In 2005 Stone and Schneir moved from Manhattan to Daytona Beach, where Schneir still lives following her death in 2011.Īnd now Schneir has co-authored the book “Merlin Stone Remembered” (Llewellyn, 331 p.), which he co-wrote with two local writers and former university professors, David Axelrod and Carol Thomas. The book became a staple of the women's studies programs springing up at progressive colleges around the country, and it led one observer to dub Stone the “foremother of Goddess feminism.” Published in 1976 (the year Stone and Schneir first met), “When God Was a Woman” played a key role in the rise of “feminist theology” in the '70s and '80s. That book, Stone wrote in its preface, is “the story of the suppression of women's rites” - the story of how “in prehistoric and early historic periods of human development, religions existed in which people revered their supreme creator as female,” before such practices were “aggressively” suppressed by patriarchal worship. She was a sculptor and professor of art and art history who had just published a book that she believed, as she told interviewer Michael Toms, “maybe 10 people in the world would bother to wade through.”Īnd, Merlin Stone told Lenny Schneir, she had felt guided by “a female energy in the universe” as she trekked across Europe and the Middle East researching what would become “When God Was a Woman.” When Lenny met Merlin, he was a poker player by profession and a self-confessed “male chauvinist.”
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