Goddesses in Each of Us Goddesses in Older Women: Archetypes in Women over Fifty Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D. '58 HarperCollins Publishers, 2001, 227 pages, $25.00

With more than 20 million baby-boomer generation women turning 50 in the few years prior to and following the dawn of the 21st century, it's about time for a handbook on becoming an authentic woman--a green and juicy crone. Psychoanalyst Jean Shinoda Bolen '58 brings us just such a manual in Goddesses in Older Women, a sequel to her 1985 bestseller, Goddesses in Everywoman: A New Psychology of Women, a project she co-edited with writer and activist Gloria Steinem.

Bolen relies on her training as a Jungian analyst, her feminism, and her penchant for historical research to introduce newcomers--and to restore her dedicated readers--to an understanding of the influence of goddess archetypes in maturing women's lives today. Precisely at a time when our society is feeling the full impact of a population of more than 45 million women whose lives and attitudes have been shaped by the women's movement, Bolen reanimates ancient goddesses with an appealing and accessible combination of historicism and tales of personal effort and exultation.

From menarche to motherhood to menopause, the milestones of womanhood have been marked in ancient matriarchal cultures with ritual and tradition for the maiden, the mother/matron, and the crone. Paralleling the cycles of the moon, women processed through these life stages, celebrating change, seeing life in a new light with the dawn of each new phase. Bolen treats contemporary readers to a better comprehension and appreciation of the "sacred feminine" by invoking goddess archetypes in figures of both the Occident and the Orient--Metis, Sophia, Hestia, Hecate, Sekhmet, Kali, Baubo, Uzume, Kuan-Yin, the Virgin Mary, and even America's Lady Liberty.

She leans on her own experience today as a woman "on the far side of 50" to encourage women to incite the power of the goddess archetypes in claiming authenticity after motherhood. Achieving a deep sense of meaning in the third phase of life requires a woman's joyful recognition of self and with that an embodiment of the traits of the "Wise Woman"--wisdom as intuition and experience, outrage over injustice, humor in the face of tragedy, and an empathic compassion.

Even for a woman 20 years from 50, the handbook is a gem. While she does sacrifice a chapter of Goddesses in Older Women to reiterate the tenets of Everywoman, she gives a terse summary of the 20th-century women's movement in America that offers much younger readers insight into the influential crones (or goddesses) in their own lives.

--Sarah Dolinar