Part two
Myths and her voice
“If women are not perceived to be fully within the structures of power, surely it is power that we need to redefine rather than women.” Mary Beard
“We realize the importance of our voices only when we are silenced.” Malala Yousafzai
“If people were silent nothing would change.” Malala Yousafzai
This second part focuses more on how women have been silenced, and how public speaking became the domain of men. Before I carry on I’d like to mention that myths provide us with ways to look and understand the world, and there are individual and more collective or universal understandings of myths. They are embedded in our cultures and traditions and can be both destructive and limiting, especially for certain groups of people, but also liberating. Also, there are multiple readings of each myth as each story contains a variety of themes. In her book, Antigone Rising: The Subversive Power of the Ancient Myths, Helen Morales (classicist and the second Argyropoulos Chair in Hellenic Studies at the University of California) writes: “Myths open up new ways of looking at the world. What makes a myth a myth, rather than just a story, is that it has been told and retold over the centuries and has become meaningful to a culture or community. The Greek and Roman myths have become embedded in, and an influential part of, our culture. They form the foundations and scaffolding of the beliefs that shape our politics and our lives. These can be limiting and destructive but also inspirational and liberating.” On a similar note, referring to Homer’s Odyssey, professor of classics and ancient literature, Mary Beard, writes that it would be a cultural crime if we read it only to investigate the well-springs of Western misogyny; it is a poem that explores, among much else, the nature of civilisation and ‘barbarity’, of homecoming, loyalty and belonging.
I’d also like to say that women, at least in the west, have come a long way and have much to celebrate, and there are more women now in positions that allow them to exert societal influence. Yet true and widespread equality between men and women is still a distant thing. Mary Beard, writes: “It is happily the case that there are now more women in what we would all probably agree are ‘powerful’ positions than there were ten, let alone fifty years ago. We should not forget to congratulate ourselves for the revolution that we have all, women and men, brought about…… but, real equality between women and men was still a thing of the future, and that there were causes for anger as well as for celebration.”
In her book, Women & Power, Beard explores the relationship between the classic Homeric moment (described below) of silencing a woman and some of the ways in which women’s voices are also silenced or repressed in our contemporary culture and politics. She suggests that we need to go beyond “the simple diagnosis of misogyny” because it is only one way of understanding or describing this reality. She mentions many instances and ways, both in antiquity and later, of how women have been excluded from public speech. For instance, she mentions how in the early fourth century BC, Aristophanes devoted a comedy to the ‘hilarious’ fantasy that women might run the state. In real life ancient women had no formal political rights, no real economic or social independence, and when women did have power, in drama and myths (Medea, Clytemnestra, and others), they are portrayed as abusers that cause destruction and chaos rather than wise users of power.
There are many mechanisms and structures in place that facilitate the disempowerment, silencing and often severing of women from the centres of power. This has been achieved through many routes since antiquity. The silencing and oppression of women are interwoven with varying levels of trauma and violence, violations of human rights, culture and narratives. Mary Beard writes: “When it comes to silencing women, Western culture has had thousands of years of practice……This is one place where the world of the ancient Greeks and Romans can help to throw light on our own.” She and other classicists claim that in the literature relevant to the public voice of women one important first recorded example of a man telling a woman that her voice was not to be heard in public was in Homer’s Odyssey (almost 3000 years ago) in the scene where Telemachus, the son of Odysseus and Penelope, tells his mother to go up to her quarters and take up her work. A short extract from Beard’s book describes the scene: “That process starts in the first book of the poem [Odyssey] when Penelope comes down from her private quarters into the great hall of the palace, to find a bard performing to throngs of her suitors; he is singing about the difficulties the Greek heroes are having in reaching home. She isn’t amused, and in front of everyone she asks him to choose another, happier number. At which point young Telemachus intervenes: ‘Mother,’ he says, ‘go back up into your quarters, and take up your own work, the loom and the distaff … speech will be the business of men, all men, and of me most of all; for mine is the power in this household.”
Beard also discusses Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 AD), where Jupiter turns Io into a cow, so that she cannot talk but only moo; and the nymph Echo is punished so that her voice is never her own, but only an instrument for repeating others’ words. There were some exceptions in the ancient worlds. Women could speak out as victims and martyrs, mostly to preface their own death. Beard provides the example of Philomela, who was raped and whose tongue was cut off, but still managed to denounce her rapist by weaving the story into a tapestry, which is “why Shakespeare’s Lavinia had her hands, as well as her tongue, removed”. Art and craftwork has been an instrument of healing, expression, and also, resistance, especially for women. Helen Morales writes: “Philomela’s cunning strategy for telling her story by weaving it into a tapestry is part of a larger cultural phenomenon in which women turn to weaving and craftwork as a means of resistance. It goes back to Homer’s Odyssey…..”
However, public speaking wasn’t only something that ancient women didn’t take part in, speaking in public and oratory were considered exclusive practices and skills that defined masculinity as a gender. Beard mentions many examples throughout ancient literature on the authority of the deep male voice in contrast to the more high pitched female. She writes; “As one ancient scientific treatise explicitly put it, a low-pitched voice indicated manly courage, a high-pitched voice female cowardice. Other classical writers insisted that the tone and timbre of women’s speech always threatened to subvert not just the voice of the male orator but also the social and political stability, the health, of the whole state.” A more recent example of this is from Henry James’1886 novel, The Bostonians, where Verena Tarrant, a young feminist campaigner and speaker, is silenced. Interestingly, as she gets closer to her suitor Basil Ransom (a man with a rich deep voice), she finds herself increasingly unable to speak in public. Beard writes about James: “Under American women’s influence, he insisted, language risks becoming a ‘generalised mumble or jumble, a tongueless slobber or snarl or whine’; it will sound like ‘the moo of the cow, the bray of the ass, and the bark of the dog’. (Note the echo of the tongueless Philomela, the moo of Io, and the barking of the female orator in the Roman Forum).”
One might think that this irrational way of viewing things is a thing of the past, but many of our contemporary traditions, conventions and rules of debate and public speaking still lie in the shadow of these outdated ideas of the classical world and beyond. I was surprised to read that contemporary women politicians and those engaged in public speaking are pushed into voice training classes to get a nice, deep, husky tone. Even though a lot has changed and progress has been made it seems that traditions and narratives underpin much of our contemporary life. Beard writes: “our classical traditions have provided us with a powerful template for thinking about public speech, and for deciding what counts as good oratory or bad, persuasive or not, and whose speech is to be given space to be heard. And gender is obviously an important part of that mix.” There are still countless examples of attempts to write women entirely out of public discourse. Beard claims that across the board, there is great resistance to female encroachment onto traditional male discursive territories. Women have not only been discouraged, but also insulted and threatened across cultures. A more recent form of violence against women and girl is online abuse. In relation to this she writes that “For a start it doesn’t much matter what line you take as a woman, if you venture into traditional male territory, the abuse comes anyway. It is not what you say that prompts it; it’s simply the fact that you’re saying it. And that matches the detail of the threats themselves. They include a fairly predictable menu of rape, bombing, murder and so forth (this may sound very relaxed; that doesn’t mean it’s not scary when it comes late at night). But a significant subsection is directed at silencing the woman.”
When exploring the silencing of women it is important to look at the prevailing discourse and the cultural assumptions about women’s relationship with power, and as Beard suggests, the shared metaphors of female access to power that we tend to use like ‘knocking on the door’, ‘smashing the glass ceiling’, ‘storming the citadel’. She writes: “Women in power are seen as breaking down barriers, or alternatively as taking something to which they are not quite entitled.” She also suggests we ask the question: If there is a cultural template, which works to disempower women, what exactly is it and where do we get it from? It is also useful to seriously reconsider power and leadership and to some extent disassociate it from current ideas and structures of power. A lot of the violence and harassment that women and other groups of people have suffered lie in the structures of powers. Beard writes: “That means thinking about power differently. It means decoupling it from public prestige. It means thinking collaboratively, about the power of followers not just of leaders. It means, above all, thinking about power as an attribute or even a verb (‘to power’), not as a possession. What I have in mind is the ability to be effective, to make a difference in the world, and the right to be taken seriously, together as much as individually. It is power in that sense that many women feel they don’t have – and that they want.”
Power does not have to be about domination and control over. Without power we cannot set healthy boundaries and our capacity to move through the world with safety and freedom are greatly compromised. So is our capacity to take part in life as equal and respected individuals, to create and actualize our dreams and fulfill our potential. Elizabeth Lesser writes: “Power. It’s been so abused that it feels like a dirty word. But what is it actually? Power is a natural force, and it’s something we all want: the energy, the freedom, the authority to be who we are, to contribute, to create. Domination and control have become synonymous with power, but power does not have to come at the expense of others; it does not have to oppress in order to express. The urges to subjugate, punish, or annihilate are corrupted versions of power.”
Finally, as I’ve been writing this piece I realized that around the same time last year I had written a thematically related post. The previous year’s December 12th post (http://www.trauma-art-alexandritonya.com/?p=7250&lang=en) had to do with Malala Yousafzai’s story, who at the age of seventeen received the Noble Prize for Peace after being shot three times for standing up for the right to an education for girls. In her book, Cassandra Speaks, Elizabeth Lesser quotes part of Malala’s speech at the UN: “They thought the bullets would silence us, but they failed. Out of the silence came thousands of voices. The terrorists thought they would change my aims and stop my ambitions. But nothing changed in my life except this: weakness, fear, and hopelessness died. Strength, power, and courage were born.”
P.S.
I’d also like to share the links to two recent podcasts related to the holidays:
a) A conversation between Rick and Forrest Hanson about the pain and struggles that can emerge or come to the foreground more vividly around this time of the year. They discuss family estrangement, joining and distancing and the pain that might accompany this, duties in relationship, grief and functional forgiveness, ways to repair, the importance of distinguishing family systems from individuals and being aware of a wide range of variables influencing family relationships including third parties and systemic and cultural influences at: https://www.rickhanson.net/being-well-podcast-navigating-familial-estrangement/
b) A guided meditation, which I think reflects the spirit of the holidays, by Tara Brach (clinical psychologist and meditation teacher) on how to cultivate loving presence, which she believes is an innate capacity that we can cultivate,at: https://www.tarabrach.com/meditation-awakening-loving-presence-2/
It includes a loving kindness part:
“May we be held in loving presence, be loving presence, trust our basic goodness, trust that we are enough, feel happy, know the joy of being alive, feel deep and natural peace, may our heart and mind awaken and be free….”