SOURCE: Smith, Catherine F. “Jane Lead: The Feminist Mind and Art of a Seventeenth-Century Mystic.” In Women of Spirit: Female Leadership in the Jewish and Christian Traditions, edited by Rosemary Ruether and Eleanor McLaughlin, pp. 183-204. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979.

In this essay, Smith uses Lead's work to suggest possible affinities between mysticism and feminism—affinities that had previously been rigorously denied. Smith analyzes Lead from the standpoint of a new feminist epistemology, one that validates inner knowing and intuition in addition to the knowledge of the external world, which had been allowed only to men.

The idea that mysticism and feminism share common elements is generally unfamiliar, even unacceptable. Mysticism is idealist in its philosophy, apolitical in its ends, and often patriarchal in its concepts. Feminism is materialist, activist, and is usually traced to rational thought rather than nonrational, to logical theories of equality rather than...