This is a very, very important book that anyone who cares about the endangered state of the USA and the world must read, male or female.
In Crawford, Mother Cindy Sheehan has changed the balance here in the US. It's because she is speaking as a mother. This book is an inspiring strategy book, a historic compendium of how women have used the feminine archetype and women's ways to heal society, to rescue cultures from world. Consider as powerful and profound and take it to heart.
Jean Shinoda Bolen is dead on right when she says that we need to gather the women to save the world, I'm a guy, and I'm certain that it is male or masculine energy that is screwing things up here.
Bolen presents, in many different ways, examples, evidence and proof of how women do things differently and how that different approach is desperately needed now. It's not that men can't do what is needed. Men CAN do it too, but they have to embrace the approaches that women use, the reactions and strategies that women use to react to stress, to trouble, to war, because the way women responds is more nurturing, more healing, more likely to build community rather than competition, more likely to create synergy.
Having also studied George Lakoff's books, including Don't Think of An Elephant, Moral Politics and Metaphors We Live By (which I read in the 1980's) I concluded that Lakoff's model, which has led to him becoming a "framing" guru for Democratic leaders, could benefit by adding a mythic, feminine archetype perspective. When he talks about nurturing parent and strict parent cultures and families, he could also be talking about masculine archetype and feminine archetype families and cultures.
Jean Shinoda Bolen's new book provides a conceptualization of ways to think about language, interventions, cultural phenomena, and change strategies that have the potential to be just as powerful as Lakoffs. She's not talking about framing, but she is offering a different way to approach the same problems. Any reader of Lakoff's Don't Think of An Elephant should find this book rewarding, empowering, enlightening and energizing, with a plethora of ideas of how to take action and go the next step to make a difference.
This is a book every woman who cares about politics and change should read and every man who can handle dealing with embracing the feminine will love.
