dignified in all her actions,’ and that she ‘spoke little and only when it was necessary to do so,’ while she ‘listened readily and could be addressed easily.’ He advanced her as of a medium height and with skin ‘the colour of ripe wheat,’ auburn hair, and light brown and olive eyes. Going into great detail, he outlined black arched eyebrows, a long nose, oval face, long hands and fingers and lips that were ‘red and full and overflowing with the sweetness of her words.’ He portrays her as patient, friendly, dignified and respectful. She listened, cared, was quiet, brave, slow to anger, physically attractive and fertile – all qualities associated with being a feminine role model.47
In Christianity three important episodes concerning Mary have been debated officially and unofficially through time. First, the Annunciation when the Archangel Gabriel appeared before Mary and told her that she would bear the son of God. Second, through the Immaculate Conception, Mary was conceived without sin. At the end of her life, on account of her purity, the Assumption saw her body and soul ascend into heaven complete. Significantly, in belonging to both Heaven and Earth, Mary took on an intermediary role as a mediator, prayed to for assistance.
For Joseph Campbell, Mary represented pure virgin motherhood, a continuation of qualities he saw in ancient societies. Campbell argued a transcultural place for virgin births, his evidence being that ‘Images of virgin birth abound in popular tales as well as myth.’48 For example, ‘The Buddha descended from heaven to his mother’s womb in the shape of a milk-white elephant,’ while of the Aztec Coatlicue he wrote that ‘She of the Serpent-woven Skirt’ was approached by a god in the form of a ball of feathers.’ Early 20th-century psychologist Sigmund Freud argued that Mary represented the ultimate self-sacrificial and reliable pure mother. Similarly, Carl Jung saw Mary as the manifestation of the Chinese Yin, everything that was feminine, yieldingness, softness, gentleness, receptiveness, mercifulness, tolerance and the opposite of the masculine Yang.49
In modern times, Mary presents a paradox to feminists.50 In her simultaneous position as virgin and mother she sets an impossible standard for women. Yet her significance as a heroine and marker of women’s place in society is enormous. As Marina Warner wrote in her 1976 book Alone of All Her Sex,
Whether we regard the Virgin Mary as the most sublime and beautiful image in man’s struggle towards the good and the pure, or the most pitiable production of ignorance and superstition, she represents a central theme in the history of Western attitudes to women. She is one of the few females to have attained the status of myth – a myth that for nearly two thousand years has coursed through our culture, as spirited and often as imperceptible as an underground stream.51
Apparitions and cult
What evidence is there that Mary represents an archetypal theme for women predating modern times? Describing her religion as ‘Māori and Goddess’ and her politics as ‘Māori and Lesbian,’ in the late 20th century Ngahuia Te Awekotoku linked Māori religion, Catholicism and Goddess worship. She asserted that ‘Even though I don’t usually pray and I don’t believe in Jesus the Lord and in God the Father, I could never ever deny Mary. Never.’ Advocating ‘Goddess energy’ she wrote that ‘I will never ever deny my feeling for the Mother or for the Goddess, ever.’52 Banishing the male part of the Church as unclean and exclusive of women, Te Awekotoku celebrated the feminine. For example, a visit to Europe prompted her feeling ‘the magic’ of sites of worship Notre Dame d’Amiens and Notre Dame de Paris with ‘their Goddess energy, in their luminous and transcendent beauty,’ but in contrast, Sacre Coeur was ‘ghastly’ and ‘absolutely sinfully dark’ with Jesus at its centre. She went back to Notre Dame ‘to get healed by the softness of her light.’ Accounting for her experience, Te Awekotuku considered that ‘The Notre Dame cathedrals were built on Goddess shrines. So they are actually on a pagan foundation that stretches millennia.’53 Te Awekotoku tapped into Mary as the Christian manifestation of a fertility Goddess. She objected to ‘that idea of God being the Father as well because it so totally contradicts the essential truth of genesis, of creation – which comes from female energy, not from the male.’54 The concept of the Mother Goddess resonated strongly with her.
Jo Ann McNamara has made general arguments for the exclusion of women from the Church ranks over the past two millennia. She charts a deterioration in women’s status from being apostles of Jesus following ‘chaste celibacy’ and through that presenting in ‘a dangerously competitive position’ to men. Excluded from being ordained, women then had to ‘develop alternative spiritualities rooted in prophesy and mysticism.’55 In that context, it is argued that Mary has appeared through the centuries as a cult figure.
For example, Mary has been of enduring significance to Muslim women. Barbara Freyer Stowasser argues for her importance, with the recitation of Mary’s Sura 19 ‘believed to confer special blessings on reciter and listeners alike.’ In modern times, women in Syria ‘pray through Mary (and other Fatima) in moments of anguish’ for miracles. Evidence of the ‘high status and lasting importance of Mary in Muslim piety,’ appearances of Mary include to Copts and Muslims in Old Cairo in May 1968.56 In 2007 Willy Jansen and Meike Kuhl looked at Muslim pilgrims at Marian shrines in Germany, Portugal and Turkey. They argued that the ‘multivalent symbol of Mary’ could unite Muslims and Christians, with both seeking comfort and assistance and to ‘build on the memory of their own mothers.’57
The most famous modern Christian example of a Marian shrine from the 19th and 20th centuries is that of Lourdes in the French Pyrenees. In 1858, as 14-year-old Bernadette Soubirous lay in a grotto by a river, she saw a young girl.58 The girl was wearing a veil and an azure (blue) sash. Blue, along with white, are considered symbols of purity. The apparition was barefoot except for roses, and there was a glow around her. Over a total of 18 appearances, Bernadette would talk with the girl she called ‘Aquero.’ She went into a trance before the grotto and prayed. News of the apparition spread and crowds arrived to witness the scene. On one occasion Bernadette scraped a gourd and uncovered a spring, drinking its muddy waters. The 16th vision appeared on the feast of the Annunciation in 1858 and Aquero told Bernadette that she was the Immaculate Conception.59 Pilgrims began to travel to Lourdes to drink the water from the spring for miraculous healing and a permanent shrine was built.60
Lourdes is a modern example of Mary appearing as a maternal archetype. Her appearance is always a popular manifestation that defies patriarchal control associated with the Church. And there is an essential life-giving feminine force surrounding her appearance. Always constructed as positive, she offers maternal hope and help to women and men. Demonstrating the continuation of heroic characteristics for women out of the past into the modern era, Mary has made many appearances over the past 200 years. Lisa M Bitel suggests that modern technology has enabled a ‘global audience.’ She calculates that the percentage of globally reported apparitions in the United States of America went from 10 per cent ‘just after World War II to 50% at the end of the Millennium.’61 In the Californian Mojave Desert, a landscape replete with ‘roots in Biblical wilderness’, in 2010, Maria Paula’s feet started bleeding with a similar pattern to the stigmata of Christ nailed to the cross.62 Crowds began gathering to bear witness and pray. Bitel conducted in-depth research into Maria Paula’s Marian afflictions. After observing and recording the activities, Bitel suggests that the continuation of pre-modern Christian behaviour is involved.63
In 2002 in Rockingham, a city south of Perth in western Australia, a statue of Mary was reported to be weeping tears of a scented oil. The tears were first noticed on the significant Catholic holy days of The Feast of St Joseph, the husband of Mary, and then over the four days of Easter. Then later in the year, on the Feast of the Assumption of Our Lady to Heaven, the statue again began to weep. It was taken to the appropriately named local Our Lady of Lourdes Church at Rockingham for public veneration on Sunday afternoons. The fibreglass statue belonged to Patty Powell, who had brought it back from a trip to Thailand. Visitors flocked to visit the statue in the hope of attaining the oil. Their donations of money were sent to Thailand to go towards charity work with orphaned babies whose mothers had died of AIDS.
The ‘Weeping Madonna of Rockingham’ was one of many modern occurrences where statues of Mary reportedly cried tears and oozed blood. Symbolically, the tears are for sins and ‘the seven sorrows of Mary’ that occurred in her lifetime, while roses are a flower associated with her as ‘the rose without thorns.’64 Displaying continuity with the past, these can be argued to be modern manifestations of the Marian cult. In continuity with Marian occurrences through history, they unite around perpetuating the feminine and Goddess spirit of the Virgin Mary, and themes of life-giving, hope, goodness, healing and miracles feature prominently. Mathew Schmalz has argued that the events are about ‘togetherness in and through suffering’ and ‘hope and healing.’65
Around the world, statues of Mary have become modern shrines. The Madonna of Syracuse in Sicily has shed tears since 1953. In 2017 there were weeping statues in Hungary, Argentina and Macedonia. In 2018 people rushed to Our Lady of Guadeloupe Catholic Church in Hobbs, New Mexico, where a statue of the Virgin Mary had started weeping, for prayer and healing. In that case the tears were tested and found to be olive oil and balsam. Statues are sometimes checked to see if there are hidden chambers of fluids, or if they are injected with oil or fat that seeps out when temperatures rise. Test results in Canada in 1986 and Italy in 2006 determined that the blood from two statues belonged to the owners.66
Modern Church investigations range from testing fluids to looking for evidence of miracles and also consider the importance of faith and devotion. For example, in Rockingham, there was a Commission led by Archbishop Barry Hickey to determine if the event was a miracle. Commissioners included a surgeon, a non-Catholic scientist and a Catholic rector. Scientific tests done as part of television coverage were inconclusive and the investigation did not confirm the miraculous. However, belief in the statue and its positive influence was only just beginning to gain momentum. Patty Powell’s house became the Holy Family House of prayer, welcoming visitors from all over the world. Powell and her twin sister Eileen dedicated themselves to activities associated with the growing shrine. They visited Ireland and in France the grotto of our Lady of Lourdes. They became ‘the Pilgrims of the Little Way,’ active in charity works in the community. Their Marian occurrences involve ‘Our lady’ speaking to them ‘amidst a perfumed breeze,’ and leaving footprints near a grotto containing the statue. Visitors seek comfort and joy, and akin to other Marian occurrences, there are themes of hope, goodness, healing and miracles. There is also a strong association with life-giving, and motherhood in particular. For example, The Pilgrims of the Little Way began assisting women and children in need, including offering pregnant mothers accommodation. They also set up soup kitchens for the homeless.67
As modern Marian shrines have posed a challenge to mainstream Catholicism, the resurgence of spirits such as the Lady of the Realm in Vietnam can occupy an awkward place in modern Buddhist religion, posing a clash with Confucian patriarchy.68 Strong maternal care and healing unites these modern examples. In the early 1990s Vietnam’s shrine of Ba Chua Xu, the Lady of the Realm sprang to prominence. The stone and cement Goddess is dressed in regal, feminine costume. Located at the foot of a small mountain, the shrine became the most visited religious site in southern Vietnam, with more than a million visitors annually. Its large halls were filled with offerings that people had made to her. Philip Taylor categorised the Goddess as a protector deity. He argued that the resurgence was part of the capacity for ‘Feminine symbols’ to evoke ‘the persistence of ancient matriarchal values or influences from the more liberal societies of Southeast Asia.’ Offering hope and spiritual sustenance, and serving as ‘Mother, benevolent creditor, healer, relationship advisor, business consultant’, the shrine attracted many women from ‘all corners of rural and urban society.’69 At the start of the rainy season every year there are ceremonies where image-bathing and robe changing are performed by elderly women, there are sacrifices by the shrine’s cult committee, and an ‘invocation to the goddess for peace and protection.’70 In order to receive offers of assistance from the Goddess, often involving prayers of fertility, love and harmony, pilgrims attempt to impress her with opera, dances and acrobatics as offerings. If their prayers are successful, they return to repay the Goddess.71
Saintly spiritual heroines
A group of heroic women saints followed in the footsteps of qualities advanced by myths of Mary. Characteristics of saints were that they lived, had visions and they performed miracles. They might be martyrs to Christianity, the most famous being warrior heroine Joan of Arc, discussed in subsequent chapters. Overall, however, women saints were chaste, and devoted to feminine qualities of nursing, healing, charity and overall, the advance of maternal womanhood. Significantly, modern women saints were missionaries, who often founded religious orders.
Jo Ann McNamara has argued for religious sisters as spiritual, uncontrollable woman-power heroines. She positions modern nuns as following in the footsteps of ‘feminist foremothers’ who,
for two millennia, have broken new paths for women. Without the daring and sacrifice of these nuns it is impossible to imagine the feminist movements of modern times finding any purchase in the public world. They created the image and reality of the autonomous woman. They formed the professions through which that autonomy was activated. They still devote their lives to the care and development of human beings everywhere.72
Importantly, McNamara argues for virginity enabling women with independence and authority.73 She argues for chaste celibacy as a way for women, and nuns in particular, to claim an independent, feminist lifestyle. She argues that ‘Few women with desirable assets in property or beauty ever succeeded in reserving their own bodies from the domination, protection, and even the love of men,’ but one way that they could was to retreat to a nunnery or cloister, a woman’s space, which she sees as the origins of modern feminist notions of ‘sisterhood.’74 In contrast to an empowering place of freedom, however, history is littered with the stories of women sent to nunneries as a form of punishment, to remove them from events and render them powerless. And the extent to which spiritual heroines were controlled by the Church or organised religion is open to debate.
Modern orders of nuns have continued to rely heavily on maternal work for identity. For example, the tasks of convent women have mirrored those feminine and maternal duties of women outside of the cloth such as caring, nursing, nurturing, teaching and working with children. One example is The Sisters of Mercy, started in Dublin, Ireland, in 1831 by Catherine McAuley. McAuley was an heiress who dedicated her life and that of the order she founded to works of charity and mercy. There was a focus on caring for poor women and girls.75 In modern times, such running of orphanages, prison visiting, and maternal care was increasingly taken up as a part of the state’s welfare work, with ‘independent women’ entering new secular professions of teaching, nursing and social work.
Martha Vicinus has emphasised the importance of women’s separate spaces in the agency of ‘independent women.’ She documents how in modern times women’s gains in equality have developed in separate spaces from men.76 For example, modern nuns were able to enjoy careers, especially in teaching and nursing, at a time when lay nurses and teachers abandoned their professional lives upon marriage. For example, Sister May Leo, whose calling is discussed in Chapter 4, went on to become one of New Zealand’s most successful singing teachers, amongst her protégées, opera diva Dame Kiri Te Kanawa.
Modern western feminism’s promotion of individual rights and choices has sometimes frowned upon a nun’s abandonment of individual agency, of being allowed to speak only when directed, of restrictive vows, and of being renamed after a saint. Furthermore, modern secular historians have moved beyond the celebration of women’s spaces and cloistered convents. There is an awareness of evidence that in hierarchical systems women oppressed other women. Most infamously, Ireland’s Magdalene laundries demonstrate the negative side of placing women’s chastity on a pedestal. Through the 19th and much of the 20th centuries, those who detracted from prescribed purity and virtue were incarcerated and put to work washing away their sins.77
Nuns were also involved in colonising endeavours. For example, in the late 19th century, Australasian colonial settlers Mary MacKillop and Suzanne Aubert both set up new world orders of nuns. By the late 20th century they were recast as heroines. For example, MacKillop was renowned for her miracles in the areas of family, farming and football; all characteristics important in national identity. The heroines were positioned as literal ‘God’s police’ assisting with settling the new world. They were mothers superior, helping in health, education and welfare. Aubert made potions as a healer, while MacKillop concentrated on making sure that children received an education.78 Both were reimagined as ‘feisty feminists’ who fought against the patriarchal Church, which, akin to age-old power struggles, stamped down on their orders when they were perceived to be too powerful, threatening and independent.
Indigenous colonised women are now subject to sainthood. Alan Greer writes of Katherine Tekiwitha in Canada (1656–80).79 Katherine had an Algonquin Christian mother and an Iroquois father who died of smallpox. Known as ‘Lily of the Mohawks,’ she was converted by Jesuits and became revered for her kindness, prayer, faith and heroic suffering. Katherine was beatified in 1980 and canonised in 2012 for the miracle of a boy who recovered after praying to her to cure his flesh-eating bacteria infection.80 Katherine was cast as a healer who abandoned her Mohawk identity to convert to Christianity.
Heroine Mother Teresa, of Albanian descent, was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in Skopje, Macedonia, in 1910. From the age of 12 she felt called to become a missionary. At 18 she joined the Sisters of Loreto, an Irish community of nuns with missions in India. After training in Dublin she was sent to India, where on 24 May 1931, she took her initial vows as a nun. After teaching for 17 years, in 1948, Mother Teresa began her work in the slums of Calcutta among the poor and neglected. Her order ‘the Missionaries of Charity’ started in 1950, becoming an International Religious Family by a decree of Pope Paul VI. Her work spread around the world, including Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. Disaster and AIDS sufferers and the homeless were all assisted. By the 1990s over one million lay ‘co-workers’ assisted the Missionaries of Charity. Mother Teresa’s work has been recognised and acclaimed throughout the world and she received a number of awards and distinctions, including the Pope John XXIII Peace Prize (1971) and the Nehru Prize for her promotion of international peace and understanding (1972). She also received the Balzan Prize (1979) and the Templeton and Magsaysay awards.81
Modern maternal reformers
During the 19th century, notions of public and private spheres were important both physically and often ideologically. The public sphere was idealised as the place of commerce, trade, government and men, whereas the private sphere was the domain of domesticity, the indoors, children and women. In the west, sermons conveyed the message that women’s true work was located in the home, engaged in domesticity. Importantly, more flattering, noble and valued depictions of women and their work emerged.82 Slowly, menstruation and childbirth became less associated with impurity, dirt and sin. For example, according to the Book of Leviticus, mothers were unclean after giving birth and must be cleansed.83
Symbolic mother figure of the British Empire, Queen Victoria personified maternal power.84 As she ruled, middle-class women were increasingly placed on pedestals for their maternal work. Victoria triumphed as the mother of nine children, many of whom went on to marry into other houses of European royalty. A feminine side to her rule included being the first woman to have chloroform during childbirth, penal reform and enlightened humanitarian attitudes: transportation to Australia, public executions and slavery were all abolished under her watch. Under her rule the British nation was relatively secure in an age of revolution, and the British Empire grew in wealth.
Catherine the Great of Russia also expanded the Russian Empire and was unafraid of conflict. According to Antonia Fraser, she was said to have made use of deep mystical Slavic feeling towards mother goddesses. Voltaire called her the Semiramis of the North, evoking another heroine in history.85 Formidable and warmongering, Catherine feminised herself in how she wanted to be remembered. She prepared an inscription for her gravestone, which advanced her character as selfless, dedicated to her people, friendly, sociable, forgiving, loving, good-natured, easy-going and with ‘a kind heart’ and ‘a cheerful temperament.’86
Out of strong traditions of women’s maternal leadership and religious heroism, a number of modern mother reformer heroines emerged whose concerns were also purity, health and welfare. Located in a 19th century ‘cult of domesticity’ that often began in women’s clubs associated with churches, these heroines were exalted for cleaning up society from a pure and angelic maternal standpoint.87 For example, in the United States of America, Clarissa (Clara) Harlowe Barton ‘Angel of the Battlefield’ was a nurse during the American Civil War.88 Her maternal service included nursing the sick and wounded, cooking and generally offering feminine comfort. Barton took food and medicine directly to the field and was humanitarian and non-partisan in her treatment of the wounded and dying.89 The Red Cross had started in Geneva to protect the sick and wounded during war, extending to aid during peacetime. In 1881 Clara founded the American Red Cross and led it for the next 23 years.90 In the Crimean War, Mary ‘Mother’ Seacole developed a reputation that rivalled that of Florence Nightingale, discussed in Chapter 4. Both were pioneering nurses and heroines of that war. Born in Jamaica with a Scottish soldier father and a Jamaican mother, Seacole’s mixed-race status added to her gender as an obstacle in being accepted in the masculine war zone. Seacole’s mother had kept a boarding house for injured soldiers where she passed on her skills to her daughter. Mary married Edwin Seacole in 1836. After his death in 1844 she travelled around the Caribbean and to Central America and Britain, further developing her medical skills. In 1854 she went to England and asked the War Office to send her as an army nurse to the Crimea. Turned down, Mary paid her own way. As her mother had done in Jamaica, she set up a hotel near Balaclava for injured soldiers, and also visited the war front to nurse the wounded.91
Another modern maternal heroine was Elizabeth Gurney Fry, who became known as ‘the angel of the prisons.’ Fry was brought up as a Quaker in England. Immersed in ideas of equality and peace, at 17 she started a school for children in her home. She married Joseph Fry in 1800 and had 11 children. Writing in 1894, William H Render captured Fry’s enduring maternal position: ‘An intellectual woman, she was also a devoted, affectionate mother, making the training and care of her children the primary duty of her life.’92 In 1813 Fry was deeply moved by a visit to London’s notoriously draconian Newgate prison. She found the conditions for women and children there, especially solitary confinement, to be inhumane. Fry became a pioneer prison reformer who advocated for rehabilitation through socialising, work and education. Her ideas and work led the way for modern social work and probation services. She believed that female and male prisoners should be held separately, that guards should be the same gender as the prisoner, that there should be regular visitors and work and educational opportunities for prisoners, as well as assistance with support to find work and gain an education upon release. Unpaid committees of women assisted her with prison visits and post-release community support and Fry herself visited many British prisons. In 1823 her ideas became part of British prison law. She was later consulted by Queen Victoria and the British Parliament and was an influential figure for Florence Nightingale. Of enduring presence as a humanitarian heroine Fry’s image was added to the British five pound note in 2002, and in America the Stanford University School of Social Work building is named after her.93
FIGURE 2.1 Mary Seacole.
Credit: Alamy stock photo Image ID RB86G9: https://www.alamy.com/mary-seacole-1805-1881-british-jamaican-nurse-business-woman-image230676777.html
In New Zealand maternal heroine Te Puea Hērangi was a healer widely held responsible for nursing her people back to health. A mythical figure in her own lifetime, she was called ‘Princess Te Puea’ to outsiders. To her people she was a highly respected saintly figure whose visions and dreams were influential. Te Puea had contracted tuberculosis as a teenager, at a time when Māori were referred to as a ‘dying race’ due to the fatal impact of introduced diseases. In 1918 the Influenza epidemic killed one-quarter of her community at Mangatāwhiri. Te Puea stepped in and placed approximately 100 orphaned children with the remaining families. In 1920 her Waikato people were able to buy 10 acres of previously confiscated land opposite a township called Ngāruawāhia on difficult land and the settlement of Tūrangawaewae (a place to stand) was begun.94 By 1929 a self-built hospital, refused official status by the government, was opened with the result that rates of tuberculosis and typhoid fever dramatically improved. It was said that the sight of Te Puea was enough to make people well.95 She lived on a farm with her husband and adopted children. Always busy, she said ‘I work, I pray, I sleep, and then I work again.’96
Akin to many maternal heroines, Te Puea was politically aware and an active leader often called Mrs Kāwanatanga (Mrs Government).97 Her supportive friends included Māori Member of Parliament Sir Āparana Ngata, New Zealand Prime Minister Coates and journalist Eric Ramsden. Alongside her health work, Te Puea played an important part in achieving national status for the Kīngitanga movement. She also attempted to gain compensation for land lost by Māori in the New Zealand Wars and was a determined negotiator over multiple decades. Devoted to the welfare of her people, in 1951, she became the first patron of the reformist Māori Women’s Welfare League. Te Puea had seen the bad effects of alcohol and would visit pubs where women were drinking and bang her stick on the floor until they left. She was also anti-smoking and a pacifist.98
Often referred to as saintly, Soong Ching-ling was known as ‘the mother of modern China,’ an identity that persisted through the 20th century. From 1915 until his death in 1925 she was married to Sun Yat-sen, considered the founding father of the Republic of China, who in 1911 had led the revolution that had ended the Manchu Dynasty. After Sun Yat-sen’s death, Soong Ching-ling became an important support for Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party. Her life was entwined with 20th-century Chinese politics, and friend and biographer Israel Epstein went so far as to argue that Soong Ching-ling personified modern China.99 When she died in 1981 aged 88, the Chinese government lauded her as ‘a great patriotic, democratic, internationalist and Communist fighter and outstanding state leader of China.’100 Weeks before her death she was granted the title of Honorary President of the People’s Republic.101
In 1922 Soong Ching-ling suffered a miscarriage while fleeing a military coup and was left unable to have children.102 Jung Chang argues that she continued to yearn for children and when she was in her mid-60s adopted two daughters whose father was her bodyguard.103 Soong was dedicated to maternal work, in particular, from 1938 the China Defense League, which later became the China Welfare Institute and was dedicated to funding children’s wellbeing and health (particularly in Communist-controlled areas). Out of her old family home, she founded a women and children’s hospital, a kindergarten, and youth facilities.104 Soong’s promotion of women’s rights are considered in further detail in Chapter 7.
Calling it ‘the pinnacle of her life,’ as ‘mother of the nation’ she walked behind Mao Zedong through Tiananmen Gate when he proclaimed the People’s Republic of China on 1 October 1949.105 She then became a vice chair in the newly formed People’s Republic of China (from 1949).106 In 1959, in a largely symbolic role, she became one of just two deputy chairmen of the Chinese Communist Party, under Mao Zedong. Seeking to shape the west’s perception of China, in 1952 she founded the magazine China Reconstructions (now China Today), broadcasting news of her homeland in English, as well as other languages. A collection of her writings, Struggle for New China, was published in the 1950s.107
In mid-20th century Argentina, Eva Perón was another example of a powerful modern maternal heroine. Renowned for her uplifting, pure and positive nurturing work with women and children, ‘Evita’ became the spiritual leader of her nation and was treated as a saint. Eva was promoted as a perfect mother figure to her people. She was seen as acting from the heart, being selfless and sacrificial. She was ‘the lady of hope’ to the working classes.108 Her gendered duties involved drawing upon women’s work as protectors of children in their place in society.
Ending with Diana
In Britain, Diana, Princess of Wales was an excellent late 20th-century example of the perpetuation of heroines as maternal. Aspects of her goodness, purity, heart and even saintliness are all featured in discourses about her. Her biographer Andrew Morton wrote positively of her legacy that
as historians reflect on her renown and her legacy, they will come to judge Diana, Princess of Wales as one of the most influential figures of this, or any other, age. For as long as there are poets, playwrights and men with hearts to break, tales will be told of the princess who died across the water and returned home to be crowned a queen, the queen of all our hearts.109
In continuity with the past, at her funeral in 1997 Charles Spencer connected his sister to ancient myth and representations of the Goddess Diana: ‘Of all the ironies about Diana perhaps the greatest was this: a girl given the name of the ancient Goddess of hunting was in the end the most hunted person of the modern age.’ The hunters were the modern media, who were accused of hounding her to death.110
FIGURE 2.2 Eva Perón as icon.
Credit: Alamy stock photo Image ID A894FN: https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-eva-peron-1919-to-1952-wife-of-argentinian-president-juan-peron-12028088.html
By the end of the 20th-century modern ‘secular’ saintly women mingled with traditional religious saints. For example, narratives for heroines Diana and Mother Teresa collided when they died a week apart. Discussion of Mother Teresa’s beatification fuelled comparative discussion of Diana as a modern secular saint, the argument being that she was martyred by the paparazzi. The purity, goodness of heart and humanitarianism of both women were emphasised.111
The massive outpouring of grief upon Diana’s death baffled traditional commentators such as Gavin Weightman, considering she ‘had no real power and her loss is of no great political consequence.’112 On the contrary, Jane Caputi argued that ‘Patriarchal proponents invariably universalize their system, claiming that nothing else ever did or could exist.’113 Weightman’s androcentrism misses the point. As Caputi put it,
When much of the world’s population reacted with outrage and grief to Princess Diana’s death, some daring to call it murder, it was because they recognised her as manifesting forces of love and compassion that had been understood throughout antiquity as the properties of the world folk deity Diana – goddess of light and dark, queen of the witches as well as the gender variant, the protector of the poor, the imprisoned, and the sick, and the historical challenger of patriarchal hegemony.114
The mourning for Diana was global, evoking the continued power of the mother archetype in modern times. Caputi argues that ‘the stream of offerings from around the world’ part of the mourning ‘must be recognised as modern mythoreligious behaviours.’115
Conclusion
Heroines in history are often categorised along binary lines as either super-womanly or ‘honorary men.’ This chapter has discussed the feminine aspects of heroines, so often as virgins and mothers, replete with discourses of purity and goodness. As icons and role models, heroines highlight an important tension concerning women’s place in society – that of whether emphasising women’s difference through feminine culture leads to entrenching inferiority, whether it can be a source of power, or even manage to do both. Building on a maternal foundation for women’s heroism, modern reformer heroines forged an influential place from women’s maternal standpoint. Yet increasingly, motherhood was viewed as confining women’s opportunities to a gendered ‘private sphere’ and became something often necessary to escape in search of equality with men. The next chapter looks at the constructed opposite of super-womanly heroines: the hero-ines – the warrior, killer and fighting women.
Notes
1 Joan Wallach Scott, The Fantasy of Feminist History (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011), 60.
2 http://www.france-phaleristique.com/accueil.htm(Date last accessed 9 August 2019).
3 https://www.militaria-history.co.uk/articles/the-cross-of-honour-of-the-german-mother/ (Date last accessed 5 December 2019).
4 https://www.connexionfrance.com/Practical/Family/France-honours-parents-who-raise-large-families (Date last accessed 9 August 2019).
5 Völkischer Beobachter, No. 25 (1938).
6 Tatiana Karabchuk, Kazuhiro Kumo and Ekaterina Selezneva, ‘Population Policies in Soviet and Modern Russia,’ 63–113 in Tatiana Karabchuk, Kazuhiro Kumo and Ekaterina Selezneva, Demography of Russia: From the Past to the Present (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 71–2.
7 Karabchuk, Kumo and Selezneva, ‘Population Policies in Soviet and Modern Russia,’ 72.
8 Karabchuk, Kumo and Selezneva, ‘Population Policies in Soviet and Modern Russia,’ 71.
9 https://www.identifymedals.com/database/medals-by-period/interwar-medals-database/the-medal-of-the-french-family/ (Date last accessed 5 December 2019).
10 See Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).
11 C G Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, trans R F C Hull (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959), 81.
12 Shahrukh Husain, The Goddess: Creation, Fertility, and Abundance. The Sovereignty of Woman Myths and Archetypes (London: Duncan Baird Publishers, 1997), 18.
13 Husain, The Goddess, 18–19.
14 Erich Neumann, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype (New York: Princeton University Press, 1955, 1972 ed), 43.
15 Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (Boston MA: Beacon Press, 1973/1985).
16 Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids and other Goddess-Worshippers in America Today (New York: Viking Press, 1979), v.
17 Martha Ann and Dorothy Myers Imel, Goddesses in World Mythology (Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 1993), xix.
18 Ann and Myers Imel, Goddesses in World Mythology, xx.
19 Ann and Myers Imel, Goddesses in World Mythology, xix.
20 E O James, The Cult of the Mother Goddess: An Archaeological and Documentary Study (London: Thames and Hudson, 1959), 22.
21 James, The Cult of the Mother Goddess, 6.
22 J J Bachofen, Myth, Religion, and Mother Right (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1967/1973), 71.
23 Bachofen, Myth, Religion, and Mother Right, 108.
24 Eva Cantarella, Pandora’s Daughters: The Role and Status of Women in Greek and Roman Antiquity. Trans. Maureen B Fant (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1987), 14.
25 Tarikhu Farrar, ‘The Queenmother, Matriarchy, and the Question of Female Political Authority in Precolonial West African Monarchy,’ Journal of Black Studies No. 27 (1997), 579–97.
26 https://atlantadailyworld.com/2012/11/29/african-queen-mothers-visit-atlanta/ (Date last accessed 15 November 2020).
27 Leonie Pihama et al (eds), Mana Wahine Reader: A Collection of Writings 1987–1998, Vol. 1 and 1999–2019 Vol. 2 (Hamilton: Education Research Monograph 3, Te Kotahi Research Institute, 2019), v.
28 Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 228–9.
29 Wallach Scott, The Fantasy of Feminist History, 65–6.
30 Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), xiii.
31 Antonia Fraser, The Warrior Queens: The Legends and Lives of the Women Who Have Led Their Nations in War (London: Penguin, 1989), 17–18.
32 Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids and other Goddess-Worshippers in America Today (New York: Viking Press, 1979), 174.
33 https://www.topic.com/witches-brew (Date last accessed 15 August 2019).
34 John S. Hawley and Donna W Wulff (eds), Devi: Goddesses of India (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1996), 2.
35 Kanika Sharma, ‘Mother India: The Role of the Maternal Figure in Establishing Legal Subjectivity,’ Law and Critique, No. 29 (2018), 1–29, 2, 8.
36 Narendra Nath Bhattacharyya, The Indian Mother Goddess (New Delhi: Manohar, 1970/77), 1.
37 Sharma, ‘Mother India,’ 8.
38 Jaroslav Pelikan, Mary Through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), 67.
39 Stephen Benko, The Virgin Goddess: Studies in the Pagan and Christian Roots of Mariology (Leiden, New York and Koln: E J Brill, 1993), 4.
40 Benko, The Virgin Goddess, 5.
41 Michael P Carroll, The Cult of the Virgin Mary: Psychological Origins (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1986), 32–5.
42 The Chapter of Mary. In Sura 66, Barbara Freyer Stowasser, Women in the Qur’an: Traditions and Interpretation (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 67, 71.
43 Stowasser, Women in the Qur’an, 78.
44 Stowasser, Women in the Qur’an, 77.
45 Marina Warner, Alone of all her Sex: the Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Knopf, 1976) 3, 7.
46 Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, 14.
47 Vincent Cronin, Mary Portrayed (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1968), 1.
48 Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (London: Fontana Press, 1949/1993), 311–2.
49 Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, xxiv. See also Carroll, The Cult of the Virgin Mary, 32–5.
50 Maaike de Haardt, ‘The Marian Paradox: Marian Practices as a Road to a New Mariology?,’ Feminist Theology, Vol. 19, No. 2 (2011), 168–81.
51 Warner, Alone of all her Sex, xxv.
52 ‘Ngahuia Te Awekotuku’ in Jane Tolerton, Convent Girls (Auckland: Penguin, 1994), 125–36, 134.
53 Te Awekotuku, 135.
54 Te Awekotuku, 136.
55 Jo Ann Kay McNamara, Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns Through Two Millennia (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 1–2.
56 Stowasser, Women in the Qur’an, 81.
57 Willy Jansen and Meike Kuhl, ‘Shared Symbols: Muslims, Marian Pilgrimages and Gender,’ European Journal of Women’s Studies, Vol. 15, Issue 3 (2008), 295–311, 308.
58 Ruth Harris, Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age (London and New York: Penguin, 1999), 3.
59 Warner, Alone of all her Sex, 249–50.
60 Sarah Jane Boss, Empress and Handmaid: On Nature and Gender in the Cult of the Virgin Mary (London and New York: Cassell, 2000), 149.
61 Lisa M Bitel and Matt Gainer, Our Lady of the Rock: Vision and Pilgrimage in the Mojave Desert (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2015), 27.
62 Bitel and Gainer, Our Lady of the Rock, 34, 67.
63 Bitel and Gainer, Our Lady of the Rock, 155.
64 https://theconversation.com/what-is-behind-belief-in-weeping-virgin-mary-statues-100358 (Date last accessed 1 August 2019).
65 https://theconversation.com/what-is-behind-belief-in-weeping-virgin-mary-statues-100358 (Date last accessed 1 August 2019).
66 https://theconversation.com/what-is-behind-belief-in-weeping-virgin-mary-statues-100358 (Date last accessed 1 August 2019).
67 https://weepingmadonna.org/ (Date last accessed 31 July 2019).
68 Philip Taylor, Goddess on the Rise: Pilgrimage and Popular Religion in Vietnam (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004), 223.
69 Taylor, Goddess on the Rise, 251 and back cover.
70 Taylor, Goddess on the Rise, 1.
71 Taylor, Goddess on the Rise, 5.
72 McNamara, Sisters in Arms, 6.
73 McNamara, Sisters in Arms, 3.
74 McNamara, Sisters in Arms, 1.
75 https://www.sistersofmercy.org/about-us/our-history-mercy-heritage-center/ (Date last accessed 12 October 2021).
76 Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women 1850–1920 (London: Virago, 1985).
77 Clara Fischer, ‘Gender, Nation, and the Politics of Shame: Magdalen Laundries and the Institutionalization of Feminine Transgression in Modern Ireland,’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 41, No. 4 (2016), 821–43.
78 Katie Pickles, ‘Colonial Sainthood in Australasia,’ National Identities, Vol. 7, No. 4 (2005), 389–408.
79 Allan Greer, Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
80 https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Kateri-Tekakwitha (Date last accessed 1 August 2019).
81 Tore Frängsmyr and Irwin Abrams (eds), Nobel Lectures, Peace 1971–1980 (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Co., 1997).
82 Philippa Levine, Feminist Lives in Victorian England: Private Roles and Public Commitment (Oxford and Cambridge Mass., Blackwell, 1990).
83 See Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo Collected Works Vol. 2 (London and New York: Routledge, 1966/96), 52.
84 Dorothy Thompson, Queen Victoria: Gender and Power (London: Virago, 1990).
85 Fraser, The Warrior Queens, 10.
86 Katharine Anthony, Catherine the Great (London: Cape, 1926), 309.
87 Glenna Matthews, Just a Housewife: The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America (Oxford: University Press, 1989).
88 Bonnie Tsui, She Went to the Field: Women Soldiers of the Civil War (Guilford Connecticut: The Globe Pequot Press, 2003), 112.
89 Tsui, She Went to the Field, 109
90 https://www.redcross.org/about-us/who-we-are/history/clara-barton.html (Date last accessed 1 August 2019).
91 http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/seacole_mary.shtml (Date last accessed 6 August 2019).
92 William H. Render, Through Prison Bars: The Lives and Labours of John Howard and Elizabeth Fry (New York: Mysterious Press/Open Road, 1894/2017), 53.
93 https://historyofsocialwork.org/eng/details.php?cps=0 (Date last accessed 1 August 2019).
94 Ann Parsonson, ‘Hērangi, Te Kirihaehae Te Puea,’ Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, first published 1996, Te Ara – The Encyclopedia of New Zealandhttps://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/3h17/herangi-te-kirihaehae-te-puea (Date last accessed 3 October 2021).
95 Patricia Sargison, Notable Women in New Zealand Health (Auckland: Longman Paul, 1993), 38.
96 Ann Parsonson, ‘Hērangi, Te Kirihaehae Te Puea,’ Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, first published 1996, Te Ara – The Encyclopedia of New Zealand. https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/3h17/herangi-te-kirihaehae-te-puea (Date last accessed 3 October 2021).
97 Tui MacDonald with Ngeungeu Zister, ‘Te Puea Herangi’ in Charlotte Macdonald, Merimeri Penfold and Bridget Willams (eds), The Book of New Zealand Women: Ko Kui Ma Te Kaupapa (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 1991), 664–9.
98 Ann Parsonson, ‘Hērangi, Te Kirihaehae Te Puea,’ Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, first published 1996, Te Ara – The Encyclopedia of New Zealand. https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/3h17/herangi-te-kirihaehae-te-puea (Date last accessed 3 October 2021), Michael King, Te Puea: A Biography (Auckland: Hodder and Stoughton, 1977).
99 Israel Epstein, Woman in World History: Soon Ching-ling (Mme Sun Yatsen) (Beijing: China International Book Trading Corp, 2nd ed 1995).
100 http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20151223-soon-qingling-the-mother-of-modern-china (Date last accessed 8 August 2019).
101 Jung Chang with Jon Halliday, Mme Sun Yat-sen (Soon Ching-ling) (Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin, 1986), 139.
102 Jung Chang, Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister: Three Women at the Heart of Twentieth-Century China (London: Jonathan Cape, 2019), xix, 93.
103 Chang Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister, 277.
104 Chang, Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister, 252.
105 Chang, Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister, 251.
106 http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20151223-soon-qingling-the-mother-of-modern-china (Date last accessed 8 August 2019).
107 http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20151223-soon-qingling-the-mother-of-modern-china (Date last accessed 8 August 2019).
108 See J M Taylor, Eva Perón: The Myths of a Woman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 92, 1.
109 Andrew Morton, Diana: Her True Story – In Her Own Words (London: Michael O’Mara, 1992/1997), 283.
110 Jane Caputi, Goddesses and Monsters: Women, Myth, Power, and Popular Culture (Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press/Popular Press, 2004), 343.
111 See C W Watson, ‘Born a Lady, Became a Princess, Died a Saint’: The Reaction to the Death of Diana, Princess of Wales, Anthropology Today, Vol. 13, No. 6 (1997), 3–7.
112 Gavin Weightman, ‘Was it British?,’ History Today, Vol. 47, No. 11 (1997), 6–7, 7.
113 Caputi, Goddesses and Monsters, 7.
114 Caputi, Goddesses and Monsters, 19–20.
115 Caputi, Goddesses and Monsters, 343.