Barbara Mor

She became most widely known for The Great Cosmic Mother, a cross-disciplinary study that cites numerous archaeological, anthropological, historical and mythological texts and artifacts as evidence of women's role as creators and first practitioners of humanity's earliest religious and cultural belief systems.

She argues that the goddess-centered beliefs that dated from humanity's Paleolithic age were violently destroyed and replaced by war-like patriarchal cultures and religions during the rise of agriculture and the erection of the first cities in Sumeria and elsewhere.

[7] With royalties for The Great Cosmic Mother late in coming, Mor attempted to parley the success of the book into a teaching position, but ultimately could not find even menial work and ended up destitute and homeless for several years.

[8] She moved to Portland, Oregon in the 1990s, but her experience of homelessness and poverty in the American southwest even as The Great Cosmic Mother was being taught in colleges throughout the country provided much of the material for her next and last two books The Blue Rental[9] and The Victory of Sex and Metal.

[10] Mor's years as a self-described "bag lady" [8] in the southwest provide the scenery and thematic backdrop to her collection of prose-pieces, The Blue Rental (The Oliver Arts & Open Press, 2011).