🌙 30,000 YearsMystery and Remembering

Our story begins long before written history.

Some 30,000 years ago, our ancestors were carving voluptuous female figures from stone and ivory. Were they symbols of fertility, sacred feminine power, or something else entirely? Their mysteries still speak to us.

Thousands of years later, in Southeastern Europe, archaeologist Marija Gimbutas unearthed ancient figurines and symbols revealing a world rich with feminine imagery, sacred animals and the rhythms of nature. From these discoveries, she envisioned cultures deeply connected to the Earth, the seasons, and the cycles of life.

Her work opened an extraordinary question: What might a culture that reveres the feminine look like?

What we have found is that across history and cultures, women have gathered to share stories, tend to one another, celebrate life’s passages, and transmit their wisdom.

The Red Tent of today speaks to something ancient within us: the longing to gather, to belong, and to be held in sisterhood.

📖 1997A Novel Sparks a Revolution

Enter Anita Diamant, a writer with a wonderful question: What might happen if the biblical Dinah, daughter of Jacob and Leah, could tell her story? And tell it she did.

In her richly imagined novel, The Red Tent, women gather during menstruation, childbirth, and recovery. Inside the crimson tent walls, women exchange secrets, share remedies, laugh, grieve, and pass the mysteries of womanhood from one generation to the next.

Although fictional, the story touched a deep chord in women around the world.

Something stirred. Something was remembered.

❤️ 2006The Red Tent Movement Takes Root

That longing found fertile ground.

Through ALisa Starkweather’s vision, The Red Tent was born.

Around 2006, she started the Red Tent Temple Movement, creating actual red tents, and inviting women to create sacred spaces in their own communities.

Red fabrics were unfurled. Candles were lit. Women gathered in homes, gardens, studios, and community spaces.

These circles offered something both radical and beautifully simple: a place to put down our burdens, remove our masks, speak the unspoken, and listen without judgment or the need to fix one another.

No hierarchy. No performance. Just women showing up for women.

The Red Tent offers something women have too often been denied: new models of womanhood. Building a woman’s self-esteem begins with offering her new possibilities for who she can be.

Here, women become mirrors for one another, reflecting strength, beauty, courage, and wisdom that we may not yet recognize in ourselves.

And the Red Tent movement grew.

🎬 2012Giving Voice to the Unspoken

Filmmaker Isadora Leidenfrost brought the movement to the screen with Things We Don’t Talk About: Women’s Stories from the Red Tent.

Through intimate storytelling, the film revealed the healing potential of women gathering to share what is often silenced: our changing bodies, menstruation, sexuality, motherhood, grief, aging, and the complexities of being a woman.

Within the Red Tent, women share a lifetime of secrets and hard-won wisdom. They speak of desire and boundaries, unwanted advances and intimate encounters, learning to trust their bodies, honor their choices, and navigate relationships with confidence and care.

These are the conversations that too often happen in whispers, if they happen at all. In the Red Tent, they are welcomed into the circle.

Together, Isadora and ALisa explored the movement’s roots and unfolding in The Red Tent Movement: A Historical Perspective.

Their work helped illuminate a movement woven from many threads: ancient inspiration, contemporary women’s spirituality, ritual, storytelling, and the profound human need for belonging.

The Red Tent was never merely about the tent. It was about what becomes possible inside it.

🌹 2016A Red Tent Is Planted in Los Angeles

For Greta Grace, the journey began with a stirring, a longing calling from depths within.

Aurora Rey, a modern-day Johnny Appleseed traveling from San Diego to Seattle, created pop-up Red Tents along her path. When she brought a Red Tent gathering to Los Angeles, Greta stepped inside her first circle.

Surrounded by rich fabrics, ritual, and multi-generational women, she listened to singing, storytelling, and experiences of deep healing.

As a marriage and family therapist, Greta recognized the possibility of something more than a gathering ~ a way to empower women at a grassroots level.

By the very next New Moon, on Valentine’s weekend in 2016, she held her first Red Tent Los Angeles. And so began ten years of gathering.

Ten years of laughter and tears, dance and discovery, sensuality and sisterhood, rites of passage. A decade of intimate, vulnerable, illuminating and courageous conversations about women’s cycles, changing bodies, sensuality, dating, aging, creativity, aliveness, and love.

One circle at a time, Red Tent Los Angeles has been weaving a living tapestry of women’s stories.

📰 2019The Red Tent Makes the News

In May 2019, Red Tent Los Angeles was featured in the Los Angeles Times, bringing the beauty and power of women’s circles into the public eye.

What began as a quiet gathering became part of a larger conversation about sisterhood, women’s wisdom, and the healing power of community.

The stories once whispered inside the Red Tent were finding their way into the wider world.

✨ 2026The Circle Widens

Today, the Red Tent continues to unfold. The vision of connecting women’s circles around the world has birthed Red Tent Global to create an international sisterhood that honors and empowers women and girls across generations. A movement that celebrates the feminine journey through its trials and triumphs, from first moon to motherhood, menopause, elderhood, and beyond.

Red Tent Global is creating a culture and community where women’s voices matter, their bodies are honored, their wisdom is shared, and their connections to one another and Mother Earth are nourished.