Published in 1976 (the year Stone and Schneir first met), “When God Was a Woman” played a key role in the rise of “feminist theology” in the '70s and '80s. That book, Stone wrote in its preface, is “the story of the suppression of women's rites” - the story of how “in prehistoric and early historic periods of human development, religions existed in which people revered their supreme creator as female,” before such practices were “aggressively” suppressed by patriarchal worship. She was a sculptor and professor of art and art history who had just published a book that she believed, as she told interviewer Michael Toms, “maybe 10 people in the world would bother to wade through.”Īnd, Merlin Stone told Lenny Schneir, she had felt guided by “a female energy in the universe” as she trekked across Europe and the Middle East researching what would become “When God Was a Woman.” When Lenny met Merlin, he was a poker player by profession and a self-confessed “male chauvinist.”
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