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

One of those wounds is the tendency, drilled into women for millennia, to doubt who we are, to diminish what we value, to have contempt for our bodies, for our very selves. And this doubt—this shame and reticence—can be traced all the way back to those old stories.

The Jungian writer Polly Young-Eisendrath

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

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.

When you make a study of a wide range of the old stories, it is stunning to see how many of them serve as warnings against women doing “unfeminine” things, like speaking, or claiming autonomy over our bodies and sexuality, or being gallant.

I am all of the above. I am gentle and empowered. Serene and wild. Maternal and sexual. These are not good or bad dichotomies. They are qualities that make us human.

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.