Passionate Journeys: Why Successful Women Joined a Cult Book

Passionate Journeys explores the fascinating stories behind the Bhagwan Rajneesh phenomenon of the 1970s and 1980s, focusing on women who left families, careers, and identities to join the community of Rajneeshpuram. Rajneesh was a spiritual leader for thousands of young Americans. He attracted such a following at his ashram in Pune, India and in the United States that he and his devotees were able to take over an entire town in rural Oregon and establish a thriving community there. Sociologist Marion Goldman's extensive interviews with women who participated in Rajneeshpuram, whether on or off the compound, provide a fascinating picture of the cultural and social climate that motivated successful, established women to participate in such a movement.While talking with and studying the women of Rajneeshpuram, Goldman comes to realize that their responses, while extreme, can shed light on our understanding of how women in general experience love, work, and spirituality. While the women who followed Rajneesh are intriguing in themselves, Goldman contends that they also mirror the ways in which women with fragile senses of self often seek confirmation in achievement or in intense relationships. Readers will learn that the origin of these women's attraction to cults or new religions may not be much of a deviation from their own behavior or that of their friends and many American women: the relentless search for confirmation in the eyes of others.In their quests for spiritual meanings the women embodied the great shifts which took place in America's religious marketplace during the 1970s and 1980s. Their searches for significance, value, and positive senses of self reflected their early family experiences and their fragile identities, as well as their social locations. More than ten years later, the Osho/Rajneesh movement continues, and almost all of the women have cemented their identities through the movement or others that resemble it.Passionate Journeys is written in an engaging, lively style that makes it an unusually engrossing ethnography for a wide range of readers. It is also meticulously researched, theoretically complex, and carefully argued and will appeal to specialists in feminist theory and women's studies, sociology, religious studies, American studies, and the history of the Northwest.Goldman is Professor of Sociology, University of Oregon. Her previous book is Gold Diggers and Silver Miners: Prostitution and Social Life on the Comstock Lode.Read More