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Naomi McDougall Jones

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“I used to think the garden of Eden story was all about Eve breaking the rules and eating the forbidden fruit. Church lessons taught us that her selfishness and deception resulted in great suffering for every generation to follow. That's the guilt we have been taught to carry as women. The serpent tricks us, and it's all our fault. Others are harmed by our naive choice, and it's all our fault. Our children stray from the right path, and it's all our fault. Truth is, the dangers were here from the start. But so was the beauty. Now I realize the story is not about punishing all of humankind for Eve's mistake. It's about relationship. It's about gratitude and honesty and choosing the right person to be by your side in life. It's about trust and partnership and loyalty. It's about love. Now, as the garden comes to life around me, I no longer think of serpents and betrayals and lies and shame. Instead, I see what God sees. I see that it is good. All of it. Good.”

“Well, what if they do come? What will they want of you?" "To be what I was." The desolation of his voice chilled her. She was silent, trying to remember what it was like to have been powerful, to be the Eaten One, the One Priestess of the Tombs of Atuan, and then to lose that, throw it away, become only Tenar, only herself. She thought about how it was to have been a woman in the prime of life, with children and a man, and then to lose all that, becoming old and a widow, powerless. But even so she did not feel she understood his shame, his agony of humiliation. Perhaps only a man could feel so. A woman got used to shame.”

“In my humble, probably wrong, select-all-delete opinion, we womenfolk today are faced with a decision: Salem or Barbie. We can either rip off the internal trapdoor that your Alanis Plath of Arc has been suffocating under or cement over it and instead luxuriate in a Hello Kitty porny Instagram-filtered cell where the validation is better than heroin and the thoughts are shorter than Mickey Rooney. (HEY-YO!)”

“With the ability to read, however, there developed new patterns of private behavior that were to threaten the legitimacy of both the Church and secular authorities on a permanent basis. Women who learned to read at that time were considered dangerous. For the woman who reads acquires a space to which she and no one else has access, and together with this she develops an independent sense of self-esteem; furthermore, she creates her own view of the world that does not necessarily correspond with that conveyed by tradition, or with that of men. All this does not yet signify the liberation of women from patriarchal guardianship, but it does push open the door that leads to freedom.”