Amy Cunningham

How did you choose Emily Dickinson, Teresa of Avila, Sojourner Truth, Lucretia Mott, and Dorothy Day to profile in your book?

Helen LaKelly Hunt: I’m not ordinarily a mystical person, but I actually had dreams of these women. My dream life was the editor and shaper of this book.

Any dreams that were particularly powerful?

No, but I had a dream of Teresa of Avila just dancing in her habit. And after reading and reading about her, I had a dream about Dorothy Day reaching out to people on the street. I’d occasionally have dreams like that, and I wanted to make sure that there was something universal about the selection.

Each of the five women you discuss represents a stage of the internal journey of the heroine, you say, or the wholeness path: pain, shadow, voice, action, communion. I wanted to stress the communion part because that’s where I think we want to go. Feminism is about interconnection, but it’s stopping short of the real kind of outreach that it could have. Becoming conscious of how we are all interconnected is important. We must treat one other carefully in order to not rupture the connections between each other. The other challenge is for feminism to think about its shadow, which is the split-off part of its spiritual self.

And what would that shadow consist of and how would we work with it?

First to own the fact that, while there is a split between faith and feminism, American feminism was birthed as a spiritual effort. The women who issued the first public call for women’s rights were fuelled by their religious fervour and passion. — Beliefnet.com