Solitude of the Self
A Meditation on the Personhood of Woman
A Hymn to the Self
It is 1895. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, American suffragette, wrote a hymn - not to God, but to herself:
Oh, Lord, I am born!
I have grown me a person
Whose ways are all open
Whose currents run free.
The words resonate with a bell first struck centuries earlier, but still faint and only heard in the deep recesses of the newly-awakened soul. A woman sings herself into being, daring to declare, I have grown me a person. What astonishes is not only the boldness of the line but the assumption behind it—that “growing a self” is now a legitimate human task for a woman; that she is free to say such words without apology and even with celebration.
For men, this presumption of selfhood has been taken for granted at least since the Renaissance. To “be somebody,” to carve out a destiny, to make a name—these were the natural expectations of sons. But for women, who had been told for centuries that their purpose was already mapped into tight, supporting roles—daughter, wife, mother—Gilman’s declaration is startlingly new. It was as if she had caught sight of an inner continent and insisted: I deserve to live here too.
Gilman’s hymn is not a hymn of petition. She is not asking God to make her a self. She is not begging for permission. She announces a fact: “Oh, Lord, I am born!” The radical note is in the first person: I have grown me a person. The self is cultivated like a garden, constructed like a city, birthed like a child. It is her own work and her own discovery, her own sacred quest.
I had to ask myself: Was this sense of growing a self still a novel idea in Gilman’s generation? Was it still shocking, in the 1890s, for a woman to presume to be more than her ordained roles, to insist upon a “me” distinct from her social functions? I think it was. In many ways I think it still is. As the poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote in 1968:
“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
The world would split open.”
The Solitude of Self
In 1892 Elizabeth Cady Stanton addressed the House Judiciary Committee with a speech that cut to the core of the matter. She did not rehearse statistics or offer pragmatic arguments about suffrage. Instead, she spoke of solitude.
“No matter how much women prefer to lean, to be protected and supported, nor how much men desire to have them do so, they must make the voyage of life alone… To guide our own craft we must be captain, pilot, engineer; with chart and compass to stand at the wheel.”
And again, more philosophically:
“There is a solitude which each and every one of us has always carried within, more inaccessible than the ice-cold mountains, more profound than the midnight sea; the solitude of self. Our inner being which we call our Self, no eye nor touch of man or angel has ever pierced.”
This was not the language of politics as usual. It was closer to theology, to epistemology. Stanton was saying: Equality is not only about rights—it is about the recognition of the Self, the inner solitude of each human being. To deny women the vote, to deny them education or property, was to deny the obvious: that each person is captain of their own fate.
Vivian Gornick, more than a century later, would return to this speech and find in it the heartbeat of feminism. In her book The Solitude of Self: Thinking About Elizabeth Cady Stanton she recalls her own awakening in the 1970s:
“I had been born into the wrong sex. The world would have to change radically before that would stop mattering. How unreal, I thought, I have been to myself! All these years going along with a head full of dreamy plans to ‘Find myself,’ ‘Become myself,’ exercise the ‘freedom of an earned will.’ Suddenly the word sounded unbearably foolish in my own ears.”
And yet the foolishness gave way to clarity when she attended her first “consciousness raising” gathering with other early feminists:
“The light was blinding, and then illuminating… I stood in the middle of my own experience, turning and turning. In every direction I saw a roomful of women, also turning and turning.”
Like Stanton before her, Gornick understood that the deepest struggle was not against political opponents but against the refusal of the culture to admit that women were fellow creatures with inner lives as real as men’s. The solitude of self was not only a burden but also a gift, the way through and out: the ground of equality, the spark of the fire that offered to burn away the outworn burden of living inside the roles ordained for women by patriarchy.
Philosophical Roots: The Ancients and the Virtuous Life
To appreciate how radical Stanton and Gilman were — are — we must step back in time. For the Greeks and Romans, the “self” was not yet a matter of inwardness or personality as we know it. The Stoics, for example, revered the virtuous life, not for egoic reasons, but to live into a conception of the Good. Marcus Aurelius, emperor and philosopher, wrote in his Meditations:
“Look within. Within is the fountain of good, and it will ever bubble up, if thou wilt ever dig.”
At first, this sounds like an invitation to self-discovery, but for Marcus the “fountain of good” is not the unique, idiosyncratic person one might cultivate, as Gilman claimed when she sang, “I have grown me a person.” For Marcus it is the rational essence shared by all, the universal Logos within, to which one must conform.
Elsewhere he makes this clear:
“Constantly regard the universe as one living being, having one substance and one soul; and observe how all things have reference to one perception, the perception of this one living being.” (Book VII, 59)
Here the inner turn is not toward an intimate self, but toward merger with the whole. The Stoic “inner citadel” was universal, impersonal, almost abstract. The ancient task was not to “grow a person” but to align oneself with cosmic reason, to play one’s role in harmony with the order of things. The “self” was a moral agent, yes, but not yet a personality. Women - like slaves - were excluded from citizenship and hardly considered capable of any agency at all; only supportive players on the stage of life. As Aurelius wrote fondly of his wife: “she was always kind, always obedient…”
Christianity and the Inner Chamber
Something shifted with the emergence of the cult of Christianity in the catacombs of the Roman empire. And maybe it was because the first few centuries were lived quietly, secretively underground that the inner, contemplative spirit grew strong in this new rebellious group of seekers for, paradoxically, the contemplative life of the later monks and mystics—though not designed to empower women—opened the very space in which individuality could begin to incubate.
The Desert Fathers withdrew into solitude, carving out time and silence for prayer. The Rule of St. Benedict prescribed daily examination of conscience. The monk was expected to listen inwardly, to converse with God in the chamber of the soul. The women built their orders and convents in accordance with their male counterparts, engineering a unique refuge and escape from the biology-as-destiny path that most women had trod for thousands of years. In this environment, women mystics found a voice. Hildegard of Bingen, for example, spoke of her visions as “the Living Light,” insisting that what she saw within was not delusion but revelation. Julian of Norwich wrote of the soul as hidden, deep-grounded, treasured, and as holding “a high secret hidden in God”—not yet revealed, yet central to one’s being: “For our soul is so deeply grounded in God and so endlessly treasured, that we may not come to the knowing of it until we first have knowing of God.” Teresa of Ávila gave us the enduring metaphor of The Interior Castle: “The soul is like a castle made of a single diamond or of very clear crystal, in which there are many rooms.”
This imaginative visualization of the soul correlates to the modern psychological idea of the Self as a many-roomed space in which we encounter aspects of the personality in our quest for wholeness or individuation - to use Jungian terminology. The mystics were not speaking of political rights (although Hildegard, Teresa, and Heloise - of Abelard and Heloise - agitated on behalf of women with their religious superiors), but by insisting on the validity of their inner experience, by describing their visions in the first person, they legitimized the idea that women had subjectivity—that their inner lives mattered. The cloister became, almost accidentally, a nursery for the notion of personhood for women.
It is, perhaps, not a coincidence that during the same period that Julian of Norwich was erasing gender barriers by writing, “Our Saviour is our Very Mother in whom we be endlessly borne, and never shall come out of Him,” and proving that her lived experience placed her with God as intimately as any male counterpart had ever experienced the Divine, a story was being told in the courts of northern Europe that would become one of the defining myths of the Middle Ages: The Marriage of Sir Gawain. In this tale of Gawain’s marriage to Dame Lady Ragnel a great riddle is posed, the answer to which must be found to save the life of King Arthur: “What is it a woman truly desires?” Gawain, by submitting his own authority to the Lady Ragnel, allows her to reveal the secret answer to the riddle: “Sovereignty - the right to rule ourselves!”
It would take another four centuries for this astoundingly unsettling idea to root deeply enough in the unconscious that an outer version could finally blossom in the conscious mind.
A Turning Point: Mary Wollstonecraft
I believe that the great turning point came with Mary Wollstonecraft in the late eighteenth century. She took the inward dignity of the mystic and the self-sovereignty of Lady Ragnel and turned it outward into the political world.
In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) she declared:
“Independence I have long considered as the grand blessing of life, the basis of every virtue;… I do not wish us to have power over men; but over ourselves.”
Note that her assertion uses almost the exact language of the medieval Arthurian tale: ‘power over ourselves’ i.e. self-sovereignty. This is the pivot: from spiritual interiority to civic autonomy. For Wollstonecraft, the point of selfhood was not only to commune with God but to stand as a rational, moral, political agent. For women to “have power over themselves” was the radical claim.
Her words ring with the same insistence as Stanton’s and Gilman’s: the self is to be grown, claimed, defended. But for Wollstonecraft, it was no longer enough to write confessions or revelations. The self demanded equal rights, equal education, equal participation - equal stance in the eyes of the state and of other humans. The alchemy of inner subjectivity had begun to transmute into social transformation, and that transformation placed a new admonition on women everywhere: We must now take possession of our own personhood and work on it with the same seriousness as our fathers, brothers, husbands and sons have been working on theirs!
The American Experiment: Stanton, Gilman, and Beyond
The American republic, with its declarations of liberty and equality, provided a fertile ground for this alchemical experiment. And yet, as Gornick reminds us, women discovered that they were not counted as “fellow creatures.” Stanton’s speech is so moving precisely because it frames equality not as a request but as a recognition of fact: each human being must face the solitude of life alone.
Gilman, too, caught this note. To “grow a person,” to “build a city” within oneself, was not just poetry—it was the work of emancipation.
When the second wave of feminism erupted in the 1960s and 70s, Baby Boomers like me and like Vivian Gornick rediscovered Stanton’s insight. As Gornick writes:
“We, like them, were overtaken by the same flash of ‘original’ insight: startled awake out of a less than grown-up dream of life to realize that men did not consider us fellow creatures. Then even more startled to find that, in the main, women themselves did not sufficiently object to their subordinate position in the worldly scheme of things. To struggle for equality meant risking the comfort and reassurance of a stability that had long been in place.”
The recognition was searing: not only had men denied women’s subjectivity, but women themselves had too often accepted the subordinate arrangement. To insist on selfhood meant risking the comfort of leaning on the men, of hiding behind the less-demanding (in terms of psychological risk - not in expenditure of human energy!) social stability of our roles as wives and mothers; it meant risking rejection and uncertainty and possible failure; most critically, it meant risking that deep existential solitude. And yet only with the risk would there be liberation.
By the 1970s, the idea that women must “become somebody” had become commonplace in consciousness-raising groups, in feminist literature, in slogans and songs. To be a woman was no longer to disappear into prescribed roles but to forge a Self—unique, conscious, and embodied in the world. To evade that demand created an uneasy feeling that one was abdicating something critical to one’s happiness and to life’s fulfillment. As Carly Simon poignantly framed it in her song lyrics:
But you say it's time we moved in together
And raised a family of our own, you and me
Well, that's the way I've always heard it should be,
You want to marry me, we'll marry.
You say we'll soar like two birds through the clouds
But soon you'll cage me on your shelf
I'll never learn to be just me first
By myself . . .
[Carly Simon, “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard it Should Be”]
I think most women feel the weight of that soul obligation, the pressure, as a kind of internal discontent; not even fully cognizant of what it is or what it means let alone how to go about it. The terms are so new and the stories so few that we feel adrift in a boat without the all-important chart and compass that Cady Stanton insisted we need.
Which is not to say that men have it “easier” than women when it comes to forging a sense of personhood; only that they’ve had social support for doing so for centuries longer. It is still an arduous process and not all succeed, as D.H. Lawrence once drily observed:
"The vast bulk of men are not pure individuals, and never will be, for the pure individual is a rarity, almost a kind of freak. The vast bulk of men need to belong to a self-governing group, a tribe, a nation, an empire. It is a necessity like the necessity to eat food."
Perhaps that is why men have felt justified in reducing women to being their “helpmates” and supporting players; the effort to become a pure individual requires so much psychic energy that one needs help with all the daily chores of life in order to have sufficient reserves to tackle the great work. As Virginia Woolf explained, patriarchy was “the agreement that women would live a half life in order that men might gain the courage to pursue a whole one.”
So the question is, will any of us have the quotient of psychic energy necessary to keep the wheels of daily life turning and take up the great spiritual quest of our time to grow ourselves a Person?
The Ongoing Task: Generations of Selfhood
Since Mary Wollstonecraft, each generation of women has inherited this insight and its correlative challenge, though never without struggle.
For Baby Boomers, feminism was a baptism by fire: the discovery that equality could not be partial, that selfhood must be defended.
For Generation X, the task was to balance autonomy with relationships, to insist on individuality even in the midst of family and career.
For Millennials, the digital age has made the project of selfhood both easier and more difficult: easier in the proliferation of voices and platforms, harder in the pressure to curate an identity constantly on display.
For Gen Z, the language of selfhood has expanded to include fluid identities, intersectional selves, hybrid subjectivities. The insistence remains the same: until one has “become somebody,” until one has forged a sense of selfhood as a unique personality, one is not fully alive.
For all of the women in the Western world right now the additional challenge includes the pushback from the men still steeped in patriarchy who fear (perhaps accurately) that without their woman behind them they will not have what it takes to make of themselves something they’ll be proud of, or - more importantly - some Self that other men will respect.
And, of course, women are subject to the ongoing cry for intimacy, for love, for the companionship and enjoyment of living with men who are willing to see what our lives look like - from our point of view, not just their own. And then, there are the children . . . [But that deserves another whole essay!]
The Solitude That Binds
The way of the woman mystic was the only door that did not have “biology is destiny” written on it over the last millennium, but it is not a door that many contemporary women want to walk through today. Yet, having some kind of map feels essential, and so looking over our brother’s shoulders at their efforts is a natural one. What was “the hero path” for the man and in what ways does the woman’s path share in that model and how does it differ?
The mythologist, Joseph Campbell, provided the clearest map for the journey of the male hero in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and many of us who knew him and followed his work have written extensively on it. (See my blog posts on the theme of “Following Bliss”) But here I want to draw your attention to a critically important passage in one of his lesser-known works, The Flight of the Wild Gander: Explorations in the Mythic Dimension:
“It is my thought, that the wealth and glory of the Western world, and of the modern world as well (insofar as it is still in spirit Western), is a function of this respect for the individual, not as a member of some sanctified consensus through which he is given worth, nor as an indifferent name and form of that ‘same perfection and infinity … present in every grain of sand, and in the raindrop as much as in the sea,’ but as an end and value in himself, unique in his imperfection, i.e., in his yearning, in his process of becoming not what he ‘ought’ to be but what he is, actually and potentially: such a one as was never seen before.”
In this passage we see how Campbell has also analyzed the work of the ancients, such as Marcus Aurelius, or of the Asian sages, and noted the difference in trajectory between the aspirations of those great thinkers and the aspirations of our Western world heroes.
“The problem of mankind today, therefore, is precisely the opposite to that of men in the comparatively stable periods of those great coordinating theologies which are now known as lies. Then all meaning was in the group, in the great anonymous forms, none in the self-expressive individual; today no meaning is in the group – none in the world: All is in the individual. But there the meaning is absolutely unconscious. One does not know toward what one moves. One does not know by what one is propelled. The lines of communication between the conscious and the unconscious zones of the human psyche have all been cut, and we have been split in two.
The hero-deed to be wrought is not today what it was in the century of Galileo. Where then there was darkness, now there is light; but also, where light was, there now is darkness. The modern hero-deed must be that of questing to bring to light again the lost Atlantis of the co-ordinated soul.”
This is such an important passage because Campbell is stating plainly that the millennia through which humanity has passed where we were all aligned along common group themes which he has characterized as “The Way of the Animal Powers” (paleolithic), “The Way of the Seeded Earth” (neolithic), “The Way of the Celestial Lights” (ancient city-states), has now disintegrated and we find ourselves in the latest mythological epoch: “The Way of the Human” (which Campbell dates starting in earnest with the Troubadour period in the early 11th century.)
And while Campbell does not dwell explicitly on the roles to be played by the male and female of our species, I am sensing that it is also imperative that the Great Divide within us between the masculine and the feminine must also become co-ordinated inside of our individual souls. The aspirations of the courageous masculine must embrace the self-sovereignty of the strengthening inner feminine ego, and the queenly powers of the awakened feminine must acknowledge and respect the inner softening and maturing of the masculine ego.
In the epoch of The Way of the Human we do not seek the unity of being, the absorption of self into the godhead, but accept the terrifying notion advanced by Jung and Campbell that the task of the modern hero is not god-in-self, but god-as-self. As Jung himself discovered in his profound inner work recorded in The Red Book, the new incarnation of the Divine Being “is no man and yet is a son of man, but in spirit and not in flesh; hence he can be born only through the spirit of men as the conceiving womb of the God." Or to phrase it more inclusively, the new life manifests not only through us but as us, men and women of co-ordinated soul.
And so we return to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s hymn:
Oh, Lord, I am born!
I have grown me a person
Whose ways are all open
Whose currents run free
From the life that is thine
Flowing ever within me,
To the life that is mine
Flowing outward through me.
I am housed, O my sisters!
My body is sheltered,
My spirit has room
’Twixt the whole world and me.
I'm guarded with beauty
and strength, and within it
Is room for still union,
And birth floweth free.
Oh, Lord I am Born
I have built me a city
Where I live manifold
Many-voiced, many-souled
From inmost to outmost
my joy in my people
the house, ever growing,
The voice in my soul
Never lost, never weary
And, oh, never parted,
The life of the human
So subtle, so great.
I am clothed, and my raiment
fits smooth to the soul,
My body's unhindered,
my spirit is free!
Across the centuries the theme persists: the Self must be grown, built, defended, celebrated. The mystics prepared the way by carving inner chambers of the Soul and developing the inner listening; Mary Wollstonecraft turned the emergence of the sene of self outward into politics and the argument for equality; Elizabeth Cady Stanton universalized solitude as the basis of equality and the existential truth for both men and women; Charlotte Perkins Gilman sang the self into being as an enterprise worthy of celebration; the feminists of the 1960s and 70s rediscovered this tiger by the tail, and we today must hang on and ride the tiger to its cave where the new birth of the Personhood of Woman is to take place.
But the irony of the task is profound: the solitude of self is also the ground of solidarity. In naming our solitude, we recognize each other. In defending our individuality, we find common cause. Women’s liberation is misnamed for it is not only a movement of outer laws and reforms, it is the long story of inner subjectivity—of souls carving out space, of voices declaring I am born, I have grown me a person, I am, I am, I am. Carving our self a face so that we can see the divine lineaments in each other.
The voyage of selfhood is solitary, yes. But in the end, it is also shared. We meet each other on the open sea, each captain of her and his own craft, each charting her and his own course, all sailing together toward the unknown horizon.
R.D. Armstrong, Autumnal Equinox 2025
The Solitude of Self: Thinking About Elizabeth Cady Stanton, by Vivian Gornick
The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, translated by Gregory Hays
The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
Flight of the Wild Gander: Explorations in the Mythic Dimension, by Joseph Campbell
