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by Tarnas, Richard

  Feminism and Women’s Movements

  Historians of feminism and women’s movements will immediately recognize the pivotal importance of the four specific eras that coincided with the sequence of consecutive Uranus-Pluto axial alignments of the past two hundred fifty years, as if the evolution of the struggle for women’s rights had been decisively impelled forward in distinct stages each of which began in exact coincidence with these specific periods of planetary alignment.

  The earliest significant emergence of modern feminism took place during the Uranus-Pluto opposition of the French Revolutionary period (1787–98). In England, this period brought the publication in 1792 of the first great feminist document and manifesto, Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (“I do not wish them to have power over men, but over themselves”). In France, women at many levels of society played significant roles in the revolutionary upheaval, from the Belgian courtesan and revolutionary street orator Théroigne de Méricourt to radical aristocrats such as Madame de Staël and Madame Roland whose salons became influential centers of political debate and activity. Demands to honor women’s “inalienable rights” were made to the Assembly by Olympe de Gouges and were supported by the women’s political organization Amis de la Vérité, which argued for women’s education, civil rights, and freedom for divorce.

  The next major stage developed during the immediately following Uranus-Pluto conjunction of 1845–56, with the emergence of the women’s suffrage movement in the United States under the leadership of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Lucy Stone, and Susan B. Anthony. At this time the first Women’s Rights Convention was held at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, after which women’s rights meetings were held regularly. At this time Stanton formulated the first organized demand for women’s suffrage, while in England Harriet Taylor wrote The Enfranchisement of Women. During this same conjunction, Margaret Fuller wrote Woman in the Nineteenth Century, the first major work of American feminism; Lucretia Mott published Discourse on Women, which argued for educational equality for women; Amelia Bloomer began the first prominent women’s rights newspaper; and Sojourner Truth delivered her famous “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech before a women’s rights convention in Akron, Ohio. Near the end of the conjunction period, Walt Whitman opened his epoch-making Leaves of Grass in 1855 with the proclamation:

  I am the poet of the woman the same as the man,

  And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man.

  The women’s suffrage movement then reached its next, more militant and international stage during the immediately following Uranus-Pluto opposition of 1896–1907, which was marked by a wave of militant suffragist activity and such seminal events as the delivery to British parliament in 1902 of a 37,000 signatory petition demanding women’s right to vote, the founding of the Women’s Social and Political Union in England in 1903 under the leadership of Emmeline Pankhurst, the founding of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in 1904, and the political reorganization of the National American Woman Suffrage Association by Carrie Chapman Catt beginning in 1905. In the following year, the term “suffragette” was first used. Also in 1906 Emma Goldman cofounded and edited the anarchist monthly Mother Earth. During the same alignment, galvanized by Nannie Helen Burroughs’s speech “How the Sisters are Hindered from Helping” to the National Baptist Convention, the largest African-American women’s organization, Women’s Convention, was founded. Also published during this period was Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Women and Economics of 1898, calling for economic freedom and social equality for women—a book widely influential and internationally translated at the time but then unread for several decades until it was rediscovered by feminists in the 1960s. On other fronts, Marie Curie in France became in 1903 the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize, while in London from 1905 the Bloomsbury Group emerged as Virginia Woolf and her circle of artistic and intellectual pioneers broke free of Victorian social codes. At the end of the alignment period in 1906, Susan B. Anthony died; in her final public speech she asserted her famous motto: “Failure is impossible.”

  Finally, the immediately following conjunction of 1960–72 coincided with perhaps the most dramatic stage in this evolution, with the decisive widespread emergence of feminism and the women’s liberation movement, impelled by the publication of Betty Friedan’s landmark work The Feminine Mystique in 1963 (five million copies were sold by 1970), the founding of the National Organization for Women in 1966, the beginning of radical feminism with the founding of New York Radical Women and Redstockings in 1968–69, the writing of Our Bodies, Ourselves by the Boston Women’s Health Collective in 1969, the founding of the Women’s Action Alliance in 1971, and the work of many individual writers and activists such as Doris Lessing, Kate Millett, Germaine Greer, and Gloria Steinem, all contributing to innumerable advances initiated on many fronts in those years.

  In examining cyclical sequences of a specific cultural stream, I observed two typical patterns. One took the form of dense clusterings of events and figures that shared a specific archetypal character—in this instance a sharply intensified impulse towards emancipation and empowerment—all appearing in close coincidence with the period of a particular alignment, followed by an intervening period in which such phenomena were diminished in number and intensity. This less active period would last until the next cyclical alignment, which would coincide with a new clustering of events and figures of the same archetypal character that bore a clear historical relationship to the earlier epoch. The quiescent intervening period resembled a stage of gestation, with the cultural impulse undergoing a kind of invisible subterranean development until the next alignment period brought forth a resurgence of the phenomenon, but now in a new form that reflected the intervening historical influences and the new cultural context.

  In the second typical pattern, the period of dense clustering during the original alignment was followed in subsequent years by a continuing and sometimes even increasing appearance of related cultural phenomena. In these cases, the alignment period seemed to act as a decisive catalyst for the cultural impulse in question, which would continue developing unabated after the alignment period was over, coming to fruition in significant ways or taking new forms. These subsequent developments and transformations, as we will see, consistently coincided with other planetary alignments whose different archetypal character closely corresponded to the nature of the development (successful and expansive milestones when Jupiter aligned with Uranus, for example, and more problematic, constricting developments, or structuring and solidifying ones, when Saturn was involved). When, however, the next major Uranus-Pluto alignment occurred, another sustained catalyzing period took place, marked by another dense clustering of archetypally relevant cultural phenomena bearing a clear historical relationship to the preceding Uranus-Pluto alignment. We will be able to observe these two basic forms of sequential patterning throughout the evidence presented below. With the history of feminism as with the other cultural phenomena we are examining, the larger interplay of correlations will emerge as our survey encompasses the other planetary cycles.

  Abolitionist and Civil Rights Movements

  A parallel pattern of cyclical stages of accelerated development occurred in an entirely different emancipatory struggle during these same centuries, the long movement for the freedom and civil rights of African-Americans. During the Uranus-Pluto alignment of 1787–98, that of the French Revolution, there simultaneously emerged in Britain, the United States, and France the first widespread public call for the abolition of slavery, with the appearance of enormously popular petitions against the slave trade, the founding of the Abolition Society in England led by Thomas Clarkson (1787), the Free African Society in Philadelphia (1787), the Society of the Friends of the Blacks in France (1788), and the publication of the widely read autobiography of the freed slave Olaudah Equiano(1789), which was the first English-language indictment of slavery. In addition, this same period saw the publication of Willia
m Blake’s engravings of slave life(1796), which strongly influenced all subsequent abolitionist iconography; the successful revolution of Haitian slaves under the leadership of Toussaint L’Ouverture (1791–94); the abandonment of the slave trade by Denmark (1792), the first nation to do so; and the French Revolutionary government’s freeing of slaves in all French colonies (1794), the first instance of such an emancipation.

  Similarly, the immediately following Uranus-Pluto alignment of 1845–56 coincided with the peak of abolitionist activism in the United States, which was marked by the influential activity of Frederick Douglass, the publication of his autobiography (1845) and his antislavery newspaper the North Star (from 1847), the flourishing of the Underground Railway through the work of Harriet Tubman (who escaped from slavery in 1849) among many others, the electrifying preaching of Sojourner Truth against slavery and on behalf of women’s rights, the publication of her autobiography (1850), Emerson’s many public lectures against slavery, popular uprisings by both blacks and whites in the North against the Fugitive Slave Act (1850–54), the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s immensely influential Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), and the militant antislavery activity of John Brown and his followers (from 1855). This same period also saw the founding of the Free Soil (1848) and Republican parties (1854), the latter joined by Lincoln, which brought abolitionist views into the mainstream of American politics and eventually precipitated the Civil War.5 It was during this period as well that Liberia proclaimed its independence (1847), the first African colony to do so.

  This cyclical sequence then continued during the immediately following Uranus-Pluto opposition alignment of 1896–1907, first with the rise of Booker T. Washington and his call for moderate social and educational reform for blacks, and then with the first emergence of organized black protest in the United States under the leadership of W. E. B. Du Bois, which was marked by the founding of the Niagara Movement in 1905 by Du Bois and twenty-nine other black intellectuals and which called for full political, social, and civil rights for all African-Americans. Du Bois published at this time his influential The Souls of Black Folk (1903), which began the intellectual revolt against accommodationism. During the period of this same alignment, there took place the first Pan-African Conference in London (1900), which supported the struggle for the freedom of all peoples of African descent, and the founding of the Congo Reform Association by Edmund Morel in England, supported by many major cultural figures such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain, and Booker T. Washington, to protest colonialist atrocities in the Belgian Congo (1904).

  And finally of course, the period of 1960–1972, that of the most recent Uranus-Pluto conjunction, brought a culmination of the movement for black civil rights with the activities of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Bayard Rustin, among many other leaders; such organizations as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (which emerged directly from the Niagara Movement of the previous alignment) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; the Freedom Riders and the great multitude of sit-ins, demonstrations, and marches; the passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1965 and 1968; the rise of the black power movement and the founding of the Black Panthers; the writings and speeches of James Baldwin, Stokeley Carmichael, Angela Davis, Eldridge Cleaver; and a host of other events, actions, and writings that reflected the climactic nature of the 1960s for this movement. Comparable phenomena took place throughout the continent of Africa at this time, from the dramatic resistance activities of Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress in South Africa to the insurrections, independence movements, and achievement of indigenous African control over European colonial powers that occurred in most of the nations of sub-Saharan Africa during this decade.

  Perhaps the paradigmatic statement of this powerful collective impulse during the 1960s was Martin Luther King’s historic speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial at the March on Washington in 1963, where King gave prophetic voice to the long evolutionary struggle (Pluto) for liberation, awakening, and freedom (Uranus):

  I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.” I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character…. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

  This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with a new meaning, “My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim’s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.” And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania! Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado! Let freedom ring from the curvaceous peaks of California! But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia! Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee! Let freedom ring from every hill and every molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

  When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

  Nonviolent Civil Disobedience

  The great historical dramas of both of these enduring movements for social change and human freedom thus appeared to follow a consistent pattern of cyclical peaks that precisely coincided with the periods of the Uranus-Pluto alignments. These in turn appeared to be particular manifestations of a more general cyclical pattern in which a collective impulse of emancipation and radical change was activated and empowered in many areas simultaneously in just these periods. Yet the connections between these eras were often even more specific. For example, the philosophy and tactics of nonviolent civil disobedience employed by Martin Luther King and others in the Sixties’ civil rights and antiwar movements were inspired above all by the example of Mohandas Gandhi. During the Uranus-Pluto opposition that immediately preceded the conjunction of the 1960s, Gandhi first developed and employed his civil disobedience philosophy of satyagraha (“truth force” or “holding to truth”) in the struggle for Indian rights in South Africa in 1906 in response to his being thrown off a “whites only” train car.

  Gandhi was influenced, as was King later, by the political writings of Leo Tolstoy, whose influence on radical reform and revolutionary movements in Russian society and personal defiance of the Russian state and church were at their peak in these same years, 1896–1907. This cyclical pattern reached back still further, for it was during the Uranus-Pluto conjunction just before this (1845–56) that Thoreau wrote and published in 1849 his seminal essay On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, which described his brief imprisonment for refusing, on antislavery grounds, to pay a tax levied by the U.S. government to support its war against Mexico. Thoreau’s essay directly influenced first Tolstoy, then Gandhi, then King. This lineage of descent in the evolution of civil disobedience—Thoreau, Tolstoy, Gandhi, King—is of course well known. What is surprising—and what should not happen so consistently—is the precise correlation with the Uranus-Pluto cycle, a correlation replicated in so many other archetypally r
elated historical and cultural phenomena.

  Radical Socialism

  A comparable pattern occurred in the evolution of radical socialist theory. Thus Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto of 1848 and the origins of revolutionary Marxist socialism coincided precisely with the Uranus-Pluto conjunction of the 1845–56 period. The next decisive step in that evolution—the emergence of Lenin and Trotsky, the founding of the Bolshevik Party, and the formulation of Marxist-Leninist philosophy in Lenin’s manifesto What Is To Be Done?—exactly coincided with the immediately following Uranus-Pluto opposition of 1896–1907.

  Finally, during the following conjunction of 1960–72, there took place the most massive upsurge and dissemination of radical socialist and Marxist-Leninist doctrines, which influenced revolutionary movements throughout the Third World and student activists and intellectuals throughout the West, and brought unprecedentedly widespread popularity to Marxist-inspired revolutionary leaders and theorists such as Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, Frantz Fanon, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Herbert Marcuse. This period brought yet another influential Marxist manifesto, Mao’s “Little Red Book,” the bible of the tens of thousands of young Chinese Cultural Revolutionaries during these years. In a different spirit, the liberation theology movement was born in Latin America during this same conjunction, through the work of Gustavo Gutiérrez and Leonardo Boff, who sought to combine Marxist principles of social revolution and historical consciousness of structures of economic oppression with incarnational Christian ideals of justice, community, and compassionate engagement with the plight of the poor.

  Nor was this cyclical pattern limited to these last three alignments, for it was during the French Revolution and the 1790s, the period of the Uranus-Pluto opposition just before these, that alongside the revolutionary leaders Danton, Marat, Saint-Just, and Robespierre there emerged the first major theorist of revolutionary socialism, François-Noël Babeuf, the leader of the Conspiracy of the Equals that attempted to overthrow the Directory and press the French Revolution to bring full economic equality as well as political equality to the masses. In 1794 Babeuf founded Le Tribun du Peuple, the first journal that advocated socialist views, and formulated a doctrine of class war and the revolutionary role of the working class that became fundamental to the Marxist theory of revolution which emerged during the following Uranus-Pluto conjunction of 1845–56. Similarly, the radical anarchist and libertarian views of Proudhon, Bakunin, and Herzen—all formulated precisely during the period of the latter conjunction—were principally anticipated by William Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. Godwin’s celebrated work was published in 1793 during the French Revolutionary alignment; in its lucid and passionate summary of both the radical beliefs that had contributed to the Revolution and those then emerging from it, the book exerted immense influence on the intellectual life of the age and of the century to come—especially during subsequent Uranus-Pluto alignments.