| Abstract
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The Red Tent is an embodied red fabric environment that acts as a catalyst to women's empowerment. Spontaneous and organic, a Red Tent is a place where women gather to rest, renew, and often share deep and powerful stories about their lives. Red Tent spaces and the grassroots movement were inspired by Anita Diamant's New York Times bestselling novel, The Red Tent, published in 1997. The Red Tent movement is changing the way that women interact and support each other by providing a place that honors and celebrates women, and by enabling open conversations about the things that women don't want to talk about in other venues. This dissertation shines a spotlight on this vital, emergent women's tradition. This work presents a cohesive, heretofore-undocumented tradition and explores the Red Tent as a phenomenon and a contemporary movement that is unique to women. Through this work it was shown that the Red Tent fosters many positive experiences for women including: Building community, encouraging caring, healing, and empowerment, offering a platform for sharing women's stories, and serving as a tool for menstrual activism, while simultaneously providing a space for self-care and renewal. This study provides a discussion of the history of menstrual huts and moon lodges and how they have shaped the development of the Red Tent. This study also expands research in the fields of textiles, embodied experiences, Women's Spirituality, liminal spaces, ethics of care, and sacred spaces. Additionally, the process of filming and editing the one-hour documentary film Things We Don't Talk About: Women's Stories from the Red Tent is documented.
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