Women’s Power
Can a woman rise to her full power without acting like a man? Can she realize her full self, be at her highest, and not somehow become hard and severe, thoughtless and un-related? Does it matter that she tries to do it within, or without, a patriarchal culture?
From the earliest written word in the first millennium BC, there has been a consistent intention to describe women in roles of submission and humility. In Homer’s Iliad, in 750 BCE, we are told of the thousand ships launched to retrieve the beautiful and wayward Helen. When the wind would not blow, as it did not for the Greeks, Agamemnon the great war chieftain was commanded by the Oracle at Delphi to sacrifice his beautiful daughter. He took his knife to her throat and the wind did blow and all of Greece learned that to be a good daughter is to lie down willingly to accept the patriarchal knife.
That war, in about 1220 BC, was fought to return an independent woman to her rightful ruler the king of Sparta. Marriage to the patriarch was, for Homer and his companions, immutable, the foundation of patrilineal descent and no woman could be allowed to disturb the progression of the male line by changing partners. The first commandment of Greek literature, therefore, the bedrock of western gender roles was that no women should choose her own lover. The reason of the rule was to insure that patriarchal property should not be threatened. A woman who had many lovers could not certainly identify the fathers, and fathers who did not know their sons could not insure the continuation of the male line. Patriarchy absolutely depended, by definition, upon control of its women.
To enforce the containment of women, instructions were given religious sanction: A woman should not look directly upon her god: Semele tried to know the face of her lover Zeus and she was burned alive in fire. In the newly-established kingdom of the Israelites the rule was similar: when Eve tried to have her own direct connection to God she was ordered to break it off, to make allegiance only to her husband, who would thereafter, for all the generations, rule over her.
In the 1940s these stories were standard fare in the fifth grade in my little three-room country school in the wheat fields of eastern Colorado. These images of women’s subordination had therefore been passed down, not just to the children of ancient Athens but also to children of all of western civilization for over 2,800 years. During nearly three millennia, children learned, and surely must have remembered as adults, one version or another of the story that no woman shall dance on the hills alone at night nor shall she revel with other women for there is danger here to men: She, like one of the Furies, is apt to be lost to lust and passion, tear a man limb from limb and eat him alive. A woman who enchants a man is like Circe who lures him to her den and then turns him to a pig. A woman who eats too much is like a Harpy who steals food from a poor blind king and will steal yours, as well. A woman who knows too much will be like the Sirens or the Sphinx and leave a man putrid and dead upon the rocks. These creatures were all symbols of women not contained in marriage and not trained to be subordinate.
One after another, western myths cascade down through the centuries describing women needing discipline. The goddess Athena disciplined Arachne for pride in her weaving; Atemis disciplined Niobe for pride in her children; Theseus disciplined Ariadne for pride in her love; Zeus disciplined Semele for wanting to see the face of her god and lover. Jehovah disciplined Eve for making her own decision in the Garden of Eden.
On the other side of the storied equation, opposite these images of dangerous women, of course, were stories of admirable men. From Herakles to Jason to Theseus to Perseus the original literature tells us of successful men who conquered demons, founded empires, established military power, very often at the expense of women. Achilles vanquished the Amazon queen; Oedipus outsmarted the Sphinx; Theseus abandoned the na’ve Ariadne; Orestes murdered his adulterous mother, and on and on.
Women who have been diminished for three thousand years might well want to break free from the bonds of the first set of myths and move into the apparent freedom of the second set, or that is to assume the mantels of these male heroes. Heroics must, after all, seem preferable to being chattel, or being subtly disrespected, as in the case for many women leaders today.
There could be worse fates, that is, than to become the inheritor of kingdoms and ruler of corporate empires. And the stories that are bedrock of western civilization, bible stories, Greek myths, tales of dragon slayings and acceptable rapes, have given us models for success that sometimes seem quite exclusive. Do it this heroic way, or don’t succeed, at all. If these stories are sufficient to tell us what we mean by power, and this is the only kind of power, then why shouldn’t a women aspire to that as much as any man?
Before the Greeks, and before Genesis, in the second millennium BC, in those areas we today know as Palestine, Turkey, Crete and the Aegean islands, many cultures featured powerful women who seemed not to have dominion over nature, so much as an understanding of nature. Their power or their influence seemed to come from their alignment with the cycles of the seasons, or connection to the earth, or the capacity to bring forth life, or to produce sexual ecstasy. Frescoes and pottery, seal rings and figurines show them more in harmony with, or in balance with, nature than in command over it. Their power seems to have been in lining up with the elements that produced life rather than following the later biblical injunction to take dominion. At the heart of these ancient images which one finds today in museums in Athens and London, Santorini and Crete, one sees a certain balance or moderation, perhaps even tolerance, and these too, might readily be seen as tools of survival, or power. There are no war celebrations in this pre-patriarchal archeology from this culture.
The power that comes from finding balance, or living with nature rather than against it was later disparaged in the Greek and biblical myths but the archeological evidence from these older, pre-Greek, examples gives us reason to examine the whole idea of power and especially of female power. We might, that is, mean the power of women in times of uncertainty to seek balance without violence, or quite simply, the predisposition to order chaos, (which is inevitable), by establishing harmony and human connection rather than by seeking to destroy or eliminate all uncertainty.
Women can be violent too, of course, but it is undeniably true that women are less predisposed to amass armies and play like Genghis Khan or Julius Caesar than are men. The overwhelming historical evidence is that they just don’t do war as often. In western lore the only story of a women’s army is of the Amazons and no one knows if they ever really existed, or where. We might mean, therefore, if we think of female power, the power to relate to nature as if it is the fertile earth, not empire, that is constant, or as if relating to seasons and the soil, the seas and the rain, is more life producing than conquest. And if that is what we mean, there is archeology to suggest that such power actually was at the center of pre-patriarchal life across much of Anatolia and into the Aegean, perhaps, according to some scholars across all of Europe. Of course, further, if this capacity was in our genes as shortly ago as 3,500 years, it is there still. And if this capacity is in our genes, it is still a choice.
Do we mean, therefore, does a woman have the power to dance and sing under the moon? Or do we mean does a women have power to reign supreme over large dominions? And if this latter is the power that we mean, can she direct empires without becoming imperial?
Almost by definition, if she wants to direct empires she will have to become like an emperor. The values of empire, whether corporate or political, do not have to do with the sustaining of life, necessarily, but far more to do with ignoring emotion, treating humans as fungibles and counting properties as more significant than lives. An empire is an abstraction, an organizational effort; a military machine is an organizational achievement; a large corporation requires organizational vision. When patriarchal norms go too far or when the organization man runs amok, then these institutions become their own justification, their own source of moral authority, and lives may be sacrificed therefor. That is not unlike Agamemnon sacrificing his daughter for the good of the whole Greek navy. The idea of marriage and the return of Helen to her rightful husband were more important than the single life of the daughter. To think this way about property and remove oneself from the human cost in order to achieve the institutional success, requires the patriarchal mind, and one has to buy into those values to do the things that patriarchy requires.
If we mean power as in directing empires and wars, whether between nations or corporations, then the definition of this kind of power already requires a kind of sacrifice of personality and one must be ready to prepare oneself for the service of some goal other than the survival of life, or the survival of the relationship, or the search for harmony or balance. To create an empire is by definition to create an imbalance, one entity larger than all others. And, yes, if one desires to create an imbalance, then one must be prepared to be comfortable with disharmony and be like that.
But if we mean the power that women had in the deep past to sing with the seasons, to plant in the spring and harvest in the fall, to nurture the seed and lie down comfortable with death, or that is the power that comes from living within the cycles of existence, then that is another thing, and that is undeniably a power also.
This other kind of power might be something more than the power to win kingdoms and build nuclear bombs because it stems from a knowing and a strength that is continued from parent to child inexorably, inevitably in the night, at meals, when the soul is in danger, and kingdoms or enterprises do not have such an endless supply of selfless servants. This alternate strength therefore, the power to nurture life, extending life’s dominion, is in some way a power to step outside the property system, to understand that deep causal relation between the cycles of life and death, or of death revolving into life. This power would, of course, be different than patriarchal power that tries to conquer death or to outlive death by achieving material success unending and dominion without challenge.
If it is this alternate power of which we speak, the power to nurture life, then we might even ask the question the other way round: “Can a man rise to his full power without becoming like a woman?” That is a question that, if fully pursued, could turn a society upside down.
Herakles went to the underworld to steal the golden apples of eternity and he took these from a woman. Herakles was therefore promised by the Greek storytellers a life in eternity because of this theft and because of other glorious slayings and conquests of evil demons, many of which probably were meant to convey the names of cultures that had in pre-patriarchal times been dominated by women. By slaying all those old symbols, or removing them, and in effect removing a woman’s point of view from the Greek world, Herakles established the earliest model for men in western civilization. In effect, the Greeks had decided that the way to immortality was to conquer things, or to take control, or to wipe something out. And if that is what, today, we mean by power, then that requires one kind of man, or indeed, one kind of woman. That would be the kind of man or woman who values, above all, victory and dominion above harmony or balance.
In today’s world, accumulating wealth or winning empires may seem the best way to have one’s reputation, and perhaps one’s family, live on forever, or that is, satisfy the Heraklean requirement. That was the ancient Greek view. But if immortality in truth is not individual, but is more aptly symbolized by the desire of life to continue itself, that is, for life to continue, in all its forms, and if the quest for immortality is the quest to find ways to promote the continuance of all life, then this is power of a much different sort. And if it is power of this other sort which is desired, that is the power to heal and dance and sing; to love abundantly, and to do so not just hedonistically but in ways which continue the species, or that is that promote the life of the community, both things are then true: Women must become more daring in their advance of that cause, risking exposure and danger for their power and conviction in that cause, and at the same time men must become more daring in shedding the ancient myths as if empire in any of its forms were truly the way to eternal life.
Life has demands that are different than the demands of empire, whether that empire is corporate or political. If women therefore are interested in a new story, one that pursues the survival of life rather than property or status, riches and empire, then they are perhaps best able to lead in that direction without becoming like men of old. If they are most interested in property and dominion, then so be it, they can act in accord with the requirements for riches and armies and these by definition will require from them the Mephistophelian bargain. They will become like the objects or institutions they admire.
But if they choose the other course, they may yet lead us all to new heights. Further, if men are prepared to pursue a new story as well, sending Herakles and his ilk at last on his way, then life might still have a chance.
All this, clearly, is not just about the liberation of women or men. Due to the critical stage to which modern culture has now come, the stage in which values of property and dominion now threaten extinction of species and civilization itself, this is now all about the survival of life. Unless both men and women move from the illusions of dominion and the old kind of patriarchal power toward an understanding of balance and search for harmony more satisfying, more enriching, more ecstatic even than property or political or corporate power, human life has little chance to survive at all.
Filed under: Shared Truths
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