The Goddess Movement took shape as feminist writers and practitioners in the 1970s asked what religious practice would look like if the divine were addressed as female rather than as an unmarked masculine default, a question that ran alongside second-wave feminism's wider challenge to inherited authority structures rather than developing separately from it.
Starhawk's 1979 book The Spiral Dance, part personal account and part practical guide to ritual, became the movement's most widely read text and did more than any other single publication to carry Goddess practice beyond small feminist consciousness-raising circles into a broader, self-sustaining religious current with its own festivals, training programs and publishing output.
The movement grew up overlapping heavily with modern Paganism and particularly with Wicca, sharing much of the same ritual vocabulary, seasonal calendar and small-group structure, to the point that many practitioners and outside observers alike do not draw a sharp line between where Goddess practice ends and Wicca begins, a boundary this entry records as genuinely unsettled rather than as a gap in available research. Starhawk herself remained an active teacher and organizer for decades after the book's publication, and successive editions of The Spiral Dance, revised across the years that followed its first appearance, tracked the movement's own development, so the book functions less as a fixed founding document than as a text that grew and changed alongside the practice it helped establish.