Feminist Theory and the Classics (Thinking Gender) by Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz & Amy Richlin

Author:Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz & Amy Richlin [Rabinowitz, Nancy Sorkin & Richlin, Amy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317857143
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2014-02-24T13:00:00+00:00

Women in Ancient Greece

“Daddy’s come around to Mommy’s way of thinking.”

—Contemporary Country-and-Western song by Paul Overstreet

This comprehensive overview of women in Native American societies—their modes of perception and articulation, their activities and standings within their societies, symbolic representations of them, and Native American gynocentric ways of approach—serves as our model for looking at women in ancient Greece. In this section I will first look at texts by women to establish the validity of examining women’s distinctive voices and activities in ancient Greece. I will then examine women’s roles in the spiritual and ritual spheres, with implications for social roles, and conclude with suggestions for approaching literary and cultural analysis.

In her interpretation and analysis of the Kochinnenako story from her own Laguna tradition and from her own perspective as a Laguna woman, Allen (1986: 226ff.) presents highly instructive paradigms for seeing into cultural forms of expression. Significantly, the story and its meanings are rooted in the spiritual, relate to ritual and social constructions of Laguna society, and provide satisfactory symbolic and narratological self-expressions for the members of that culture. At the center background of the story, representing woman’s fundamental centrality in the culture, is Kochinnenako. By indicating how this same story approached from a Western epistemological framework yields a mistaken and denigrating picture of women’s roles, Allen shows clearly how crucial it is to stretch beyond Western epistemological boundaries and attempt to see another culture and its constructs through the eyes of that culture’s members. Since for ancient Greece, this directness is impossible, the model Allen provides from a non-Western culture shown to have significant perceptual and expressive similarities with those of ancient Greece is invaluable for our study. It provides the very epistemological strategies to overcome the limitations of Western patriarchal discourses that researchers in classics as well as other disciplines are calling for (de Lauretis 1987; duBois 1988; Winkler 1990).

The few extant poetic and philosophical texts known to be by women writers demonstrate ways of thinking about oneself and the world that differ from the ancient Greek male views, sharing instead the gynocentric features noted by Native American and other researchers. Recent scholarship underscores the distinctive women’s perceptions given voice in the poetry by women, which echo the strong sense of ritual, female deity, women’s associations, female creativity, and that assured sense of self and of woman’s place characteristic of a gynocentric, Native American outlook. Dover (1978: chap. 3) and Stigers (1981) note that Sappho’s love poetry is distinguished from that of male poets not only in the fact of the female gender of her lovers. Instead of the hierarchical games according to fixed rules characterizing love between men, Sappho and other female poets describe the love between women as mutual, complementary, and tender. In two articles, Winkler (1981, 1990: 162–87) discusses how Sappho transforms Homer’s epic, male poetry into her feminine vision, emphasizing in the latter the distinctive woman’s consciousness Sappho presents, while Snyder (1989) brings out the multiple approaches Sappho employs in her creative expressions. And Judith Hallett (1982) shows how Sappho (fr.

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