Cutting across class, race, religion, and gender, A Woman's Worth speaks powerfully and persuasively to a generation in need of healing, and in search of harmony. With A Woman's Worth , Marianne Williamson turns her charismatic voice—and the same empowering, spiritually enlightening wisdom that energized her landmark work, A Return to Love — to 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. With A WOMAN'S WORTH, Marianne Williamson turns her charismatic voice--and the same empowering, spiritually enlightening wisdom that energized her landmark work, A RETURN TO LOVE-- to 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 WOMAN'S WORTH speaks powerfully and persuasively to a generation in need of healing, and in search of harmony. With A WOMAN'S WORTH, Marianne Williamson turns her charismatic voice--and the same empowering, spiritually enlightening wisdom that energized her landmark work, A RETURN TO LOVE-- to 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 WOMAN'S WORTH speaks powerfully and persuasively to a generation in need of healing, and in search of harmony. A native of Houston, Texas, Marianne Williamson has been lecturing on metaphysics and spirituality since 1983. She founded the meals-on-wheels program Project Angel Food, which has served more than 10 million meals since 1989. She also cofounded the Peace Alliance and serves on the board of directors of the poverty nonprofit RESULTS. She has published 12 books, several of which have been New York Times bestsellers. An internationally acclaimed spiritualist, Williamson has appeared on numerous television programs, such as Good Morning America , The Oprah Winfrey Show , Larry King Live, Charlie Rose, and Bill Maher. ONE Glorious Queens and Slavegirls The eternal feminine draws us upward. —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe It’s very difficult being a woman. It’s 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 anyone—man or woman—realizes. 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 it’s 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 woman’s hand and minister to her tenderly, or she will turn—this collective feminine shadow self—into a monster who will go unheard no longer. This book is an effort to hear and understand her, in today’s 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 isn’t than by what it is. For some women, this is not a problem. They have risen above the complexities of society’s 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, we’re liable to be told, “There you go—complaining 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. This is a book about a woman’s inner life. Here, we are our real selves, while in the outer world we are impostors.
