Find Your Power with Max Dashu

Max Dashu is one of women’s history’s unsung heroes and someone every woman, and man actually, should know about.  For almost 40 years, Max has collected thousands of images that document the history of women and their achievements that rarely makes it into history books.  She has created 100 slide presentations that show powerful women as shamans, civic leaders, priestesses, rebels, artists, and so much more.  And these aren’t just extraordinary women, but also everyday women following in the footsteps of their mothers and grandmothers as their community’s healers, spiritual prophets, creators, lawgivers, and leaders in every way.  Other of her programs show how women and men all over the world and throughout time have worshipped the Divine in the form of a woman.   Finally, her work demonstrates how sexism, racism, and other injustices have robbed us of an important part of our legacy as human beings.  

Max’s programs are unique, not only because much of the information is not available elsewhere, but also because of her courage and determination in following the story wherever it leads her in time and place.  She shows that we, as women and people, have so much more in common with our ancestors and women on other continents than we knew.  Iconography, practices, ideas, and stories flow from one culture and time to another in her programs, binding us together with women from the most ancient past and distant places.

As if this were not enough, Max is also an artist whose work breathes life into the history through her own vision.  Her paintings include goddesses, spiritual leaders, spiritual concepts and more.  They are vibrant and beautiful and powerful.

Now, even if you aren’t able to go to one of her presentations, you can see one of her most popular programs on DVD.  “Woman’s Power in Global Perspective” is an 86-minute rendering on film of her slideshow that starts with the monuments of female dieties, ancestors, and other beings that ancient people raised all over the world; continues with both notable and everyday women who have been shamans and other spiritual leaders, warriors, queens, and liberators, healers, artists, musicians and poets, scholars and philosophers, athletes, and more; and ends with activists who have furthered and continue to promote a better future for us all.  You can see clips from the video, read the transcript, find a study guide, and order the DVD from Max’s Suppressed History Archives .  There you may also read articles she has written, find more about her other programs, and more.  You can see and learn more about her art here.  You’ll discover things about your heritage as a woman that you never knew. 

                                                                              ~ Carolyn Lee Boyd