User:LeslieDR/sandbox

Woman Within International, Ltd., also known as Woman Within and as WWIL, began in 1987 in Wisconsin, the creation of Char Tosi and. The goals of this experiential weekend workshop for women were and continue to be personal empowerment for participants and staff and the building of community connections. In the intervening years, the numbers of women who have experienced the weekend have ebbed and flowed and have totaled in 2023 at about fifteen thousand.

History

The Men's Movement of the 1980s was instrumental in the development of Woman Within as some of the leaders from the Midwest, US, were married or otherwise connected to women who saw both what might be analogously useful to women and clearly different from what emerged as The New Warrior Weekend. Rich Tosi, Bob Kauth and Ron Herring, among others, developed the men's weekend in 1985 and two years later, Char Tosi and     had formulated a weekend for women that used the Myth of Inanna as the guiding story line.

The women who led these early weekends developed the elements of individual interiority, small group sharing, larger group work facilitated by women who were sometimes professional therapists and often not, and group ceremony. The plan was to have close to a one to one ratio of Staff to participants. Some staff were in leadership and facilitation roles and some staff handled more logistical support. For the first nearly two years, the sequence of the workshop was largely oral tradition. In early 1991, the first written draft of the entire workshop's details was written out.

The local popularity of the Woman Within Weekend in the greater Chicago - Milwaukee area meant that monthly there were both a Weekend and a mid-week option and there was a substantial waiting list for both participants and Staff.