Preaching

"Contradiction emerges. As women silence themselves to avoid separation from others, they create separation of another kind by becoming divorced from their own desires and feelings. The separation is from the truest self, and the connection in relationship becomes a kind of false intimacy. One after another, the girls moving into adolescence struggled to hold onto their own experience, to know what they knew, to speak in their own voices, to bring their own knowledge into the world in which they lived. There was the fear that one’s experience, if ever spoken, would endanger relationships and threaten survival. The tragedy came upon them quietly and subtly. Like a thief in the night, someone or something came in and robbed them of a positive sense of self. They developed, unbeknownst to themselves, a ‘no-voice voice.’"

— Turner and Hudson, “To be Saved From Silence” in Saved from Silence: Finding Women’s Voice in Preaching (St. Louis: Chalice Press) 1999, 85.