[Editor’s Note: Return to Mago E-Magazine (RTME) introduces Sister Organizations under the banner of the Nine Sister Networks as a way of consolidating Matriversal Feminism previously known as Goddess Feminist Activist Spirituality. If you are interested in interviewing or being interviewed for this project, please see here. This interview was conducted through a Zoom meeting and its video recording and script are available below.]
Interview with Sid Reger and Mary Jo Neitz of the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology
Carolyn Boyd: Welcome! I’m Carolyn Boyd, a contributor to the e-magazine Return to Mago and I will be interviewing Sid Reger and Mary Jo Neitz of the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology, also known as ASWM. The interview is a part of an effort by Return to Mago E-magazine to introduce Sister Organizations under the banner of the Nine Sister Networks as a way of consolidating Matriversal Feminism, and making all our works more visible.
First, let’s introduce Sid and Mary Jo.
Sid Reger received her doctorate in adult education from Indiana University. She is an artist, educator, and independent scholar whose passions are prehistoric arts, matrifocal cultures, mythology and animal mysteries. Now semi-retired, she still teaches widely, relating these topics to women’s spiritual journeys. She is co-founder, with the late Patricia Monaghan, of the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology, and currently serves as president. She lives in western PA with one sentient feline and one dog.
Mary Jo Neitz is Professor Emerita at the University of Missouri in Columbia and a board member of ASWM. She is a founding member of the MU Department of Women’s and Gender Studies and holds a Ph.D in sociology. She taught feminist theories and methodologies to graduate and undergraduate students. She studies religious practices and experiences in a variety of settings, primarily in the US. She serves as the United States representative on the Governing Council of the International Society for the Sociology of Religion. She lives with two young cats in beautiful Boone County, just a few miles from the Missouri River, and she celebrates native plants inside and outside of her gardens.
Let’s get to some of the questions!
Probably the most basic thing we want people to know is what is ASWM’s overall mission?
Sid: We’ll both speak to this because there are always two ways to look at things. ASWM was founded to bring the notion of the Sacred Feminine back into academia in its many forms. I say “in its many forms” because we have two threads that got us started. One was the strictly academic. That was Patricia (Monaghan)’s contribution. I’m the one who wanted to just have that wild-eyed conversation where all the women who are doing women’s spirituality work and are doing to change the paradigm had a chance to talk about something besides “What is it that you do?” So we also wanted to have conversations that were peer-to-peer, letting us go deep, letting us learn from each other and building and advancing the field. So that’s what ASWM does, in short, and we foster in any way that we can the study of goddesses, strong women, girls, and mythology, for us takes two turns, one of which is mythology is, of course, the way to describe sacred stories, and every culture has its sacred stories, but the other way is that myths are sometimes used against women and girls.We figure that as feminists it is our job as much to dispel those myths as it is to foster the others.
Mary Jo: Sid and I are sorry that Pat can’t be here to speak for herself, but I’m going to say a little bit about her. Pat was a poet and so she had that art component, but she also worked as a researcher and a reporter and did early research on goddesses and heroines. And she was in Alaska, which meant that she was very good at maintaining connections and reaching out and building her network that would keep her connected to what was happening with the feminist movement outside of Alaska. She didn’t start out as an academic. That wasn’t her beginning. She had an MFA from the University of Minnesota. She was very much in the arts and in the public. Then she moved towards academia and her experience was that her work was not viewed as legitimate and that work on goddesses and work on women in mythology and actually feminist work was not scoring her any points. Later on she went back and did her Ph.D in Interdisciplinary Studies at the Union Institute, and entered academia and eventually ended up as a professor. In that period of building her scholarship she felt that the world of scholarship did not recognize what we all were doing and what she was doing and how could she build an organization that would enhance the recognizability of goddess scholarship and the study of women and myth as legitimate. She was very strategic. You notice that we are not the “Feminist Organization for the Study of Goddesses.” That was very intentional on her part to choose this neutral language and to set up this organization where important work would happen: the sharing of scholarship, mentoring, helping new scholars publish, but also that would look like an academic organization. It would have its own publications. It would give out awards, the best book awards, the best dissertation award. So I think that her strategy of how is it that we could be perceived among other researchers who are not necessarily with the program, how is it that we could we create an organization which would enhance the way that we are perceived and recognized for the valuable and important work that is being done.
Sid: Just quickly to pick up on it, my half of this came from a whole different perspective. I was in graduate school in Bloomington, Indiana and I also took on the job of helping to coordinate the National Women’s Music Festival. They had a series of workshops. I said “I’ll manage the workshops if you know that I’m going to have goddess scholarship in the workshops for this festival.” They nodded and said “Yes, go right ahead.” So we used to meet after the festivals were over, I had friends who had a retreat out in the woods, a beautiful place, that the keynote speakers for the women’s spirituality workshops would come out and spend a few days before they went home. That was the time that I got hooked on the “great conversation,” the conversation where you can sit down with Vickie Noble and nobody has to run right out and give a workshop but we’re both sitting there thinking through what we want to do next and talking about our goals and talking about the ethics of what we do and talking about development coming for the women afterwards. So all those conversations were happening and that’s the piece that I brought when I met Pat. We actually had a situation where she was giving a workshop and we were sitting around talking at the end of it and I said “Wait a minute! This conversation is too good! We can’t all get back on the plane and go home! What are we going to do?” One of the women in the group started a listserv which did well for us for a number of years. We had a one day meeting every year to bring in women who just wanted to talk about what they were doing. One day Pat just tapped me on the shoulder and said “Nope, it’s time for the non-profit. You’re going to be the president and I’m going to be the vice president. We’re going to call it the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology because they are going to give our people money from the academic institutions to come to our conferences.” So that’s the reason we set it up the way we did and I tell everyone everyone that with that name we do tend to fly under the radar sometimes.
Carolyn: What are some of the things that ASWM offers in support of your mission?
Sid: We have conferences. We have online events. We have produced four volumes of proceedings. And, as Mary Jo said, one of the really important things that we do is we give out awards of recognition in various fields. Pat’s genius was that the first thing she set up was a dissertation award which meant that when somebody came back to their not-very-interested research directors and said “Oh! I just won an award for my dissertation!” that university would sit up and take notice, and that really has happened as time has gone on. So we give out awards for leadership, as Mary Jo said, for best book, and we also have an award for arts, and for the contribution to women’s history and culture which is kind of wide open because we want to be sure that we can include women from a wide variety of fields. This is not about being academic and in order to be as ASWM member you’ve got to be working on your dissertation. This is about the woman who, for instance, goes to this international crane foundation every year for the migration and then comes back and tells us what the mysteries of the cranes are which is why it all of a sudden makes sense that they show up in sacred stories.
Carolyn: You just mentioned the very wide range of topics and backgrounds of some of the people who you feature, so could you speak just a little bit about just a few of them? What I would like is to give our viewers an idea of some of the wide variety of perspectives and presenters that they will encounter when they come to your events or even when they just explore your website.
Sid: I’d like to just for a moment highlight our Saga recipients. Saga is the award for women’s history and culture. We’ve given it out in a variety of ways, as I said, to people across many fields, so the folks who, bless their hearts, keep coming back, and they’ve also received these awards over the years, include Dr. Heide Goettner-Abendroth, Genevieve Vaughn, Donna Read, Arisika Razak, Z Budapest, Jane Caputi, Dr. Mara Lynn Keller, Dr. Peggy Sanday, and Christiana Biaggi. They have all been Saga recipients over the years so you can see that there is a a broad foundation there of practitioners, theoreticians, artists, and musicians.
Another thing I would say about that that I didn’t mention before is that we have a salon series online. Every couple of weeks for a series of maybe six or eight a couple times a year we have women who we focus on their work. That work ranges even more widely to the folks that we find who are doing things in Native American and Indigenous communities who are often only available to us online so we’re always looking for folks who belong on a salon and need to be introduced to the women of the organization.
Carolyn: We talked about the wide range of people but what are some of the themes that run through your work – presentations and awards – that you find to be most important and how do they inter-relate to each other and also to the challenging times that we’re in.
Sid: Our themes are so varied we actually had one person come up to us and say at a conference “I thought this was going to be about mythology.” Well, yes, it is! But it’s about mythology as a sacred story and that sacred story expands into including many sacred stories from many places. Mythology is also a story, in this case, a story about women and what we’re looking for there is how do women embody mythology, how does it have an effect on their lives, what does it do for them? So it’s not merely a story of Persephone. It’s “how does your body relate to the story of Persephone? How does your lifespan relate to that?” We want to provide a big tent for all those voices to come in so that we have very many different ways to look at things. So our themes, we mentioned animal mysteries earlier, we have a theme that keeps recurring which is wonderful which is all about the notion of sentience and the notion of living in partnership on this Earth. Again, there’s a reason why it’s a crane in that myth and not some other bird and the reason is what’s right in front of us and our relationship to that animal. So we want to make sure that we include, as we said, Native American and Indigenous perspectives. We want to include what’s going on for girls. We want to talk about literature for young adults and girls. There are a lot of things we would like to be able to include.
It’s almost more like “What isn’t included?” Really! One of the women I’m trying to reach, she lives in Pittsburgh and she makes cookies, it’s a cookie thing, but they are cookies that represent Chinese-Americans in American history. It’s a beautiful project! I would love to have a salon on that.
Carolyn: I should say that I’ve been a member for many years and I don’t think I’ve missed a salon yet because each one of them has something so unique and so meaningful. And it’s right there are on your computer so if you are someone who can’t really travel, ASWM has a lot to offer, even with just the salons as well as all the other things you offer.
Sid: That’s true. I certainly hope so. That’s why we’re always on the lookout to see who’s doing that wonderful, wild, interesting thing out there. One of the ones that I loved recently was that we had the representative from the Girl Museum who came in and talked about that great project and anybody who wants to go to our website can learn more about that salon and about her project but it puts the telling of girls’ stories in the hands of girls worldwide and it’s great.
Carolyn: You’ve already talked about how ASWM was founded but I’m wondering if there is anything else you’d like to say but also if you’d like to talk about how ASWM has grown and changed over time in response to world events or just the maturation of the women’s spirituality movement.
Sid: I have one answer to that and I’m sure Mary Jo has another. As an example, what I want to say is that very early on we had a young woman put a graduate student paper in, and we are very much open to working with graduate students, and she submitted a paper about a Native American myth. She herself was not Native American and it was just one of those superficial, cringy things and she was in grad school and it shouldn’t have happened to her, but it did, and it was because that is not a high priority for even some of her mentors. So we set up a mentor to work with her and she turned out to have a beautiful paper, understood the difference, which makes all the difference to us. And what it did for us was to highlight how we needed to make a central part of our mission room for Native and Indigenous voices. We know we’re not in a position to know how to handle this, let’s find the folks who can. So she had a Native American mentor who guided her to a much better paper and we learned a lot. So that’s an example of one way we’ve expanded our mission.
Mary Jo: One of the ways we’ve extended our mission recently is a result of COVID. Since we couldn’t meet in person and since people were at home and wanting things, we developed a salon program. Sid, how many have we had?
Sid: 95 will be the next one.
Mary Jo: We do about 30 a year. It’s a wonderful opportunity to bring in people who might not travel to a conference, for example. It also increases our ability to bring in people from outside North America and to bring in both very established people but also new scholars or people who are new to our world and our readers and our audience. We have about a 40-minute talk and then about 20 or 15 minutes of discussion. The topics have been ancient North American stories, also things from classical Greece, and a wonderful piece by an African-American historian who was writing about Harriet Tubman and her leadership and some very interesting research techniques. This woman went through the swamps in the area to see what would be the most likely way that they would have conducted this exodus. It’s been really fabulous in terms of increasing the range and the audience and it’s also allowed a kind of a continuous possibility of participation. Our conferences are every other year. That created quite a gap, especially in the year in which there was no conference. Who knew that this horrible disaster would also allow us to respond using a technology that for many of us was not part of our daily lives when we started. So that’s been astonishingly successful. If any of your (Return to Mago’s) audience hasn’t sampled that, it would be worth a look.
Sid: Let me say one thing about that. The salons are a member benefit. However, we also have a page called “Share the Wisdom” where some of the salons that have risen because of current events or some other reason are on a public page. So anyone can go to see those any time and use them in teaching and whatever else you need to do.
The other thing I was going to say about the change that has come about for us. This year we’re kind of flipping our script on its head to do this online event because it’s a one-day online symposium and rather than have a keynote followed by panels, which is usually what we do in our conferences, we’re having the panels first and a respondent. The respondent is Dr Apela Colorado. We’re going to run all the information that has come from these three invited panels through the lens of Indigenous sciences and Indigenous wisdom. So that’s really different for us, and I think that’s going to provide an opportunity for more dialogue and for us to get more inspiration. This is something new we’re trying.
Mary Jo: Another thing that I think has grown, this is not outside of the original vision, but we are an archive. Of course in this day and age that means digital. Our website has an enormous number of resources, some of which have been generated through our own events. We record them and put them up on the website. But also we have been asked to archive some other scholars’ work so there is an ongoing resource there that I think is going to be increasingly important.
Sid: We’re always very much concerned that women’s work is so often ephemeral. Even to the best of our knowledge, and we do the best that we can, but it’s often a one-woman operation and so we don’t want to see any of this good information lost. One of the folks we were able to do that for is Mary Kelly who did the wonderful work on textiles and goddess symbolism in Europe. That’s available on our website, too.
Carolyn: What are some of your wishes for the future of ASWM?
Sid: I would like to see us, and I was delighted this year at our conference. I’m going to just ‘fess up to the fact that I have gray hair and that I’ve reached the stage of my life when most of my activism and work is behind me now. But thank goodness when we had our conference this year there were younger women and guys who came that we hadn’t met before. That’s what I would like to see is to make sure that we continue to have an appeal to the people who come after us because there was that awful gap between First Wave Feminism and Second Wave Feminism, but Second and Third not so much and ongoing. So if we are have to have a lapse we have a quicker turnaround so that we who have the gray hair are still available to watch the wondrous things that the younger folks will do.
Mary Jo: I have to say that’s Number One on my list. I’m also very excited about how international the conversation has become and that’s partly possible due to digital availability and processes. I hope that that knowledge-sharing will continue.
Sid: One of the things we’ve been lucky about is that every great once in a while somebody says “You know I met a woman at your last conference and we’re making a movie” or “We really are writing a book.” So it’s because they met, it’s not our job, but it’s our job to make that big tent so they can all come and they can meet each other and they can have authentic conversations, and they can go home not only inspired about what they’ve learned but inspired to take action.
Carolyn: Continuing along on the topic of activism, one of the things that we’ve found in these interviews is that each organization that I have interviewed or interacted with seems to have a very different concept of what their role in activism is. One is very much “We’re going to highlight political activism that’s going on.” Another one was “We’re the visionaries.” You’ve already addressed a couple of the ways that ASWM finds its role in being activists for the future but are there other ways you’d like to mention before we move off that topic?
Sid: I guess what I would say is that one of the things that ASWM’s about is trusting our members. The activism they bring to an event, for instance, they’ve already got it set up somewhere. They are probably doing what they need to do and we are an add-on in that regard. But we are a place that you can come and meet other people who are interested in the same kinds of issues you are and be inspired further to go back and have a little more strength and a little bit more support behind you when you go do it. I don’t know all of the types of activism our members are engaged in, but from what little I do know, I’m amazed.
Mary Jo: There’s a vision of a different world and there’s a vision that things have not always been the way they are now and that they could be different and it could be a more equal world and it could be a more just world and I think holding that vision up then permeates the work that we do. Maybe that’s obvious but I wanted to say it.
Carolyn: That’s important!
Sid: I think it is important and we’re also, as I said, we are positioned to trust our members to do what they need to do. But that vision is one that is a responsibility for so many of us to hold. That’s why it’s important that there is the Mago work and the ASWM work and all the other work that’s going on. It’s takes a lot of us to make this happen.
Carolyn: Which leads into my next question. You’ve talked about how people can participate in ASWM by becoming a member, by attending all the conferences and salons, or approaching you with proposals for a salon. What are some of the other ways that if someone wanted to become involved in ASWM they could do that?
Sid: I think you’ve mostly hit on them. We love to be in relationship face-to-face when we can, but that’s only going to happen every couple of years because one of the things we learned early on is not to overextend ourselves. If we are going to keep doing a good job we have to be careful about how much we promise that we will do. So I would say all of those things are possible and we are open to other options. When we first started we thought about maybe having regional groups that might want to meet together. We thought about having opportunities for things like art exhibits to get the arts more involved. We have a commitment to the arts because you can’t really hold that vision without incorporating all of the ways that women embody that vision.
Mary Jo: I will add that there is quite a bit of labor that goes into, say, putting on a conference. Even this one-day online conference involves quite a few people who are involved in working on publicity and working with the speakers and working on the visuals for the programs. So we do need helpers and there are things that we are delighted to have people involved in. So if you do want to be involved, let’s talk!
Sid: Let’s talk! We put out a newsletter every couple of weeks, usually not more than twice a month when we’re doing a salon series, but there’s always something on there about contact us at membership or at events and we’ll respond.
Carolyn: How can people contact you?
Sid: The best thing is probably go to the website. I would go to events at womenandmyth.org. That’s probably a good place to start.
Carolyn: As you know, Return to Mago is trying to create this Nine Systems Network so everyone maintains their own unique identity but finding ways to connect and collaborate, and share information. Are there ways that you can think of that you would like the Nine Sisters Network to assist you in some of those ways?
Mary Jo: It would great if they would publicize our events. That would be good.
Sid: I’ve been thinking about this this year because we are bumping against, not head to head against, against an international event. That’s an in-person event so the chances were that we weren’t going to have the same audience anyway, but it always makes me think about the calendar. You know, wouldn’t it be nice to have a big calendar someplace so that we didn’t go “Oh my gosh! We just scheduled opposite something that Mago is doing! We didn’t want to do that!” I know it’s not possible to have it happen that way all the time but we are kind of stuck in this time-space continuum with regards to events like that. Our psychic skills are terrific, but they aren’t always that good.
Carolyn: I know you are both scholars and artists in your own right. Would you both like to tell us a little bit about your own work aside from your work with ASWM?
Sid: I worked as an artist. I started out actually touring with a feminist theater group. I told them I would do anything except climb a catwalk or get onstage. So I was in charge of everything else. That was the best learning I could possibly have had. It was Womanshine Theater in Indianapolis, Indiana and it was the best learning about what makes feminist organizations work so that I never again underestimated the reach that women’s voices and women’s truth has after I did that work. I am a visual artist, I was for about ten years working as studio artist. That’s mostly what I do. My work was mandalas and related designs.
Mary Jo: I’m a sociologist by training and I have worked in the university system with all of its challenges and opportunities. I am now retired but I am just finishing a handbook that is co-edited with Elisabetta Ruspini, from Milan, Italy and it’s on gender and religion. We have 23 authors from all over the world. Some of them are in the diaspora. That’s a very exciting way to continue being in the conversation which was referred to earlier and which is one of the most exciting things about being a scholar for me is following the conversation and learning what the new wisdom is and how to continually think in ways that are informed and critical. So that’s me.
Carolyn: Before we close out, is there anything you would like to add?
Sid: I can’t think of anything except just to say that I am very grateful that you all are doing these. I think it’s very important to be able to get a kind of a bird’s-eye view, a woman’s-eye view into different organizations to see what is out there and what we’re doing. Yeah! We’ll figure out some better ways to collaborate as time goes along. So I’m very happy about that. And thanks to Helen for all the work she does.
Carolyn: Definitely.
Mary Jo: Thank you so much for inviting us and we’ll look forward to the fruit that comes from the work that you are doing.
Carolyn: Thank you both for being interviewed and we look forward to all kinds of future collaborations.