Marianne Williamson - A Womans Worth

How strange that this should be the club we belong to: women who have been to hell and back. But we all understand what this means. Its a membership badge we wear with knowing looks and lines on our foreheads. Such has been our womanquest. The relationships, careers, children, dreams, betrayals, hopes, wins, losses Our feelings have blended. Our stories converge.

So begins the extraordinary new book by one of todays most renowned and influential spiritual leaders. A hugely popular proponent and interpreter of A Course in Miracles, Marianne Williamson has made a phenomenal impact on audiences worldwide, via her captivating lectures and TV appearances.

With A Womans Worth, Williamson turns her charismatic voiceand the same empowering, spiritually enlightening wisdom that energized her landmark work, A Return to Loveto exploring the crucial role of women in the world today. Drawing deeply and candidly on her own experiences, the author illuminates her thought-provoking positions on such issues as beauty and age, relationships and sex, children and careers, and the reassurance and reassertion of the feminine in a patriarchal society.

Cutting across class, race, religion, and gender, A Womans Worth speaks powerfully and persuasively to a generation in need of healing, and in search of harmony.

Marianne Williamson is blessed with the ability to get to the kernel of truth. [She] addresses issues of the spirit with such earnestness and grace that she can convert even the most jaded of souls. Her voice is refreshing and new.

Chicago Sun-Times

She puts the responsibility, glory and direction of womens lives right where it belongsin our own hands and hearts.

The New Times (Seattle)

DEEPLY FELT ITS CLEAR SHES BEEN THERE.

Booklist

Marianne Williamson has powerful and universal things to say and she says them well. This is a work of wisdom.

Santa Rosa Sun

Filled with insightful comments and inspirational thoughts that will empower women to fulfill their potential.

Chattanooga News

A potent message.

Kirkus Reviews

A Ballantine Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group

Copyright 1993 by Marianne Williamson

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

www.ballantinebooks.com

This edition published by arrangement with Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 93-90550

eISBN: 978-0-307-83335-8

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PREFACE

W hen I told girlfriends I was writing a book about women, most of them said something like this: For us, for women who have been to hell and back?

How strange that this should be the club we belong to: women who have been to hell and back. But we all understand what that means. Its a membership badge we wear with knowing looks and lines on our foreheads. Most of us have known at least one divorce or one devastating breakup, whether we were married or not. Other circumstances can get us into the club as well: abortion, disease, a variety of public or private humiliations, drugs, alcohol, the death of a loved one, incompetent parents, sick children. Its everything we thought life would never be like. We dont feel self-pity so much as fear and deep grief.

Such has been our womanquest. It is conscious and disciplined, or unconscious and unbridled. Whether weve learned anything or not, our suffering has shaped who we are, and for better or for worse weve been changed by the past few years. We are not who we would have been had we not descended. We have a lot of stories and a lot to edit.

In writing this book, I have no purpose other than a creative spill of my own guts. But that in itself is a passionate purpose, and I have seen how like my guts are to those of other women. The relationships, careers, children, dreams, betrayals, hopes, wins, lossesall these form my landscape too. Our feelings have blended. Our stories converge.

Every writer hopes her words will open a door, will offer a passage of light the reader can glide through. I dare to dream that dream for this book.

Marianne Williamson
Los Angeles

CONTENTS

The eternal feminine draws us upward.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I ts very difficult being a woman. Its very difficult being a man too, I realize, but this is a book about women. Sam Keen wrote a book about men, which he called Fire in the Belly. My friend Tara called me up one day and told me she wanted to write a companion volume, Volcano in the Uterus. I laughed when she said that, but inside I was thinking, and Catastrophes in the Breasts and Terror in the Ovaries

More women cry, loudly or silently, every fraction of every moment, in every town of every country, than anyoneman or womanrealizes. We cry for our children, our lovers, our parents, and ourselves.

We cry in shame because we feel no right to cry and we cry in peace because we feel its time we did cry. We cry in moans and we cry in great yelps. We cry for the world. Yet we think we cry alone.

We feel that no one hears. And we must all listen now. We must hold the crying womans hand and minister to her tenderly, or she will turnthis collective feminine shadow selfinto a monster who will go unheard no longer. This book is an effort to hear and understand her, in todays world, as she exists at this moment, imprisoned while still dressed in all her ancient, soiled regalia. She is like a child yet she is not a child. She is our mother, our daughter, our sister, our lover. She needs us now, and we need her.

Womanhood Today is tentative and unsure, a thing defined more by what it isnt than by what it is. For some women, this is not a problem. They have risen above the complexities of societys projections and misunderstandings and now fly high above the clouds. For most women, however, the resistances they encountered as they reached for the sky were so great that their wings have now drooped, and they try no longer.

Womanhood is a mass pain of unspoken depth; and when we try to speak it, were liable to be told, There you gocomplaining again!

As long as this is true, not half but all of humanity is obstructed in its journey to our cosmic destination. This destination is far, far away, a place so deep inside us that we have barely glimpsed its outer walls.