Brilliant book. I don't often have the feeling of being so completely seen on the page, but I found myself nodding frequently, especially in the early chapters. I think as I continue my own journey the latter chapters will resonate more. I will be thinking about this book for a long while to come and can see myself re-reading it regularly. Highly recommend.

Every mother should read this book, regardless of having sons or daughters. I was in the mood for a novel, not theory, when I picked up this book so the quote at the beginning from Gilbert and Gubar put me off a bit. But Monk's voice pulled me in and I couldn't put it down. I read the first 100 pages in one sitting - rare for me. This book is about life, not theory. It is not preachy either, just sharing.

A lovely memoir about the author's spiritual journey. ( Spoiler alert; She leaves the Christian church of her youth). I felt like every part of this was well-researched and sensitively written. I think so many of the feminist issues that she brings up are common feelings and thoughts that many religious women experience. As an author, Kidd is able to write about her feelings and insights in a clear and understandable way, to put context to them and connect them into an enjoyable and readable form.

I appreciated that she included personal rituals and her own dream analysis. She talked about the female friends who were indispensable to her awakening and how she and her husband navigated the inevitable metamorphosis in their relationship. I liked it a lot.

Beautifully written, thoroughly researched, thought-provoking.

Made me realize I have miles and miles to go before my feminist spiritual awakening is complete.

If you're interested in trying to understand the angst of a feminist in a religious setting, read this.

I read this book after hearing from so many people that it had been life changing. It is an interesting read, though it got a little too theoretical for me at times, but I found myself not totally connecting to the story. I think for the right reader this book can be a total revelation. I can appreciate her journey and struggles and it is interesting to read about the process she went through as she underwent this journey. But I also found myself just not relating as I had expected given the high praise. I think my background is so incredibly different and I have not felt the oppression of womanhood that she experiences - and after reading her book I am increasingly grateful for the culture and environment I was raised in. I think it’s an excellent resource for women struggling to find their own identity and importance in a world that elevates men to a higher status, it can be a great encouragement for women who feel alone in this and it is well written.

On the day my daughter started Kindergarten, I had my first meeting with my spiritual director, which is mid-sabbatical for me. At the end of our meeting, she recommended this book and I drove directly to the Fuller bookstore and bought and sat in the cafe and read the prologue. And then I cried the whole drive home. This book will mess with you, especially if you are a woman who leads in the evangelical church. Read with care! I found this book to be the door into profound personal journey of faith and theology, but it is not for the faint of heart (or faith!). I love Kidd's description of centeredness and found myself longing and identifying with much of her journey. She is an interesting writer and it is easy to read.

I thought I would like this book better than I did. The first couple chapters were alright as I could relate to her somewhat but then I felt like she just started swallowing whole everything that she read and chucking her entire past out the window. I just couldn't track with her anymore.

This was a fascinating book. My pastor loaned her copy to me, but I'm going to order my own if for no other reason than having the bibliography available! I also need to order some to give away to friends.

The books sub-title really says it in a nutshell. Sue Monk Kidd grew up in the Southern Baptist church, and married a SB minister. At some point, she became frustrated with the patriarchal assumptions that dominated the SBs and other mainline churches. She began exploring spirituality, with a focus on the feminine. She discovered the power of the Goddess in her life over the course of several years.

Much of this thinking was familiar to me, but there were a lot of discovery moments. Ms. Kidd is certainly better read on the subject than I am, so I really appreciate the extensive footnoting!

Awesome book about an equally awesome journey.

Read this book after finishing Secret Life of Bees for the second time. I love all the references to other books and articles. I read them while reading this... so it took me awhile. Fascinating!
This is the story of Monk-Kidd's personal struggle with her Christianity. I'd say it was a feminist critique of Christianity, but "feminist" is too culturally loaded, and "critique" sounds so academic as to be deadly. She looks at mythology -- and I include Christianity in this genre here -- from all over the world and all across time to see how and why women and goddesses have been systematically pushed to the fringes of religion and given secondary roles, even in their spiritual lives.

I'll be thinking about this book for a long time.
I remember reading pieces by author Sue Monk Kidd in a Christian magazine when I was a young teenager in the 1980s. Cut to 2020- one of my favorite reads of the year was "The Book of Longings", by the same author.

In the years leading up to 2020 I had been through a faith deconstruction, and it was clear to me that Kidd had, as well. "The Dance of the Dissident Daughter" is her memoir, the story of a Christian writer in the Baptist Church, of recognizing the deep injustice caused by the patriarchy in the church and the patriarchy that permeates society, and of her journey of discovering the Sacred Feminine.

There are four sections of this book, and I was most impacted by the 3rd. That's where Kidd shares most of the information she learned... About ancient cultures who worshipped goddesses... About the Divine Feminine that existed in the early Christian church but was erased in the canonization of the Bible... About the cultural values of matriarchal societies in comparison to those of patriarchal societies... About learning to recognize the Sacred Feminine that is intrinsic in all women. This book will be a guiding light for other women who are still early in their journey towards honoring the Divine Feminine.

Below is my favorite passage of the book- I've already shared it with several loved ones...

"It's that old the-world-is-flat conviction, where we believe that if we sail out on the spiritual ocean beyond a certain point we will fall off the edge of the known world into a void. We think there's nothing beyond the edge. No real spirituality, no salvation, no community, no divine substance. We cannot see that the voyage will lead us to whole new continents of depth and meaning. That if we keep going, we might even come full circle, but with a while new consciousness."

This a life-altering and mind-altering book! I absolutely loved it!

The following is what I wrote for the book club that had me reading The Dance of the Dissident Daughter. Beneath it, also in italics is an added paragraph..

I did finish the book but it was a hard slog to do it. I'd read a paragraph and by the end of it couldn't recall exactly what the first part of the paragraph was. I couldn't stop thinking how nice it was for her to be able to take all those trips, not only the more local retreats to her circle of trees but all over the country and abroad. I was never clear exactly on what the husband did for a living - minister I think was mentioned at one point, associated with a college/university in some capacity at another - but whatever he did, between their two jobs, she was certainly able to travel to a lot of nice places. Some of the workshops and retreats mentioned were job related and she was probably comped in some way for them but many were not and over the course of the several years of her "journey" the woman did a heck of a lot of traveling, even if only for weekend getaways.

I thought it ever so convenient that she'd mention a certain symbol as showing up in her dreams and oh, by the way, she'd read at least one other book on the sacred feminine that was all about that particular symbol... and oh yeah, read it before that symbol started showing up in the dreams. If I followed her discourse time and again on such events, she'd read a book or several books with information about a particular symbol showing up in dreams and how it relates to the sacred feminine and then she'd start having dreams with that exact symbol. As I said, seemed rather convenient for her in terms of relating how her journey evolved and progressed.

I also found it convenient that just when she's searching for an example to give of patriarchal oppression she suddenly remembered something from childhood that fits perfectly into her scenario. The same is true of conversations over the years with others at workshops or from daily life or from church settings. Some of these incidents when recalled made her angry or in need of sitting down and sobbing yet at the time many of them occurred she didn't seem to find anything oppressing or anger inducing. Maybe she wasn't happy with how the conversation went but that's different from finding the situation oppressing.

I hated how she wrote as if certain things are fact and apply to everyone. Just because I might dream about a labrynth doesn't mean I am having a dream symbol relating to the sacred feminine and wombs. Labrynths or mazes in dreams can be about searching for the solution to a problem, about feeling lost and confused, or like a rat running around in a maze. Sometimes, it's just a labrynth. Not every single thing in a dream is a symbol.

She states as if fact some of the information about Ariadne from the Theseus and the Minotaur myth. Some of that information is theory and supposition. I really dislike it when someone states theories and suppositions as fact. Kidd really should have stated as much. Would it really have been so difficult or taken away from her narrative to have said that based on archaeological evidence or on the works of Plutarch or whatever that Ariadne is theorized to have been a goddess in her own right? Kidd does this throughout the book. Take something that's supposition or theory and state it as infallible fact. If this were a work of fiction, then fine, take something and put a particular spin on it for story purposes. Don't do that with non-fiction.

The whole episode in Crete emerging from the cave with the pronouncements of, "It's a girl!" I found laughable, and not in a good way. It seemed contrived and over the top silly. That said, I don't want to demean or belittle whatever genuine experience any of those women had. If for them they found the experience of emerging from the cave as some sort of spiritual or feminine rebirth then more power to them. Kidd's description of it after going on and on and on about caves and labrynths and being reborn made the whole thing come across as trite and comical to me.

I agree with others that Kidd was having some sort of mid-life crisis and based on a number of things she wrote I would say that part of the crisis was already being depressed. She mentions becoming depressed over certain things as she "awakened" and began this inner journey of hers but I think she was already in a somewhat depressed state. Her reaction to certain events, conversations, attitudes of others, etc point in that direction. Where others might have been peeved over something, Kidd was having out and out mini breakdowns, throwing objects, sobbing, getting good and truly angry.

I do think part of her mid-life crisis was a crisis of faith in her church and the church leaders but I do think there was so much more going on, such as being depressed and not really being aware of it, that led her to have this sudden light bulb moment about how she was being oppressed by a patriarchal church and a patriarchal society. I think she was experience dissatisfaction in her marriage already, which added to the depression and lack of faith in the church.

Kidd wrote about how women put their lifes on the back burner for their families. That's true. In many families the needs of Mom come last. Some women are fine with that. Some are not. Of those who are not, some speak up right away and establish a more balanced way of doing things. Others stay silent for years with some finally reaching a breaking point. Sounds to me like that's what happened with Kidd. She got tired of things being one way for her husband but another way for her. He could announce that he was going away on business in two weeks and that would be that. On the other hand, when she needed to go out of town it became a big production of okaying it with him first, checking schedules for conflicts, arranging meals, making sure her husband knew what was going on in the kids' lives and so on. Kidd finally got tired of that and it came as part of this mid-life crisis, awakening, whatever you want to call it.

That leads me to point out that Kidd could be sometimes contraditory. Through the book she talks about a woman seeking permission, of needing permission, of looking to others to find out this or that was all right yet at other times she says a woman doesn't need permission of others, she doesn't need approval from a husband, father, best friend, or whomever. I found this contradiction annoying.

Also annoying was how she presented everything as being true for all women. All women who seek the sacred feminine will do this and then they will do this and then blah blah blah. It's another example, really, of her being contraditory because at times, particularly early in the book, she states that this was the evolution of her journey and she can't really speak to how the journey for others will go.

Now, all the rambling to this point aside, I could see her point and even empathize on certain things. What mature woman would want to witness two older men leering at a teenage girl working to stock shelves and hear them say that's how they like their women, on their knees? I would have found that offensive so I can well imagine how Kidd must have felt as the mother of that teen.

I think most women are well aware of the male oriented world with men still making more for the same jobs as women, of the lack of women in all aspects of politics and higher ranking corporate jobs, and within church organizations. I do not think that these days it's something women are blind too even though that's sometimes the way Kidd's writing came off to me. That is, she's going along, minding her own business then one day, BAM, it hits her. Men tend to dominate and don't like letting women have control of anything.

That might have been the case at one time with culture and society here in the US but nowadays any woman who isn't aware that women are still having to fight for equal rights in and out of the home has been off living in that cave like labrynth methinks.

All right, I could go on even more but I'm thinking y'all have a good idea on my overall thoughts and opinions of this book now. *LOL*

Okay, now for that added paragraph.

I wanted to also say that I do think that Kidd underwent something. I also think that the women she talks about had an experience that helped them each grow as a person. I don't wish from the above to make it seem as though I think it's all a load of hooey. I do believe in things like symbolism in dreams and seeing something spiritual all around us that can have a profound impact on someone's life. I did not like the book because of the manner in which things were presented. I didn't care at all for how Kidd often implies and sometimes out right writes that her experience is one that applies to all women nor did I like how at times she states something as fact when it is not yet never states that it's her opinion or someone else's opinion. To say the least I did not find this book fulfulling or freeing. For those who have, it's wonderful that the book speaks to you in such a way. Even if only one person had gotten something positive from the book, then Kidd did what she set out to do by sharing her spiritual journey.