A Career and Life Planning Guide for Women Survivors

MAKING THE CONNECTIONS WORKBOOK

Patricia Murphy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000154566
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

This book aims to assist women survivors of abuse in creating and directing their own vocational plans whether or not these efforts take place in state departments of rehabilitation and work and welfare programs such as the JOBS program arising out of the Family Services Act.

section II: the process – moving through the flower

Moving through the flower is a process that is available to all of us, a process that can lead to a place where we can express our humanity and values as women through our work and in our lives and in so doing, perhaps we can also reach across the great gulf between masculine and feminine and gently, tenderly, but firmly heal it.

Chicago, 1977, p. 206

6 Introduction

7 Making Your Work Visible

8 Analyzing, Respecting, and Celebrating Your Work

9 Understanding Your Vocational Impairment

six

introduction

Through the Flower is both the title of one of Judy Chicago’s books and one of her paintings, a luminous work I saw hanging in the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC in 1991. It is a painting which beckons and shimmers with invitation. The invitation is to step through, into another reality, a woman’s reality. The purpose of this section is to extend this invitation to you as well.

The sensual and magnificent visual and written expression of this reality has been created by the artist Judy Chicago in collaboration with hundreds of women and men, in a series of art projects starting with Womanhouse (1971), then The Dinner Party (1979), and The Birth Project (1985). In each of these efforts, Chicago has guided both women and men in going through the flower by exploring the meanings of women’s work on many levels simultaneously. Her latest eight-year effort was completed in a partnership with her husband, Donald Woodman. The Holocaust Project (1993) also explores women’s work within the human tragedy we know as the Holocaust.

Chicago’s books offer rich descriptions of the complexities of women’s work. There is her journal process which describes her struggle as a woman artist, writer, and teacher. Her observations on the damaged work lives and work habits of women are, perhaps, the most important commentary now available on the work psychology of women. Then there is the writing of those who have shared the collaborative art-making process with Chicago. Both women and men write about their experience of Chicago as a role model, teacher, and an inspiring and challenging guide. Photographs in all of the books document not only the artwork, but also the process of creating the art. The content of the writing and of the visual expressions (photographs of the art work, the art making process, the graphic design of the books themselves) are also explorations of women’s work. The books are Through the Flower: My Struggle As A Woman Artist (1977), The Dinner Party: A Symbol of Our Heritage (1979), Embroidering Our Heritage: The Dinner Party Needlework (1980), and The Holocaust Project: From Darkness Into Light (1993).

RESOURCE – Through the Flower, Inc. is a nonprofit organization which owns and controls the showing of The Dinner Party. The effort to house The Dinner Party in its own museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico is also part of this organization’s responsibility. To join Through the Flower as a member, to host dinner parties for The Dinner Party, to make contributions toward the values expressed in The Dinner Party, or to obtain more information regarding the work of Judy Chicago; write P.O. Box 8138, Santa Fe, NM 87504.

And then there is the glory of the artwork. Both The Dinner Party and The Birth Project raise women’s traditional needlework to the level of high art. The Dinner Party is a celebration of women’s china painting traditions. Both the needlework and the china painting are used to make visible a woman’s reality, whether that reality is within the world of achievement as a scientist, mystic, freedom fighter, or goddess (The Dinner Party), or within the world of a woman’s body (The Birth Project). Chicago’s art explores both the sacred and the mundane aspects of women’s realities. She makes visible the mundane, tedious aspects of women’s invisible unwaged work, and she celebrates the erased and obliterated achievements of the women we have lost.

One example is Theodora. She is, or should be, a hero to every abuse survivor. She started life as an actor, and became the Empress of Byzantium. “She issued an imperial decree making it illegal—and punishable by death—to entice a woman into prostitution, and she turned one of her palaces into an institution where prostitutes could go to start new lives” (Chicago, 1979). Theodora also instituted the death penalty for rape, and passed laws ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• About the Cover
• Dedication
• Every Woman is the Re-Weaver of her Own Life
• Table of Contents
• Confidentiality
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Section I. The Tools – Gathering the Words of Power
• II. The Process – Moving Through the Flower
• III. The Plan – Re-Weaving Your Own Life and Work
• References and Suggested Readings