Women’s Circles and the Rise of the New Feminine: Reclaiming Sisterhood, Spirituality, and Wellbeing

Chia Longman

doi:10.3390/rel9010009

Abstract

This paper draws on the results of ethnographic research on ‘women’s circles’; women-only spaces that celebrate sisterhood and the ‘feminine’, including the increasingly globally popular ‘Red Tent’. Women’s circles are non-institutionalized, often monthly gatherings, for women to come together and relax, meditate, share stories, partake in rituals, heal, nourish, and empower themselves. Based on fieldwork and in-depth interviews with founders and organizer-practitioners of women’s circles in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany, the study shows how they offer a growing number of women from diverse backgrounds a space that they find lacking in secular-liberal society, out of a desire to ‘re/connect’ with each other, their bodies, their inner selves, and sometimes with the sacred. Women’s circles are indicative of women’s heightened participation in the realm of subjective wellbeing culture, including both elements of spirituality and more secular ‘personal growth’. Against the presumption that circles would be merely expressive of neo-liberal individualist consumer culture or retrograde gender essentialism, the paper argues they can be viewed as sites of sisterhood, solidarity, and dissent, cultivating a new type of femininity grounded in both affirmative and more oppositional forms of emerging feminist consciousness. In response to the so-called ‘post-secular turn in feminism’ and the growing interest for religion and, more recently, spirituality in (secular) feminist theory, the paper pleads for a re-consideration of the rise of women’s spirituality/wellbeing culture in the West as a form of post-secular agency.

Highlights

This paper draws on the results of ethnographic research on ‘women’s circles’; women-only spaces that celebrate sisterhood and the ‘feminine’, including the increasingly globally popular ‘Red
Feminist theory, the paper pleads for a re-consideration of the rise of women’s spirituality/wellbeing culture in the West as a form of post-secular agency
Some of the women’s circles in this study contain what can be identified as spiritual elements, I have shown that as a phenomenon they can generally be referred to as part of ‘subjective wellbeing culture’ that can be characterized as more post-secular than strictly religious, spiritual, or secular

Summary

Introduction

“Just as consciousness raising groups led to the Women’s Movement of the late 1960s and. While women’s involvement in new religious and spiritual movements appears to respond to gender inequalities in the traditional religions of the West, firstly, and as noted above, I consider the recent circle movements and ‘autonomous’ women’s circles in this study as a separate phenomenon from these longer-standing movements, communities, and traditions They appear more ‘post-secular’ in their orientation, and as I suggested, can be aligned with the much broader realm of women’s agency within subjective wellbeing culture. Important for the discussion on women’s agency is the fact that that many other social and cultural theorists hold a far more critical view of the wellbeing sphere and self-help culture’s tendency to reproduce normative femininities and what it sees as its complicity with a postfeminist version of the neo-liberal self (Salmenniemi and Adamson 2015; Hochschild 1994; Kenny and Bell 2014; Blackman 2004) These differing views on spirituality/wellbeing for women as either agentic or oppressive mirror conflicting paradigms in the wider literature on contemporary spirituality and wellbeing in the West. In this article, while taking the claims of my interlocutors seriously, I set out to explore how the femininities that are cultivated within women’s circles can be critically analysed and assessed

When Women Gather

Holding Sacred Space

The New Feminine?

Sisterhood Reclaimed

Conclusions