This book challenged the groups awareness of how many myths, stories, vocabulary, and behaviors in our culture degrade the value of women. Many of the examples are well known, others were very subtile but when brought to our attention it surprised us! We are interested to observe how we each as individuals will speak out when we hear degrading stories, words, and comments made about women.
Cassandra Speaks is about the stories we tell and how those stories become the culture. It’s about the stories we still blindly cling to, and the ones that cling to us: the origin tales, the guiding myths, the religious parables, the literature and films and fairy tales passed down through the centuries about women and men, power and war, sex and love, and the values we live by. Stories written mostly by men with lessons and laws for all of humanity. We have outgrown so many of them, and still they endure. This book is about what happens when women are the storytellers too - when we speak from our authentic voices, when we flex our values, when we become protagonists in the tales we tell about what it means to be human.
Lesser has walked two main paths in her life - the spiritual path and the feminist one - paths that sometimes cross but sometimes feel at cross-purposes. Cassandra Speaks is her extraordinary merging of the two. The best-selling author of Broken Open and Marrow, Lesser is a beloved spiritual writer, as well as a leading feminist thinker. In this book, she gives equal voice to the cool water of her meditative self and the fire of her feminist self. With her trademark gifts of both humor and insight, she offers a vision that transcends the either/or ideologies on both sides of the gender debate.