Hillary Clinton’s win in New Hampshire got me thinking about the feminine voice. Clinton said as her victory became apparent last night that she had listened to the voters in New Hampshire, and “in the process found my own voice.” Why that should take so long for a woman long in the public eye is matter for wonder, but I’m only five years younger and still finding my own.

What interests me more is how the women who voted for her were thinking about their vote (according to reports I heard on NPR). Apparently a very large and growing number of women want the voice emanating from what Americans persist in thinking is the center of power in the knwon universe to be the voice of a woman, a feminine voice.

Parenthetically, I am not in Hillary’s camp. Among other things, I balk at the fact that she has never said her vote to go to war in Iraq was terribly wrong — how could it be that so many of us knew better at the time but so few in Congress had the courage to resist the manipulation?

Some commentators are certain that when Hillary dropped the mask and got personal, coming close to tears two days ago when asked about the stresses of campaigning, something shifted. Listening to her voice replayed again yesterday and today, I feel myself touched, as apparently, others did. Many women seem to feel that this was an example of how women care about the world, really care: about our children and grandchildren, about the future. They feel that women, being somehow more relational, feel and express their feelings in a very different way. Never mind that Hillary Clinton has been coming off more like the Iron Lady — I’m thinking Margaret Thatcher here — than the woman from Venus — the planet named for the goddess of beauty and erotic love (and women in the present administration are distinctly Martian: faithful devotees of the god of war).

However, because I’m a pattern-thinker, the women’s voices I have heard connect with something else. In my most recent post, I complained about the Bush administration’s well-known habit of coddling crony capitalism (this was in connection with its nothing-doing attitude about catastrophic climate change and only recently acknowledging it exists and trying, ludicrously, to put a smiley-face on it). For me, incoming from left field, is a question about how the cultural myths that live us have silenced voices that, had we been able to listen, would have been able to tell us much that we needed to know. For example, about climate change.

I am remembering a wonderful book by Linda Jean Shepherd, Lifting the Veil: The Feminine Face of Science (1993). With reference to Jung, Shepherd sorted out two ways of looking at the world. Eros (remember Venus?) has the qualities of “emotionality, aesthetics, spirituality, value reached through feeling, subtlety, the urge to relate, to value, to join, to be in the midst of, to reach out to, to get in touch with, to connect, to get involved with concrete feelings, things and people rather than to abstract and theorize.” Eros pulls us toward the unique qualities of things and people in the real world. Logos qualities are “reason, clear thinking, activity, high-mindedness, problem-solving, discrimination, judgment, insight, abstraction, and nonpersonal truth reached through objectivity.” Logos distances us from things and people and pulls us toward categorization.

Shepherd is careful to say that Logos and Eros qualities are not gender-based. Instead, any whole person should be able to combine both. She spends most of the rest of the book looking very closely at a number of women scientists whose training disposes them toward Logos, but who find their feminine nature expressed in the Erotic relation to their subjects of study. One of the women she discusses is the geneticist and Nobel laureate, Barbara McClintock, who attributed her discovery of how genetic change occurs to the relationships she formed with the objects of her study, the corn plants she worked with every day.

This question of giving voice to the Erotic attitude, which has been mostly silenced in the public forum for all of written history at the least, and which we very often think of as feminine — and, I believe, is the one that the women voters I mentioned are thinking of — is one that is suddenly gaining volume. Of course I would love to blame everything on George Bush and Dick Cheney, but being a mythologist I can’t do that. The gods and goddesses, which is to say the foibles and attitudes that are enduringly human, are all in relationship, inter-implicated. That does not mean that all these available human qualities are equally valued. What is de-valued goes underground and expresses itself only in the shadows.

What if Logos has silenced scientists who have been seeing global warming all along, but have been prevented by our cultural bias toward Logos from publicly expressing anything other than “objectively” demonstrable cases and causes? In the shadow of Logos, McClintock was largely ignored for three decades before receiving the Nobel Prize because her work challenged the scientific dogma of the day (that genetic material remained unchanged as it passed from one generation to another). McClintock privately railed against her apparent inability to convince peers in the 1950s of what she had discovered by carefully observing. “I know every plant in the field,” she said, “I know them intimately.” That’s Eros.

The rise of the feminine voice — and in due time, we shall see what happens in a female-majority U.S. electorate — may mean far more than a check on the war-god Mars. Surely it’s time to promote Venus, and make room for their child, Eros. When this voice is liberated, not only among women, but men as well, what may we expect to learn? Perhaps it is not too late for our species to find out.

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