Vulnerability as a key to feminism. Vulnerability lies at the core of our social relationships and responsibilities. It may also show us a way of living purposefully. Sarah Stein Lubrano
“The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain… When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.” -Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
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The above quote struck me when I read The Prophet for the first time this summer because it reminded me of the work of Lou Andreas-Salomé, an obscure turn-of-the-century German philosopher who wrote about the benefits of “primitive” experience. Gibran says that the key to joy is sorrow, just as the key to sorrow is joy; Andreas-Salomé suggested that women understood this best of all. She argued that the very aspects of female life—sex, love and motherhood—that make women most vulnerable, most
open to positive and especially negative experience, also make life as a woman most meaningful. For example, Andreas-Salomé believed motherhood represented the ultimate human relationship, and “it is therefore only to motherhood that it is given to realize a relationship fully, from its deepest original source to its topmost pinnacle: from its flesh and its blood to the spiritual self of the Other, in which the beginning of the world is rediscovered” (The Erotic, 84). The mother recognizes what it means