As a young girl, I was filled with sadness over the story of Lot's wife, the woman with no name. Who was this woman who became a pillar of salt for the seemingly innocent act of looking back? What was she trying to see, and why was she punished so severely? For women, the act of remembering -- of looking back -- can feel transgressive, even sinful. Lot's wife defied the commandment not to look back, and her act of resistance serves as a cautionary tale of the consequences of female rebellion. Such an act of defiance also may evoke anxiety over lingering too long at the transformative moments of history. As both a treacherous and a liberatory activity, confronting the personal past involves reconciling competing allegiances and conflicting desires. To do so often involves the violation of cultural taboos.
For women, particularly, the process of remembering -- both individually and collectively -- means creating representations of the past out of a shadowy historical landscape. In Western traditions, women are more likely than men to be transitional icons, facilitating masculine journeys of exploration and conquest. As wife, mother, daughter, the woman is the one who is left and returned to, a fixed position in a male universe of transformative action. Women are spared and at the same time deprived of grand legends that place them at the center of cosmic dramas. Western cultural legacies offer women few illusions about their importance as agents in the larger order of things.
Given their invisibility within patriarchal legends and lineages, how do we understand what is involved for women in the project of remembering? And, further, what is at stake for contemporary women who collectively challenge the "Word" of the Father(s)? There are both advantages and disadvantages to understanding recollecting as transgressive work. This viewpoint permits careful scrutiny of received truths and opens up a field of possible discoveries. But it also stirs uncertainty about what is real and what is not, and it creates problems in defending what is learned. For women, who traditionally have been denied the authority to define the cultural past, the project of remembering is also a struggle for a new way of looking back. When the master's creation is called into question, so too are his tools -- the very methods of arriving at the truth.
