Maiden, Mother, and Crone

Natural Stages of the Feminine

May 10, 2026

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Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays explore common topics from different perspectives and disciplines to uncover unique insights and solutions.

Today’s topic looks at the importance of the unique phases of human femininity that differentiate us from much of the natural world. We’ll explore the power behind each of the three phases as well as the shadow archetypes that emerge when we don’t properly mature through those phases. At the end, you’ll get a preview of my third novel, Rebirth, where these ideas are fused together.

Throughout history, there have been three major phases of the feminine, typically rendered as the Maiden, Mother, and Crone. At the simplest distillation, the Maiden begins with puberty and ends with motherhood. The Mother, obviously, picks up there and ends with menopause, and the Crone finishes the cycle as neither of the first two, but something added to both.

What’s interesting to note is that, amongst mammals, especially primates, humans are quite unique in having menopause and in the long lives women live beyond their reproductive years. In nature, when females stop producing, it’s typically the end of their lives. This extension of life created a unique evolutionary adaptation that makes each phase unique and important.

Each phase also comes with both positive and negative archetypes. This is critically important to understand in the light of modern feminism because there’s a natural maturation that we tend to ignore, which conflates all of the feminine as inherently good while desperately overlooking the negative manifestations. Let’s dive into each one a little deeper.

Maiden

The positive Maiden emulates autonomy, curiosity, creativity, courage, and the willingness to step beyond inherited limits. She’s the explorer, innovator, and truth-teller who refuses to be trapped by old roles. She brings freshness, experimentation, aspiration, and the conviction that a woman’s life is larger than what convention prescribed. She’s the independent thinker, head held high, keeping both the men and the other women on their toes in the best possible ways.

She’s fiercely feminine and comfortable in who she is while also not compromising to be something she’s not. She sees the natural maturation into Mother as a goal, not a burden. I’ll note here that the Mother doesn’t require babies, and babies do not make the Maiden into a mother. The Maiden explores the feminine, while the Mother is the embodiment of the core feminine.

This last part is important as the Maiden’s shadow is the “boss bitch” or influencer version of feminism, built on optics instead of depth. She’s liable to sell her sex on the one hand while also trying to pretend her sex doesn’t exist on the other. The shadow is hyper-individualistic, consumerized empowerment, with endless reinvention, and often refusing to mature beyond rebellion.

Yet, as she refuses to mature into the Mother and pushes that social responsibility down the road, she continues fighting old constraints, but is trapped in performative independence. We can see this manifest in the social justice warrior willing to burn down the old structures instead of appreciating that, as Donald Kingsbury wrote, “Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution, and you get the problem back.”

There’s another layer here where many of our Maidens are on hormonal birth control, which tricks their bodies into thinking they’re pregnant. This means they’re suffering the vulnerability of the Mother without having had the maturation of the Maiden.

This compounds the problem that there are a lot of moms out there who are still Maidens. In part, that’s because feminism hasn’t recognized that the Maiden is a phase providing a natural and valuable tension that needs to settle as she matures into her role as Mother. In part, that’s because we have gotten rid of so much of the value of Mother that the systems that support her are gone, and women aren’t challenged to mature into the Mother.

Tradition!

Michael Woudenberg

July 9, 2023

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Mother

As we move forward, we need to recognize that the core function of the Mother goes hand in hand with her own physiological evolution. It’s not overexaggerating to say that the Mother is the evolutionary apex of the woman from a natural selection perspective. Our entire species relies exclusively on the ability to support, protect, and care for the Mother while she bears and raises our children.

For example, to birth a human baby’s extraordinarily large head, a mother’s hips are just wide enough to birth and just narrow enough to still run away… barely. Babies are also born much more prematurely than other mammals, and so both of these together mean that she and her child are incredibly vulnerable during and after birth. This is compounded by the fact that human children are reliant on their mothers significantly longer, both through nursing and care, than other animals.

This time of life is also the height of the monthly menstrual cycle, which flows through patterns of estrogen, progesterone, and oxytocin. This cycle is essential for fertility, bonding, emotional attunement, and caregiving, which drive healthy Mother archetypes. However, this cycle is also chaotic, and doesn’t fit within modern structures that want to ignore or break that cycle, starting with the Maiden before her.

Breaking the Cycle

Michael Woudenberg and Lisa Woudenberg

September 15, 2024

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However, with a well-supporting system, the positive Mother expresses protection, generativity, stewardship, community building, and a desire to create conditions in which others can flourish. At her best, she not only nurtures but adds formative structure to the community.

Because she is the most vulnerable, the Mother’s survival depends on building families, institutions, movements, classrooms, neighborhoods, and cultures that support her children. She’s responsible, manages chaos, mentors, preserves what is worth saving, and works to improve others' lives. The positive Mother is the strongest person in the room because she can bear burdens without losing sight of the human beings involved.

The Mother is both at her greatest strength in the feminine and the most susceptible to the worst of the shadow, which manifests as safetyism, moral policing, helicopter activism, and the “Karen” or “woke scold” enforcing control under the guise of care. That’s because, when the Mother’s desire for protection outweighs all else, she resorts to gatekeeping ideological purity or bureaucratic management using regulation for justice and turning nurturing energy into smothering authority.

This gatekeeping also shows up in resource protection. It’s only been in the last 100 years that we’ve had a surplus of resources in the West, and even less time across the world. Add to that intrasexual competition, status hoarding, and the perpetual fear of replacement by the Maiden, and the Mother often weaponizes typical matriarchal structures of soft power to protect what she has, even if it holds others back.

What’s interesting to note is that as we delay the transition to Motherhood by pushing marriage and childbearing ten years later in life, we end up with a lot of vulnerable mothers who are also going through perimenopause, where those hormones, especially estrogen, start to fluctuate unpredictably and exacerbate the negative archetypes. Simply put, she has no more room for error, and the shadow is more compelling.1

This is where it becomes hard to face the main implication that the Mother, while the creator of life, is also the most chaotic and, without structure, becomes incredibly fragile. If this isn’t understood, the Mother cannot mature into the value of the Crone.

Chaos and Order

Michael Woudenberg and Lisa Woudenberg

February 11, 2024

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Crone

As described earlier, the Crone is unique in nature as she’s unburdened from reproduction, unlike the Maiden and Mother. She is post-menopause, where estrogen and progesterone drop to more stable levels, and the influence of androgens increases, resulting in greater emotional steadiness. This helps her create clearer boundaries, reduces the need for external validation, and fosters a more direct, discerning mindset. The Crone’s body goes from a more chaotic, hormonally reinforced mode of connection and creation to a calmer form of clarity and integration.

This maturation allows the Crone to stabilize the overall feminine with memory, discernment, pattern-recognition, depth, and wisdom gained from her life’s experience. The healthy Crone can contextualize social change, temper youthful excess, name uncomfortable truths, and mentor the younger generations without needing to dominate them. She has a freedom that no longer needs approval because she’s not fighting for intrasexual competition like the Maiden or resources for her babies like the Mother.

Or, at least that’s what should happen. If this maturation doesn’t happen, or the negative archetypes have predominated through the first two cycles, she becomes a hardened veteran, cynical, combative, and unable to let go of past battles. Worse, she desperately competes with the Maiden and Mother while fighting against the gravity of age. This is the aging activist who sees progress as betrayal and cannot perceive how far society has moved, while, at the same time, demanding that younger women struggle as she did. (or perceives she did)

Where the positive Crone guides, balances, and supports, the shadow Crone clings to grievance and turns wisdom into bitterness and vigilance into perpetual war. The negative Crone also weaponizes the zealotry of the immature Maiden and the fears of the vulnerable Mother in ways that exacerbate chaos, a topic we explored in Toxic Empathy.

Toxic Empathy

Michael Woudenberg

July 20, 2025

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Synthesis

Threading these three layers together highlights just how much the impact of the Mother has across the board. This makes complete sense from our biological evolution. What’s fascinating is that, unlike other species, we have two unique bookends of the Maiden and the Crone.

Think about that. Almost every other primate has no Maiden that challenges, strives, and competes, forcing both the patriarchy to do better while keeping the matriarchy from becoming ossified. Likewise, nature rarely has a Crone who balances the equation with temperance and support.

That is, only if we actually understand and embrace the layers properly. However, in our current zeitgeist, I fear we’ve thrown out that understanding and stagnated the natural maturation. Without the balance, the shadow archetypes emerge, and we see that in much of modern feminism, which, at its worst, has lost the value proposition of the feminine, an irony of ironies given its goals.

In part, we got so fixated on the negatives of masculinity that it’s become a knee-jerk reaction that assumes everything about the feminine is positive while also collapsing the distinct phases of the feminine into one chaotic mess. If the current mental health crisis, male loneliness epidemic, declining birthrates, and general absence from sex are any example, it’s not helpful for anyone.

But what did we expect when we’ve unbalanced the equation so badly? We’ve smothered the independence of the Maiden with birth control that her body interprets as pregnancy. We’ve convinced the Mother that she has to hold a career and let someone else raise her children, and we’ve abandoned the Crone in chasing eternal youth. Underpinning this is a general devaluation of the feminine and the embrace of the patriarchal value propositions, and the beauty and value of the matriarchy are lost.

So, how do we get it back? Is it a vestige of a bygone era and should be phased out? Has something better replaced it, or have we lost something important? I’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas.