The Fourfold Goddess: Maiden, Householder, Regent, Wise Woman. A New Metaphor for Women’s Midlife Creating Sovereignty and Power

Abstract

In the twentieth century, the life span of U.S. women expanded from 45-50 years, to over 80 years. Before 1900, most women did not live past menopause. As a result of this increased longevity, this study claims there has been an expansion of women’s mythological, psychological, physiological, and spiritual life stages from three to four. The standard, though recently adopted, mythological trinity of Maiden, Mother, and Crone no longer encompasses women’s lives; old age no longer begins at fifty. Menopause and midlife, once harbingers of death, are now rite of passage thresholds, into what this study names Regency, the ages from 45-70. Regent women who are Boomers and Late Boomers are the first generations collectively living into Regency, experiencing an additional twenty-five years before the onset of old age, to recreate themselves, for themselves, at midlife. The unity of the Archetypal Feminine remains unchanged. However, women’s embodied experience of the goddess has changed. By tracing the mythology of the goddess from monad, dyad, and triad, to tetrad, this dissertation claims that women’s embodied lives are now a four-stage reflection of the goddess. As women are the metaphoric embodiments of the goddess in the flesh, it is fundamental that the metaphors of the goddess have expanded right along with us.

Women cannot separate themselves from the goddess any more than the goddess can separate herself from women. Moreover, continuing its analysis through feminist, mythological, and depth psychological methodologies, this study examines the experiences of this new life stage, through the history and recreation of the goddess from antiquity and the reclamation of menopause from the medical disease model, identifying it as biologically, psychologically, and spiritually inseparable from women’s midlife. Finally, this study argues that these twin threads of transformation offer women historically unprecedented opportunities for personal re-creation and the development of social, political, and personal sovereignty. Regency in the U.S. is one expression of a new emerging mythos that may, hopefully, find its full expression in the balancing of the masculine and feminine attributes within the human psyche and in the external world.