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

by Elizabeth Lesser

“As you enter positions of trust and power,” Toni Morrison wrote, “dream a little before you think.”

But many of our foundational narratives that pretend to be about and for all of us were told by only a few of us, and therefore have served a mere slice of humanity. They have set in stone which values and temperaments should prevail, what power looks like, and who gets to have

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.

History isn’t what happened. It’s who tells the story. —Sally Roesch Wagner

The noble characters in the books we read had qualities like quick thinking, curtailed emotions, rugged individualism, and a competitive nature.

the past is laced into the present on the needle and thread of stories.

The way I see it, Eve is humankind’s first grown-up. The “temptation” she succumbs to is the most fundamental human yearning—to know oneself, to find one’s own path, and to courageously engage with the big world beyond the garden of childhood.

While the men of the Bible are allowed to fall in their humanness and rise in wisdom, Eve only falls. And womankind bears the scars of her sin instead of the honor of her courage.

Woman brings life into the world. Eve is the mother of this temporal world. Formerly you had a dreamtime paradise there in the Garden of Eden—no time, no birth, no death—no life.”

But what if the whole point of life is to find Eden within and, in doing so, to create heaven on Earth? This is what the awareness of good and evil really means: to recognize that all the light and all the darkness in the world also dwells within your own heart, and instead of blaming the “other,” our task is to become like gods—self-aware and responsible for choosing goodness over evil.

How would things be different if humankind’s first big mistake wasn’t to follow the lead of the woman? And if Eve’s punishment hadn’t been subservience to Adam?

In Hesiod’s words, Zeus said to Prometheus: “You stole the fire and outwitted my thinking; but it will be a great sorrow to you, and to men who come after. As the price of fire, I will give them an evil, and all men shall fondle this, their evil, close to their hearts, and take delight in it.” This evil was none other than Pandora, the first woman.

Hesiod interpreted old myths and folk tales from the oral tradition, changing many of them to reflect the issues of his times and to protect the privilege of the ruling, patriarchal class.

In versions that predate Hesiod’s storytelling, Pandora was not a punishment at all but rather a gift. In fact, the name Pandora means “all-giving.”

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.

This age-old dualism—the worship of the divine feminine and yet the mistrust of flesh-and-blood women—confuses and silences women. It confuses and provokes men. And it leads us right up to today. Our culture still—either overtly or subtly—presents women with a choice: you can be a good girl (gentle, submissive, pure), or you can be a bad girl (empowered, embodied, sexual).

“Far from women as a species being irrational, overemotional, hysterical, lunatic or morally weak,” writes the Australian author Jane Caro, “what strikes me about women and their history is just how damn sane we have managed to stay.”

Real Truth About Beauty: Revisited, sponsored by Dove, only 4 percent of women around the world consider themselves beautiful, and anxiety about appearance begins at an early age. Ninety-two percent of teen girls would like to change something about the way they look, with body weight ranking the highest, and six out of ten girls are so concerned with the way they look that they actually opt out of participating fully in daily life—from going swimming and playing sports to visiting the doctor to going to school or even just to offering their opinions.

am more interested in the observation that Virginia Woolf made in 1929, in A Room of One’s Own. In it she laments how over the ages, men have chosen which human values should prevail—elevating some and demeaning others, leading whole cultures to believe in the superiority of what Woolf called masculine values.

Tell me to what you pay attention, and I will tell you who you are. —José Ortega y Gassett

We have paid a lot of attention to violence and warriors.

If all we do is immerse ourselves in the stories of bad people doing bad things to each other and the planet, we will sink under the weight of a lopsided story.

Tammy Duckworth’s name: she was the first woman or man to vote on the chamber floor holding her baby.

It’s up to us to deny evil the attention it seeks. It’s up to us to demand stories of love and justice, to read and watch them, to validate and elevate them. To pay attention to the women and men who are doing power differently, and to know their names.

I understood how what we modern Westerners believe is just the way it is, is merely a sliver of time, a slice of the whole story.

What if our myths and teaching tales had purposely led humanity to believe that it was the ultimate sign of strength to nurture and love? What if the urge to care for children and nature and each other had been chosen as the most important tasks of any society? What if care as opposed to conquest had been the marker of virility? What if resources were granted to the people most skilled at peacemaking, healing, creating, and opposed to those with brute strength and a penchant for violence?

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 have an advantage as power outsiders for most of recorded history to step in now and question some basic assumptions: that domination and violence are necessary to maintain order; that men are divinely or biologically predetermined to lead; and that the strong and silent warrior is to be revered while the emotional, communicative caretaker is second-rate.

We need new stories that arise from different values.

What Einstein did say is this: “A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move to higher levels. Often in evolutionary processes a species must adapt to new conditions in order to survive. Today we must abandon competition and secure cooperation. This must be the central fact in all our considerations . . . otherwise we face certain disaster.”

Women have internalized patriarchy and created unhealthy coping mechanisms to survive and prosper within the existing laws of power. If we no longer want to collude with those laws, and if we want to be cocreators of a new story, some of the work starts on the inside with what C. G. Jung called shadow work, a process I explore next.

The personal shadow is the disowned self.

Doing power differently is about fueling leadership with the energy of love.

The moment we start imagining a new world and sharing it with one another through story is the moment that new world may actually come. —Brit Marling

Storytellers are the meaning makers in a society, and therefore they have a weighty influence and the ability to move humanity forward.

Every dollar spent on war, every young person lost, every city and country destroyed, every technological innovation applied to the military, could be used in favor of life as opposed to death and destruction. War is a lack of imagination in a time of great peril.”

The next time you find yourself using metaphors from violent confrontations—either in warfare or contact sports—play around with other ways of describing common situations.

Ingersoll said it about Lincoln. “Nothing discloses real character like the use of power,” he said. “Most people can bear adversity. But if you want to know what a man really is, give him power. This is the supreme test. It is the glory of Lincoln that, having almost absolute power, he never abused it, except on the side of mercy.”

When we deny our stories, they define us. When we own our stories, we get to write a brave new ending. —Brené Brown

Take the VIA Character Strengths survey online to learn more about your inherent character strengths. Validate and hone those gifts. Whenever you doubt yourself or compare yourself negatively to another, go back to the results of the survey and let them remind you of your particular strengths.

One person plus one typewriter constitutes a movement. —Pauli Murray

Write an Oath of Allegiance you believe all citizens of your country should swear to.

May I have the courage today To live the life that I would love, To postpone my dream no longer But do at last what I came here for And waste my heart on fear no more. —John O’Donohue

Our role in life is to bring the light of our own souls to the dim places around us. ―Sister Joan Chittister

I am writing about fernweh because we are all homesick for a place humanity has never been before. It is up to us to dream that place into being.