The Devaluation of the Divine Feminine: A Reckoning in Art and Life
This article first appeared in Issue 1 of the Tea, Art and Anarchy Zine which was compiled by my friend Jo Kemp.
For too long, we have lived in a world that fails to honour and respect the sacred work of mothers and feminine energy. A patriarchal society has systematically devalued the roles of birthing, nurturing, and tending to life itself. And now, we are reaping what we’ve sown through dangerous declines in birth rates and a severe lack of reciprocity with the natural world. We have reached an inflection point – a “fuck around and find out” moment where the harmful repercussions of undervaluing the feminine can no longer be ignored.
This devaluation echoes profoundly across creative fields, where women’s artistic forces have been systematically suppressed, overlooked, or outright stolen. Consider the revolutionary artist Hilma af Klint, whose abstract masterpieces predated Kandinsky yet remained hidden from the world for decades, her will stipulating that her work not be shown until twenty years after her death – knowing the world wasn’t ready to acknowledge a woman as the pioneer of abstract art. Or think of Dora Maar, remembered primarily as Picasso’s muse and model for “The Weeping Woman,” while her own brilliant photographic work was overshadowed and her career actively undermined by her famous partner. In film and theatre, actresses face similar battles – take Kate Beckinsale’s recent revelation about working with an habitually drunk male co-star who kept her waiting for six hours to film scenes, preventing her from seeing her child. When she dared to speak up about this unprofessional behaviour, she was labelled a “cunt” and patronizingly offered a bicycle to ride around on while waiting. The message was clear: her time as a mother and professional was worth less than accommodating her male colleague’s dysfunction.
From the moment a woman becomes a mother, she is already swimming upstream against a current of unconscious biases. Despite the miracle of bringing forth new life, mothers are cast aside professionally as boundaries around their time and availability become more rigid. In creative fields, this manifests as a cruel double bind: motherhood provides profound artistic inspiration yet simultaneously erects practical barriers to creative practice. Writers delay their novels, choreographers step back from dance companies, visual artists surrender their studio time – Like the protagonist in “Nightbitch,” countless women artists find their wild creative spirits seemingly caged by the demands of motherhood, only to later discover that this very experience can transform and deepen their artistic vision – if only they can find the space and support to explore it.
The notion that beauty and value are intrinsically tied to fertility and sexuality immediately paints older women as disposable in a culture steeped in objectification. And yet, these are the very women with decades of accumulated wisdom and creative power. It’s no coincidence that many women artists only find recognition in their later years, having spent decades nurturing others before finally claiming the time and space for their own creative expression. Louise Bourgeois didn’t have her first retrospective until age 70, proving that artistic genius doesn’t expire with youth – it often deepens with lived experience.
For those who sacrifice career for motherhood, the inequities are no less egregious. The irreplaceable act of cultivating young humans receives no financial compensation or support in our economic model. This extends to the art world, where residencies rarely accommodate parents, galleries hesitate to invest in artists who might become mothers, and the demanding schedule of openings and networking assumes someone else is handling childcare. The “artistic lifestyle” itself has been defined by male artists who historically relied on women’s unpaid domestic labour to maintain their creative freedom.
This psychic wound goes beyond economics – it is a metaphysical dismissal of the Divine Mother’s incredible strength and significance. When women continually make sacrifices with little reciprocity or appreciation, it inevitably breeds resentment. In art, this manifests as generations of women whose creative voices were silenced or delayed, their work relegated to “craft” or “domestic arts” rather than “fine art,” their innovations credited to male contemporaries who had the privilege of uninterrupted creative practice.
Is it any wonder that rates of divorce, domestic violence, and women simply choosing not to have children or partner with men are increasing? From their perch of devaluation, too many women are concluding the wisest path is to avoid marriage and motherhood entirely in a world that does not truly honour or support their journey. Female artists particularly feel this tension, knowing the art world’s history of forcing women to choose between their creative practice and motherhood, as if the two were incompatible rather than potentially symbiotic forces.
This is not just a crisis of respect for women – it is an existential threat to our entire species and our cultural heritage. For we are inextricably linked to the great Mother Earth who birthed us all. And she, too, is reaching a breaking point due to millennia of human disregard and consumption without reciprocity.
Our dismissal of the Divine Feminine’s holistic, nurturing principles is quite literally leading to our potential demise through climate change, war, racism, and a lack of human consciousness. One need only look at the leadership of most nations historically – an uninterrupted lineage of male centeredness, domination, hoarding of resources, and conquering at all costs. This same dynamic has shaped our cultural institutions, determining which artists are collected, which stories are told, and whose perspective is deemed universal rather than niche.
Just as we have stripped the Earth’s womb, disrespected her rhythms, and taken until armageddon’s shadow looms, so have we taken from human mothers and artists. From the migrant worker mother separating from her children to provide for them, to the artist mother struggling to maintain her practice between day-care pickup and dinner prep – the depletion is systemic and multi-generational.
Where masculine consciousness seeks to subdue the wild and procreate endlessly without consideration, the Divine Feminine conceives, gestates, and tends with great sagacious intent. She births not just children, but new ways of seeing, new forms of expression, new possibilities for human consciousness. Her art emerges from the deep well of lived experience, from the sacred dance of creation and nurturing, from the wisdom that can only come from holding both the profound and the mundane in perfect balance.
If we are to evolve as a species and as a culture, we must restore this balance. We must shift to a partnership model where the nurturing and life-giving forces are cherished, supported and allowed to thrive without exploitation. This means reimagining our cultural institutions and support systems to honour both the mother and the artist, understanding that these roles can nurture each other rather than compete. It means acknowledging and celebrating women’s creative power in all its forms, at all stages of life. Only then can we hope to birth the kind of art, and the kind of world, that our collective future requires.