If I had never read the book Finding Dorothy by Elizabeth Letts, I’d never have known how well this embroidery of Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz fit in to my “Not Going Back” quilt.
Frank Baum, who wrote The Wizard of Oz, married Maud Gage, the daughter of early feminist Matilda Joslyn Gage. His mother-in-laws beliefs and ideas about women influenced his writing.
In Anna Danziger Halperin’s article The Feminist of Oz, she writes “Gage… pointed to the persecution of witchcraft as a form of physical violence and a cause of psychological and spiritual harm targeting women…”
“It is impossible for us at the present day to conceive the awful horror falling upon a family into which an accusation of witchcraft had come. Not alone the shame and disgrace of such a charge; the terrors of a violent death under the most painful form; the sudden hurling of the family from ease and affluence to the most abject poverty; but above all the belief that unending torment by fire pursued the lost soul through eternity, made a combination of terrors appalling to the stoutest heart.” From her book Woman, Church and State written in 1893 by Matilda Joselyn Gage.
In The Wizard of Oz, Baum made popular the idea of a “good” witch when he created Glinda. Before that, in the main stream, if you were a witch you were thought to be evil.
At the end of the story Glinda tells Dorothy that now famous quote about how to get home…. “You’ve always had the power, my dear, you just had to learn it for yourself.”
We all embody our power in our own way. And I do believe we all have it inside of us. Some of us learn about it earlier than others. I have a feeling Kamala Harris learned her power at a young age.
For me, I’m still working on it, but getting there.
