Click here to listen to Women, Power, and the Right to Speak Out in the season 2 archives on buzzsprout
“We moms are often underestimated. But we’re stronger than we’re given credit for. So what do you say, will you stand with me?” Bev Barnum, catalyst for the Wall of Moms protest in Portland, OR USA
In 411 BCE, Aristophanes’ comedy the “Lysistrata” was performed in Athens. Athens was embroiled in the Peloponnesian War, and the play was a dream of peace in which women played a significant role.
In this podcast, I give a gloss of the plot of this play and consider some connections between the ancient Greek world of Aristophanes, and the growing presence of women in public life today. Women are taking the lead, speaking out, and showing up in greater and greater numbers. They are not uniformly welcome.
A look at the classical Greek roots of Western culture sheds some light on the cultural tensions that surround women and power and the right to speak out.
“We have to be more reflective about what power is, what it is for, and how it is measured. To put it another way, 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, Women & Power: A Manifesto
Transcript of Women, Power, and the Right to Speak Out
Well, way back and fifth century BCE, around 411 BCE to be exact, a comedy written by the Greek dramatist Aristophanes was performed called the “Lysistrata.”.Now the “Lysistrata” was one of three “peace plays” written by Aristophanes, and all three of these plays were performed at the time that Athens was engaged in the Peloponnesian War. This war went on for a very long time, 20 some years, and it was an extended war between Athens and Sparta and the Persians were involved, and this particular play was performed at a time when Athens was really in a pretty desperate crisis. Their Navy had been pretty much destroyed in one very disastrous battle and they were anticipating both the Spartans and the Persians moving in on them. And although many of the citizens at the time didn’t know it, there were a lot of intrigues going on, involving possible alliances with the Persians that were going to undermine Athenian democracy. In the midst of all of this, Aristophanes wrote a comedy, which was also a dream about peace, and this was the “Lysistrata.”
Later in this program, I’m going to give you a gloss of the plot of that play. So, no worries if it is unfamiliar to you. But first, I want to tell you a little bit about why I’m thinking about this and get to the primary topic of today’s podcast, which is the changing and significantly larger and more important role, that women are playing in public life and in the current protests here in the United States. Of the many changes that are underway, one thing that I’ve been observing for a while (and I imagine that you have too), is the women who are organizing, speaking, leading and showing up in greater and greater numbers, with what feels to me to be a very different and thrilling awareness of their personal power and right to claim it.
Now, this is not a smooth and open road and women are not receiving a warm welcome. Of course, we’ve got the patriarchy to contend with, its poisonous misogyny that has to be deliberately and consciously thrown off by each of us, just like the poisons of racism, and classism, and all of those other “isms.” What I’d like to unpack a little bit today is the mythological backdrop for this struggle, and for the incredible animosity that appears when women attempt to speak out publicly about the things that concern them. And although Greek and Roman cultures and mythologies are not the only traditions shaping Western culture, the Greeks and this play by Aristophanes in particular, is an entry point into some reflections about both the mythological backdrop and also your own participation and strategy at this time.
Events all around the world are revealing the truth, that we are in fact, the ones that we have been waiting for. Right? There are no leaders who are going to capably move us through this global cultural transformation. And in fact, the new role of the individual and a change in our concept of what that means– to be an individual in community– may well be the kernel, the heart of that transformation.
So, let me tell you in brief, the plot of the play the “Lysistrata” by Aristophanes. As I mentioned, this play was performed in Athens, at a very critical point in the Peloponnesian War, and the audience would have been pretty much all men, and all of the actors would have been men. The play opens with a “woman” named “Lysistrata”, who has decided that the war has to come to an end. That peace is absolutely necessary because it’s costing far too much, and it’s costing women and children a great deal. Families are disrupted and women are losing the husbands and fathers and brothers and other men upon whom they depend for various forms of support, as well as for company.
So Lysistrata decides that the women need to take the matter of peace into their own hands and she reaches out to women in Sparta and other places that are the enemies of Athens, and manages to get women to come together in Athens. And she says to them, we need to do this. We need to be the ones who make peace happen. for reasons that I don’t need to explain to you, and the way that we can do this is by first of all having a sex strike. First of all, we will all agree that we’re not going to have sex with men until there’s a peace. Secondly, I’ve sent a group of women to go and occupy the Acropolis. (The Acropolis was the center of government in Athens and also where they kept the Treasury, so women occupying the Acropolis would disrupt men from doing the normal business of government and paying the army).
Now there was a lot of back and forth about this. Initially, women were kind of unsure, but eventually, they were all persuaded and the goddess Aphrodite and the goddess Athena both had something to do with this whole setup. Athena was the patron Goddess of the city of Athens. Athens was named after her, and she was a warrior, virgin goddess of great intellect. She lent her energies to strengthen the women in their resolve to abstain from sex, and also lent them courage to enact this strategy of taking over the Acropolis. Aphrodite, on her end, instilled in the men of Athens and Sparta and the various other warring states, a deeper longing for heterosexual sex than they normally would possess.
So, the women agree that they’re going to do this and they start their strike, and the first thing that happens is a group of men, older men, go to take the Acropolis back from the occupying women, which happens to be a group of somewhat older women. And this is a comedy so there are a very funny set of interactions where the men ineptly try to batter down the doors and set fires to smoke the women out ,and the women put out the fires and douse the men with water, and there’s a lot of sexual innuendo involved in this ineffectual wood and the dousing of fires. The men are repulsed and the women retain control of the Acropolis and control of the purse strings of government.
The sex strike is also having an effect. But the men are really resisting as as best they can and there are a few cracks in the ranks among the women. Lysistrata has to you know, give some of them a talking to and restrain them from giving in to their own lustful urges. Then the energy of the play gets centered around one particular Athenian husband, who comes to the Acropolis to beg his wife to come home and to have sex with him. She says, “Oh, yes, dear. Yes. Okay. Yes. All right. Well, yes, I do miss you and my children, okay. But you know, before we can make love, we’ve really got to have a proper bed,” and she pretends that she’s going through the motions to create that and get that set up, and he’s waiting very, very impatiently, and all of the male actors in this play at this point, including this poor young gentleman, are sporting these very large and uncomfortable erections. But then once the bed is together, then she needs perfume. And then once she’s got the perfume, well, then she needs oil because they really should give each other massages, and it goes on and on. You get the point. He’s getting more and more frustrated and then finally, she disappears into the Acropolis and doesn’t come back, and he has to go home in a state of tremendous frustration and discomfort.
This interaction between this couple is meant to illustrate the peak of tension that has come into Athenian culture in general. And so now, the men begin to gather in Athens and talk about whether or not they can put down their arms in order to regain the favors of their women folk. And Lysistrata plays a role then, in negotiating that peace. She brings a very beautiful, naked young woman named Peace, to represent peace, out in front of the men, and they rather pornographically divvy up her body as a metaphor for coming to the terms of peace. And then Yay! The war’s over and everybody goes back to copulating at will.
Now, this play has been told and retold and staged in a variety of ways for centuries. I feel pretty confident that it’s been performed more often than any of Aristophanes’ other comedies and in part, this is because the language and the jokes in it are more accessible to us today. We don’t have to know nearly as much Greek or as much about Greek culture, to understand the satire. But it’s also been told because there’s something very appealing about this idea that women have this kind of power and that they come together for such an important collective good as peace. And so, there are cases in which this play has been staged to support and express what we call today, a “feminist perspective” and the idea that women have a role in politics. For example, I think it was 2003, the “Lysistrata” was staged in many places in the United States and around the world as part of a protest against the Bush administration’s war against Iraq.
Now, I’m going to assume that you see and hear the feminist potential in this play. And yet, to imagine for a second, that Aristophanes and the Greeks, primarily male remember, who saw this play staged, had even a fraction of the consciousness that we would call feminist today; to imagine that for even a second would be a gross misunderstanding of ancient Greek civilization. And while we are constantly working with and updating the mythological material that we inherit, I feel that it is very important that we understand this distinction. Because myths that don’t work anymore, myths that we actively seek to alter, which is part of the process of cultural transformation, those myths that don’t work anymore—they don’t die. They become dysfunctional. They oppress us, or we oppress others with them if we don’t fundamentally understand their roots and their message.
Athenian society at the time that this play was produced, well, Athenian women were not citizens. They did not have rights, they couldn’t vote, they couldn’t hold office. It was highly improper for them to discuss politics publicly. They could not go around the city unescorted. They were educated at home, according to the wishes of their fathers and their future husbands, they were in arranged marriages, and they had one purpose and one purpose only, which was to produce children. Men were in charge of everything, and they had a lot of sex with each other. Heterosexual sex was not anywhere near as important as it has been in most of Western culture over the subsequent centuries. It certainly was not equated with any kind of transcendent experience.
I’m not saying that there wasn’t real love between men and women, husbands and wives. There was, but what we’re talking about, in the context of this play is an absurd fantasy. That’s why it was a comedy. Not just because they’re making jokes about sex, but because the idea that women would be able to restrain their insatiable appetites for sex– sex that men could take or leave for the most part—in order to play any kind of public role in something as important as a war, was the ultimate joke. It was a very edgy move on the part of Aristophanes, for sure, but it was a joke. And one of the ways that we know this is because it took the intervention of the two goddesses, Aphrodite and Athena, to manipulate the situation such that the women could succeed. We also know this because Aristophanes tells us that this story is a dream.
If what we are talking about together today is of interest to you, then I highly recommend a small but very potent book titled “Women in Power: A Manifesto” by Mary Beard. Beard is a professor of classics at the University of Cambridge, and she very skillfully draws the connections between ancient Greek mythology and society, and the contemporary animosity aimed at women who speak out publicly or attempt to gain public office, like run for president, here in the United States. She examines the vitriol, I mean the real hatred of the trolls that come out against women who have an opinion and feel entitled to express it, and ancient roots in Greek culture.
I’m going to give you one little example and I think if you meditate on it, you will feel the truth of this in our current moment today. Beard writes that there were only two main exceptions in the classical world, to the general stricture and extreme prejudice against women’s public speaking. According to the Greeks she says, a woman who endeavored to speak in public was not, actually, even a woman. And I know I can feel that to be true today. But she says the two main exceptions were that women are allowed to speak out as victims and as martyrs, usually to preface their own death. So, women are allowed to speak out as victims and as martyrs, usually to preface their own death. But even when they came out with those kinds of messages, there was no assumed burden on the man to listen, to believe it, to take it seriously, or to take action.
Beard also talks about the way that the ancient Greeks, and this was true also of the Romans, how they divided their society into the public “polis” which was the public, powerful community realm, and “oikos” which was the home and the household. Now, ultimately, men were in charge of both. They had the final say in both realms. But oikos, the home, was the place that women were expected to take charge, they were expected to bear children, raise children, manage the slaves, make sure everybody got fed, all of that sort of thing. And it occurred to me as I was watching the Wall of Moms in Portland, Oregon, over the course of this week, that what feels so revolutionary about this is that they are taking the space. And also, that by proclaiming themselves to be mothers, they are both owning a particular moral authority that belongs to mothers as the creators and custodians of our lives, and they are stepping out of the “oikos.” They are compelled because the polis is in such sad and sorry shape, to leave the oikos and move into the polis.
I am really inspired by the bravery of these women. I am inspired by their growing numbers, and I’m inspired by the many men who are coming to their aid in this time. And yet you can feel the echoes of this division of the world into the areas in which men have absolute sovereignity, and the areas in which women are expected to assume some. Returning to the “Lysistrata” then, we have this story that is part of our mythology of a past, that is still very present, very active in our society. And we already have many attempts and variations on that core story that have been handled by feminists and others, that attempt to draw out the power that’s in it, and to do something with it. But as I say, my contention is we can’t do this important task of remaking, of what the Greeks called mythopoesis, effectively, unless we really know what we’re working with.
So, we need to go below and beyond our initial attraction to stories like “Lysistrata” and look at the underlying ideas that supported them, so that we can go to the root, so to speak. Now, another thing that we must do, you and I, in this time as we take up this quest in our various ways, as individuals or as citizens, to change the stories, to break out of a limiting frameworks, to tear down dysfunctional systems—we need to ask ourselves, what’s the point in any given instance? Why do I feel the need to change this? Is it because I want to be included? Is it because I want to play a role in it?
Do I want to simply swap out the “prince” for a “princess,” in my case? Or is it that I want to be allowed into the story and to be able to assume a different role? To use that fairytale metaphor again, in my case, maybe it’s not that I want to do as a princess, what the prince was allowed to do, but maybe I want to get into the story and I just want to be the king. Maybe I want to play a role that I haven’t been allowed to play. Or is it possible that I want to change the stories because I want to change the definitions, and the roles and the goals, and the plotline entirely?
Food for thought.
You know, this is a very interesting time to be a mythologist because I feel that I must advocate for the soul life, for the mythic perspective as essential to a humane humanity, and at the same time, the actual literal myths, that is the texts from the past and their elaboration over the last, say 4000 years, are part of the problem. So yes, a very interesting time to be a mythologist or to be working with myth, and a very creative time. As a myth dies and the pressure for new forms builds, that myth, that story, it loses its ability to give meaning and coherence to life. And it becomes increasingly ideological and oppressive, and this is such a time. This is what we are seeing. This is what many of us are experiencing and it is my aim, every time that we meet here through Myth Matters, to aid you in this understanding and help you find your way through it, using the tools at hand, which paradoxically, beautifully, includes the old stories themselves.
A couple more things before I go today. First, if you want more on this topic, if you would like for me to speak more about women in power, or the ancient Greeks, or the relationship between the old stories and the methods we have for working with them, then please email me your comments or your questions, or you can post them on the Facebook page for Myth Matters.
I want to mention to those of you who interact with me on Facebook, or listen to the podcast via Facebook, that I am feeling increasing pressure to just abandon the whole platform because I find the politics so abhorrent. So please consider getting on my email list and a moving your point of contact with me away from Facebook, because I think the day is rapidly coming when I’m going to stop using Facebook altogether. On a similar note, if you are interacting with me via Facebook, please share the podcast with other people you know, because I don’t want to have to boost the posts and give dollars to Mark Zuckerberg.
The other thing I wanted to share, is that we’ve been talking about the Greeks and I mentioned that the Wall of Moms here in the United States, in Portland, Oregon, was one catalyst of that for me, but I have another really interesting and inspiring resource for you, if you want to spend some more time with women who are playing incredible roles in their societies to bring about change. And that is the “Women War and Peace” series, which are interviews and documentaries produced by Abigail Disney (and yes, it is that Disney family), telling the stories of women who are leading women’s movements in conflict zones all around the world, including the story of Nobel Peace Prize winner Leymah Gbowee, who led a group of Liberian women in a protest that brought about the end of their civil war.
That particular documentary is called “Pray the Devil Back to Hell.” It’s moving and inspiring, and I highly recommend it. I will post the links to that and to the Women, War and Peace series on my website, along with the transcript of this episode.
And that is it for me, Catherine Svehla, and Myth Matters for this week. Please contact me with your questions or comments. Thank you very much for sharing Myth Matters with other people, spreading the word about what we’re doing here. I offer a deep virtual bow of gratitude to my new financial supporters on Patreon and Bandcamp. A shout out to Allison and Lisa Mecham, who joined this last week. Thank you so much, Allison and Lisa. If you are finding value in Myth Matters, then I hope that you will consider making a monthly pledge to support the program and make future episodes of Myth Matters possible.
Take good care of yourself, my friend and until next time, happy mythmaking and keep the mystery in your life.
Links to inspiring resources:
Women, War, and Peace series from 2011
What if you looked at war as though women mattered? What if you looked at peace as though women mattered? These two questions were at the heart of the critically acclaimed PBS five-part special series, Women, War & Peace which aired in 2011.
Filmed in conflict zones in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Colombia, and Liberia, the original Women, War & Peace series was created by Abigail E. Disney, Pamela Hogan, Gini Reticker, and was a co-production of THIRTEEN and Fork Films in association with WNET and ITVS.
Women, War, and Peace II premiered in March 2019
WOMEN WEREN’T WRITTEN OUT OF HISTORY – THEY WERE NEVER WRITTEN IN. UNTIL NOW. In a year when women are mobilizing and running for office in unprecedented numbers, Women, War & Peace demonstrates how some of the biggest international stories of recent memory are shaped by women. An all-female cast of directors present four never-before-told stories about the women who risked their lives for peace, changing history in the process.
“Pray the Devil Back to Hell” tells the remarkable story of Nobel Peace Prize winner Leymah Gbowee and the courageous Liberian women who came together to pray, protest, and bring about a peaceful end to a bloody civil war. watch on amazon prime
Interview on the Bill Moyers Journal with Leymah Gbowee, the woman who led her fellow countrywomen to fight for and win peace in war-torn Liberia, and Abigail Disney, who produced the documentary of their struggle and triumph.
Women and Power: A Manifesto by Mary Beard, Professor of Classics and Cambridge University
In pictures: ‘Wall of Moms’ joins Portland’s anti-racism protests
