Daughters of Saturn
From Father’s Daughter to Creative Woman
Patricia Reis
Spring Journal Books 2006 361p.

                           “Submission to one’s situation, one’s relationships, one’s job,
                             is also antithetical to creative work. Dutiful daughters,
                             compliant wives, deferential employees, do not create,
                             they resign themselves to their situations. They surrender,
                             not to the creative fires within, but to the demands of the
                             life of servitude the culture has created for them.” Pg. 75

Author and Depth Psychologist Patricia Reis, MFA, says that an understanding of the interconnections between the personal father and the cultural father is imperative not only to free daughters of tyranny but, as important, to claim their power to live creative lives.

Carefully and with great compassion, Reis explains that extrication from the muzzles of father-rule is tangled by another power; that of love. Daughters, sisters, mothers and wives love the fathers, brothers, sons and husbands who were, under patriarchy, socialized to oppress, repress, sexually abuse and infantilize women.
With the heightened sensitivity of the victim, daughters love their powerful, dynamic, favored, manipulative and depressed patriarchs. Reis shares her own process concerning her own father:

                  “Only when I unplugged from my craving for love and approval from him
                    and the men who represented him, could I find within myself,
                    with the help of other women, my own woman-centered sense of authority.
                   …a work that fulfilled me, creative expression… ..”
                   I know who my people are and where my battles need to be fought.
                   I know too, where my spiritual resources are and how to replenish myself.” Pg. xix

Reis explains that in the compulsive gulping down of his own children, fear-based Saturn eschewed any competition for his prized power. He also confined his perceived rivals. Reis comments on the complicated nature of recovery from patriarchal swallowing: “Many women walk the narrow path between wanting to make a home and needing to get out of it. It seems no surprise that the twinned condition of agoraphobia/claustrophobia is primarily a women’s disorder.” Pg 103

Saturn’s wife, Rhea, resists her husband’s addiction to power, but does so co-dependently. She learns to manipulate. Subsumed in his controlling dynamic and unable to stop his destructive behavior, it was only the birth of a male child, Zeus, which fired her dazed instincts into fierce protection of this penis-bearing child.
Rheas’ desperate, clever trickery results in the release of her favored son from the belly of his father and, unintentionally, in the fortuitous disgorgement of her three previously swallowed daughters, Hestia, Hera and Demeter. Instinct-injured Rhea dozed in denial during the swallowing of her three beautiful girl babies. Reis comments on a sad reality:

                                   “…Daughters swallowed by the father of a patriarchal culture,
                                    lack the necessary nurturing and agency of a strong mother and thus
                                    they are left vulnerable and unprotected.”  Pg. 30

Reis explains how tragic it is when mothers themselves become “actual embodiment and executors of the repressive patriarchal system.”  Such a one was the mother of Virginia Woolf,  Julia Stevens, blind to the sexual abuse of her daughters in her own household, as she labored so excessively under her demanding husband’s identification as  “Angel of the House” that her early death was attributed to intense exhaustion.  Her own complete socialization into the patriarchal system sealed her own - and her daughters’ fates.

 “Like the mythic Daughters of Saturn, when a woman has awakened out of the Belly of the Father, she will find herself in a male-oriented system, a system that has already defined her.” Pg.86  
Reis describes the effects of living under the domination of a patriarchal culture: “their inheritance as devoured daughters sets them apart in certain symptomatic ways; they all have relational difficulties; they each struggle with various oral disorders; each has her need for psychic space and all suffer from lack of courageous mothering…They have learned to live without benefit of maternal nurturing, warmth and energy and like sisters who don’t speak to each other…they don’t acknowledge their early trauma and try to go it alone.” Pg 97  

Reis provides startling research about the lives of Henrietta Dolittle, a client of Freud, Sylvia Plath, Anais Nin, Emily Dickenson and Virginia Woolf, contemporary ‘daughters of Saturn’. Astonishing accounts of these determined, courageous women wipes away any trace of denial about the tortures they endured and continue to suffer in such a patriarchal system that praises women most of all for selfless service.

Reis escorts her reader through four critical gates: The Awakening, (consciousness of inequalities) The Threshold, (becoming woman-centered and stepping outside of patriarchal thought) The Return (the bumpy process of putting theory into practice), and Possibility, (living well without the map). Each stage of the initiatory journey to wholeness requires the alert attention of the woman wayfarer as she seeks her freedom. The creative woman is quiet now, not because she “knows her place” but because she enjoys solitude, peaceful time to privately reflect and to consciously create.

In the chapter Sylvia Plath and the Marital Hells of Hera, Reis describes Plath’s disastrous decline subsequent to her marriage. Reis poignantly tells how this powerful young poet began to identify with Eve and called herself  “Adam’s woman.” 
Plath wrote, “… away from Ted I feel as if I were living with one eyelash of myself only.” Pg.163

Reis explains that Plath “…embarked upon that strange process of diminishment which happens upon marriage…projecting her own genius onto her husband.”  How could this happen to ‘The Girl who wanted to be God.’?

Reis quotes a statement made by Virginia Wolfe in 1928:

                    “Women have served all these centuries as
                     looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power
                     of reflecting the figure of a man at twice his natural size.” Pg. 164

One might shrug and say ‘Yes, but that was then and this is now, 2007.’

But could the June 1955 commencement address conferred by Adlai Stevenson, ‘the most prominent liberal of the day” upon Sylvia Plath and her graduating class not eerily echo in fundamentalist circles today?

                      “The assignment for you, as wives and mothers,
                       you can do in the living room with a baby on your lap
                       or in the kitchen with a can opener in your hand. If you are clever,
                       maybe you can even practice your saving arts on that unsuspecting man
                       while he’s watching television…”  Pg. 162

Reis is firm in her last chapter containing but a single, determined page. It is called “Possibility.”

It is up to every woman who reads this extremely well-researched and emphatic study to respond by herself,

for Her Self.  

                                                                                                          Eleanor Cowan