Cassandra Speaks: When Women Are the Storytellers, the Human Story Changes

the old stories haunt us still: religious tales where the women are fickle, or weak, or cursed; fairy tales where the men are white knights and swashbuckling saviors, bad boys and lone wolves, warriors and kings. And where the women are ugly hags and scullery maids, or sleeping beauties and girls locked in towers.

To empower the lost voices and undervalued ways of women is not an either/or, oppositional proposition. Rather, it is an act of restoration, a righting of a world seriously out of whack.

To mankind he sent a different punishment: woman.

So much was lost with the disparaging of anything coded feminine and the erasure of women as protagonists and heroes.

I know, in my bones, that we can break Cassandra’s curse, that we can dispel our culture’s enduring mistrust and devaluing of women. And when we do, all of humanity will benefit.

It’s time to tell stories where no one is to blame for the human predicament and all of us are responsible for forging a hopeful path forward.

Just because the written word is currently the most dependable record of the stories our ancestors told doesn’t mean there aren’t other stories.

There’s a painting of Joan of Arc by Jules Bastien-Lepage that hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Every now and then, when I’m in New York City, I like to drop in on that painting, as if it were a distant relative I enjoy seeing from time to time.

From these texts, and from observing my parents, I drank the cultural Kool-Aid. I metabolized the preferred range of human behaviors. The noble characters in the books we read had qualities like quick thinking, curtailed emotions, rugged individualism, and a competitive nature.