The Goddess movement includes spiritual beliefs or practices (chiefly Neopagan) which emerged predominantly in North America, Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand in the 1970s. The movement grew as a reaction to perceptions of predominant organized religion as male-dominated, and makes use of goddess worship and can include a focus on women, or on one or more understandings of gender or femininity. The Goddess movement is a widespread, non-centralized trend in Neopaganism, and therefore has no centralized tenets of belief. Practices vary widely, from the name and number of goddesses worshipped to the specific rituals and rites used to do so. Some, such as Dianic Wicca, exclusively worship female deities, while others do not. Belief systems range from monotheistic to polytheism to pantheistic, encompassing a range of theological variety similar to that in the broader neopagan community. Common pluralistic belief means that a self-identified Goddess worshiper could theoretically worship any number of different goddesses from cultures all over the world. Based on its characteristics, the Goddess movement is also referred to as a form of cultural religiosity that is increasingly diverse, geographically widespread, eclectic, and more dynamic in process. Background In the 19th century, some first-wave feminists such as Matilda Joslyn Gage and Elizabeth Cady Stanton published their ideas describing a female deity, whilst anthropologists such as Johann Jakob Bachofen examined the ideas of prehistoric matriarchal Goddess cultures in the Mediterranean region. There are also post-traditional Goddess feminists who claim that female theologies are more ancient, having emerged in and around Europe during the Upper Paleolithic period or 30,000 years ago: the Great Goddess hypothesis. It is said that these theologies were suppressed in the west when Christianity outlawed all pre-Christian religions through a series of edicts by Theodosius I. These ideas gained additional traction during the second-wave feminism movement. In the 1960s and 1970s, feminists who became interested in the history of religion also refer to the work of Helen Diner (1965), whose book Mothers and Amazons: An Outline of Female Empires was first published in German in 1932; Mary Esther Harding (1935), the first significant Jungian psychoanalyst in the United States; Elizabeth Gould Davis (1971); and Merlin Stone (1976). Since the 1970s, Goddess Spirituality has emerged as a recognizable international cultural movement. In 1978 Carol P. Christ's widely reprinted essay "Why Women Need the Goddess," which argues in favor of the concept of there having been an ancient