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

is Cassandra’s story, and it is the story of any woman who has been dismissed, gaslighted, or punished for having an opinion of her own. It is the old trope of the hysterical girl or the scorned woman who is not to be believed as a witness to her own experience.

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.

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

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.

They forewarn men against anything coded feminine: the home, the hearth,

“womanly arts”

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.