Betsy Crane
Betsy Crane leads workshops that are interactive and enlightening. She is Professor, Center for Human Sexuality Studies, Widener University, Chester, PA. She was Director of Graduate Programs in Human Sexuality at Widener from 2007-2012. Previously she worked for 17 years as a sexuality educator, first as a public health family planning outreach worker, then as Education Director and later Executive Director for Planned Parenthood in Ithaca, NY. She is co-editor of Sexual Lives: A Reader on the Theories and Realities of Human Sexualities (Heasley & Crane, McGraw-Hill, 2003). Her research interests include history of gendered sexuality and shifting gender and sexual identities.
Designated as Distinguished University Professor, 2014-17 by Widener University for outstanding teaching, scholarship, and service, she is past president of the Foundation for the Scientific Study of Sexuality and of the Eastern Region of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality.
Today’s gender norms emerged from the last 7,000 to 10,000 years of patriarchal social arrangements that legitimated sexual and physical violence against women and subverted women’s ability to support themselves without men. But what about the time before gender relations pivoted so heavily toward male dominance? Based on the work of goddess history scholars, e.g. Eisler & Gimbutas, participants in this workshop will experience a trip to a “pre-history” where our ancestors conceptualized the supreme power in the universe as a female.
During this time girls would have seen their bodies and social roles in relation to a creative, powerful, and deeply mystical feminine creator. Boys saw themselves in terms of the ‘horned god,’ a passionate and embodied force of nature who was lover and ally to the goddess. What might all this mean for us today? Join the conversation.
Betsy’s 2016 conference workshop is Implications of the Goddess for Gendered Sexuality: Then and Now
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