In 2010, when ASWM held its first biennial international meeting, we established the Demeter Award for Leadership in Women’s Spirituality as a lifetime achievement award. At this year’s conference, the recipient ie author-activist Hallie Iglehart Austen. Our letter to her reads as follows:
The 2023 Demeter Award is given in recognition of your decades of visionary scholarship as a founding mother of feminist art, culture, and spiritual practice. We recognize your work as a teacher, bringing the message about the Goddess through conferences, workshops and writing. We also recognize your commitment to sustainable living, and your activism for the protection of marine life and the ocean. We honor your celebration of the connections among all things, and the hopeful message you bring at this time of crisis.
Your first book, Womenspirit, A Guide to Women’s Wisdom, published in 1983, grew out of your voyage of discovery, promoting the practice of meditation and the creation of a personal mythology. For your second book, The Heart of the Goddess: Art, Myth and Meditations of the World’s Sacred Feminine, you collected remarkable images and symbols of goddesses from world cultures. It has been hailed as “an exultantly female-centric text whose wisdom is universal.” First published in 1991, this beloved book has now been released in a new edition by Monkfish press.
In the 2000s you were inspired by your work with the divine feminine to focus on initiatives for the protection of oceans and sea life. In 2001 you co-founded Seaflow: Protect Our Oceans to educate people about the dangers of active sonars and other ocean noise to whales, dolphins, and all sea life. In 2010 you initiated All One Ocean: Cleaning Up the Oceans, One Beach at a Time. This work of organizing people to come together on local projects of habitat restoration sets an example of how forming grassroots initiatives can make a difference for the fate of the planet, its oceans and sea creatures.
Your work has combined your knowledge of indigenous Goddess wisdom with activism for the environment in a way that is truly inspirational. Our board and members honor you as one of the premier visionary feminist thinkers of our time, and thank you for your scholarly, literary, healing, and cultural leadership.
The ASWM awards program was established by our co-founder, Patricia Monaghan, to advance the best work in the field of goddess studies. Previous honorees for the Demeter Award have included Margot Adler (2010), Charlene Spretnak (2012), Jean Shinoda Bolen (2014), Elinor Gadon and Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum (2016), Kathy Jones (2018), and Vicki Noble and Judy Grahn (2020).