Virgin as Psychological Type

The figure of the woman who is one-in-herself — not defined by her relation to a man — developed by esther-harding from the lunar and virgin goddesses of antiquity (Artemis, Athena, Hestia) and read as an archetypal possibility for modern women. Where earlier cultures had named the virgin goddess as a distinct divine type, Harding reads the unmarried professional woman of her own century as standing in the same archetypal territory. “The unmarried woman must adapt herself to a reality which is not at all under the necessity of obliging or humoring her” (Harding 1970, p. 74), and through that discipline she develops “courage, honesty, dependability, the power to co-operate, to be impersonal in her attitude, and to make decisions with impartiality and fairness” — traits the culture had coded masculine but which Harding reads as the feminine animus put to creative use rather than projected onto a man.

The full mythological elaboration of the one-in-herself belongs to Harding’s Woman’s Mysteries Ancient and Modern (1935), which the current library does not hold but which is foundational for the feminine Jungian line. There Harding traces the figure through Isis, Ishtar, Inanna, Artemis, and Athena, and reads the moon goddess as the psychic image of the woman who belongs to herself.

The concept answers the cultural assumption that the unmarried woman is a failed or residual form. Harding treats her as a developmental possibility the tradition had names for — parthenos, the virgin goddess, the woman whole in herself — and for which the psychology of women had not yet found its modern vocabulary.

Relationships

• feminine-individuation
• animus
• anima-mundi
• artemis
• athena

Primary sources

• the-way-of-all-women (Harding 1970)
• harding-womans-mysteries (Harding 1935) — flagged as library gap