The Red Tent Temple Movement is a modern feminist and spiritual initiative grounded in ancient traditions of women’s gathering, storytelling, and cyclical wisdom. It is both a healing space and a quiet revolution—one that challenges patriarchal systems by honoring the sacred feminine in all its forms. Emerging from a blend of goddess spirituality, New Age consciousness, and feminist reclamation, the Red Tent invites participants to slow down, listen deeply, and remember.

The term "Red Tent" entered modern consciousness through Anita Diamant’s 1997 novel The Red Tent, a fictional retelling of the biblical story of Dinah, daughter of Jacob and Leah. In the novel, the red tent is a place where women retreat during menstruation and childbirth—a space of communion, rest, and power outside the male-dominated world.

Diamant’s novel, while fictional, stirred a deep, almost ancestral resonance in many readers. "Women responded viscerally," she said in an interview. “They told me, ‘I want that tent. I need that tent.’” (New York Times, 1998). What followed was more than just a literary fan base—it sparked a global grassroots movement to manifest these spaces in real life.

The Red Tent Temple Movement was formally initiated in the early 2000s by ALisa Starkweather, a feminist spiritual leader and founder of the Women in Power Initiation. Her vision was to create intergenerational, sacred gatherings where women could meet monthly to share stories, heal trauma, and reconnect with their innate wisdom.

“Women have always gathered,” Starkweather has said. “We just forgot how. The Red Tent is a remembering.” These events are often hosted in red-draped spaces, lit with candles and infused with rituals, drumming, oracle readings, singing, or simply silence. There is no central dogma—only the honoring of whatever arises in the circle.

Menstrual huts or moon lodges were common in many Indigenous cultures, including among the Navajo and Ojibwe, where menstruation was not viewed as dirty or shameful but powerful and sacred. As Dr. Judy Grahn, poet and feminist theorist, writes in Blood, Bread, and Roses: How Menstruation Created the World (1993), “The first rituals were menstrual. The first calendars were based on the moon and the bleed.” She argues that early human culture was shaped around the mysteries of the womb, and that modern patriarchy severed that connection.

The Red Tent is a living act of resistance against capitalist productivity, misogyny, and the medicalization of women's bodies. It aligns with ecofeminist values that see the Earth and the body as interconnected, sacred, and cyclic rather than linear and extractive.

It also subverts the isolation often placed on menstruation and female pain. “To bleed alone is to be silenced,” wrote feminist activist DeAnna L'am, a leader in menstrual empowerment work. “To bleed together is to remember that we are never alone.”

Importantly, many contemporary Red Tent Temples are working toward inclusivity, welcoming not only cisgender women but also trans and nonbinary people who resonate with womb-based spirituality or feminine archetypes.

There is no single organization controlling Red Tent spaces. Anyone can start one. As a decentralized, grassroots movement, Red Tents appear in churches, yoga studios, community centers, and living rooms around the world. Each one is unique, yet tethered to a shared desire: to reclaim the feminine, to remember what was once lost, and to pass that remembering on.

In a world that often rewards speed, competition, and disconnection, the Red Tent Temple offers slowness, softness, and sacred pause.

As ALisa Starkweather beautifully puts it, “If we want to change the world, we must start by changing the way we gather.”