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

“womanly arts”

Perfection or damnation.

That one really gets me—how menstruation and childbirth and parenting are all seen as burdens as opposed to examples of strength, worthiness, and power, whereas the physicality and roles granted to men are vaulted into god-like attributes.

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.

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.

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.

Remember that many of the creation myths from our earlier ancestors—the indigenous, pre-colonized peoples from cultures around the world—painted a different picture of the origin of women and men, and their worth and roles. In many of those stories, neither sex was created to dominate the other. Both men and women shared the responsibility to help

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.

You may think these stories are the stuff of “once upon a time” and have nothing to do with you or your times. But “once upon a time” is now, because the past is laced into the present on the needle and thread of stories.

Cassandra’s tale is your tale. It is all of our tales. We must speak, and we must be taken seriously. We must change the way the story ends.”