Cassandra Speaks

When Women Are the Storytellers, the Human Story Changes

Elizabeth Lesser

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780062887207
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

What story would Eve have told about picking the apple? Why is Pandora blamed for opening the box? And what about the fate of Cassandra who was blessed with knowing the future but cursed so that no one believed her? What if women had been the storytellers?

Elizabeth Lesser believes that if women's voices had been equally heard and respected throughout history, humankind would have followed different hero myths and guiding stories—stories that value caretaking, champion compassion, and elevate communication over vengeance and violence.

Cassandra Speaks is about the stories we tell and how those stories become the culture. It's about the stories we still blindly cling to, and the ones that cling to us: the origin tales, the guiding myths, the religious parables, the literature and films and fairy tales passed down through the centuries about women and men, power and war, sex and love, and the values we live by. Stories written mostly by men with lessons and laws for all of humanity. We have outgrown so many of them, and still they endure. This book is about what happens when women are the storytellers too—when we speak from our authentic voices, when we flex our values, when we become protagonists in the tales we tell about what it means to be human.

Lesser has walked two main paths in her life—the spiritual path and the feminist one—paths that sometimes cross but sometimes feel at cross-purposes. Cassandra Speaks is her extraordinary merging of the two. The bestselling author of Broken Open and Marrow, Lesser is a beloved spiritual writer, as well as a leading feminist thinker. In this book she gives equal voice to the cool water of her meditative self and the fire of her feminist self. With her trademark gifts of both humor and insight, she offers a vision that transcends the either/or ideologies on both sides of the gender debate.

Brilliantly structured into three distinct parts, Part One explores how history is carried forward through the stories a culture tells and values, and what we can do to balance the scales. Part Two looks at women and power and expands what it means to be courageous, daring, and strong. And Part Three offers "A Toolbox for Inner Strength." Lesser argues that change in the culture starts with inner change, and that no one—woman or man—is immune to the corrupting influence of power. She provides inner tools to help us be both strong-willed and kind-hearted.

Cassandra Speaks is a beautifully balanced synthesis of storytelling, memoir, and cultural observation. Women, men and all people will find themselves in the pages of this book, and will come away strengthened, opened, and ready to work together to create a better world for all people.

Part I
Origin Stories

History isn’t what happened. It’s who tells the story.

—Sally Roesch Wagner

Introductory Text to Part I

What’s the best thing about getting older? Certainly not my creaky knees, or the way my whole body is proving the existence of gravity, or how I often find myself standing in the middle of a room wondering what I’m looking for. No, the best thing about being older is that I finally trust my own point of view, so much so that I no longer suppress it when it deserves to be expressed, nor do I argue it with a person who is uninterested in listening, learning, or growing (or helping me listen, learn, or grow). I know my own heart, and I value my experience. I am not afraid of being exposed when I’m wrong. I’m not looking for accolades when I do the right thing. I am at home in my own skin, and my own mind, and in the joy and mess of being human.

I wasn’t always like this. As a girl and a young woman in my early career years, and in my first marriage, I didn’t know my own mind, treasure my own body, or trust my emotions. I didn’t trust myself. Well, sometimes I did. Sometimes I spoke my truth, but lurking always in the background was self-doubt and a vague sense of shame.

Where did that doubt and shame come from? Why did I question my basic validity as a human being? Why did I devalue my interests and perspectives and rights? Why was I ashamed of my body? I didn’t know. I didn’t even realize I had shame. I just knew there were acceptable ways to be a woman—like being nice and agreeable, and not overly aggressive or overtly ambitious. If I felt desire for pleasure or an instinct for power, then I was wrong to feel that way. And if I dared to follow those desires and instincts, I was bad. I knew this because I was dipped in the waters of our culture, just as everyone else was, hearing the same stories and absorbing the same rules.

Even as a girl I understood there was something out of line about being female—something physical, something emotional, something sexual that made me, and the whole lot of us girls and women, suspect, untrustworthy, punishable. I was an imaginative and gutsy little girl, born into a family that consisted of a creative, self-centered, and domineering father; a smart, submissive, and pissed-off mother; and four daughters. My mother—a frustrated writer and a high school English teacher—read to her girls from a wide range of literature: Greek myths, Bible stories, Homer’s Odyssey, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Grimm’s fairy tales, Little Women. From these texts, and from observing my parents, I drank the cultural Kool-Aid. I metabolized the preferred range of human behaviors. The noble characters in the books we read had qualities like quick thinking, curtailed emotions, rugged individualism, and a competitive nature. They did not exhibit what my father called the “girly stuff”—excessive feeling and concern about the feelings of other people. Excessive chattering. Excessive need for someone to chatter back. General excessiveness all around. My father wasn’t the only one dismissing the girly stuff and elevating his own ways of being. My mother upheld his ways, too, even as she strained against them.

I dragged what I learned in childhood into adulthood and marriage and the work world and discovered the same narrow range of heralded humanness wherever I went. When my so-called girly stuff rose to the surface at home or work—when in a meeting I would be brought to tears (instead of responding with locker-room put-downs or poker-faced stoicism), when I wanted to talk about what I was feeling in my marriage, when I felt belittled and scared by sexual innuendo and outright harassment, when the competition and violence in the world offended something deep inside of me—I would judge myself. Too emotional, too needy, too sexually tempting, too naive and idealistic. Best to tamp down those qualities and behaviors if I wanted peace at home and achievement at work and influence in the world. Best to fit myself into the already acceptable mold, because that was “just the way it is.”

I can’t point to one thing that finally emboldened me to trust in the legitimacy of my self—a self that is broad enough, complex enough, and unique enough to contain all of who I am. My tenderness and my ambition, my empathy and my individuality. My femaleness, my maleness, my genderless-ness. Such clumsy words, all of them. All in need of rounding out. All I know is that in my early thirties I became acutely aware of the feelings of constriction, heartache, and anger that had been brewing in me since I was a girl. Slowly, the desire to do something to change the story became stronger than my fear of speaking up. Maybe it was the wave of women gathering their strength all over the world that amped up my courage and freed my voice. Or maybe my meditation practice was paying off, giving me a strong backbone and a way of regarding myself and others with calm curiosity. Or was it my first, clumsy attempts at being in therapy that helped me unravel the stories that had shaped me? Probably all of the above. They all woke me up. I began to know in my bones that “just the way it is” was actually just a story—a story with ancient roots; a story that begged to be revisited and revamped.

And so, I went back into those teaching tales that my mother had read to her girls—Adam and Eve and other Bible parables, the Greek and Roman myths, Shakespeare’s tragedies, war stories and heroic legends. I had absorbed those stories as if they were about humankind, about men and women. But here’s the thing: stories created only by men are really stories about men. I wanted to explore what would have happened—and what can happen now—when women are the storytellers, too.

Whether we know it or not, whether we have read them or not, whether we believe them or don’t, our daily lives take direction from stories that are hundreds, even thousands of years old. I was reminded of this the other day when I read a news story about the assistant principal and athletic director of a Tennessee high school who posted a video to the school’s YouTube channel. In the video the assistant principal explains the school’s new, stricter dress code that prohibits all students—girls and boys—from wearing revealing clothing, including athletic shorts. In the video the assistant principal says, “I know, boys, you’re thinking, ‘I don’t understand why. It’s not fair. . . .’” Then he leans in closer to the camera and says, “If you really want someone to blame, blame the girls, because they pretty much ruin everything. They ruin the dress code, they ruin, well, ask Adam. Look at Eve. That’s really all you gotta get to, OK? You can go back to the beginning of time.” He ends with an aside to the boys, saying, “It’ll be like that the rest of your life. Get used to it.”

After the video went viral, the assistant principal insisted he had been kidding. The school put him on temporary leave and deleted the video, but the Chattanooga Free Times Press obtained a copy. I watched it. Several times. It confirms what I know to be true—that we are still under the sway of antiquated myths and misguided interpretations of religious parables. 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. Solid things come and go, but stories endure. They outlive the people who tell them; they jump from one continent to another; they continue to mold cultures for generations.

Why do the stories endure? Why did humans tell them in the first place? For a very simple reason: Life is hard. It’s confusing. We have enough intelligence to ponder existence, but not enough to really understand what’s going on here in our small corner of the vast universe. That’s why we tell the stories. To ease the anxiety of being soft-skinned mortals. To inspire the soul to fathom eternity. To give order to what feels out of control. To guide, to blame, to warn, to shame. To make some kind of sense out of why people do what they do, why things happen the way they happen, and how we might all meet each other and daily life with less turmoil and more stability. That’s why we cling to the old stories. That’s how an assistant principle in Tennessee in the twenty-first century can reach back to a parable from 1500 bce to wrap a complex conundrum in a simplistic explanation, to affix blame to one group of people in order to solve a problem for another group. In this case, blaming girls for how their exposed bodies affect boys, while letting boys off the hook for their own sexual urges and conduct. “If you really want someone to blame,” he said, “blame the girls, because they pretty much ruin everything. . . . You can go back to the beginning of time.”

Once metabolized, the old stories are hard to shake from the mind of an individual or the hierarchy of a family or the guiding principles of a country. Sometimes they are experienced as benign entertainment, and sometimes they are used, as the Tennessee assistant principal did, to remind women of the blame and shame we inherited from our founding Western mothers, starting with Eve, and followed by a long line of disgraced leading ladies.

It’s important to know these stories and to ask questions like: Who told them? Why? And how have they maintained their authority all these years later? It’s important to understand that the stories were not created to help women respect their bodies, intelligence, and legitimacy. They were not told to help women tap into their strength, or to use their voice to influence priorities at home and at work and in the world. Quite the opposite. They were told and are still told to bury the truth of our equality, values, and voice.

Becoming familiar with our culture’s origin stories and tracing their influence is a surprisingly effective way to take stock of our own lives and to claim an authentically powerful voice—one that proclaims not only our equal rights but also our unique capacities and concerns. By “origin stories,” I am referring to stories from modern Western cultures, including Adam and Eve from the Old Testament, Pandora and Cassandra from Greek myths, and novels and plays from the canon of Western literature.

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 the community survive, thrive, and connect with the sacred. Researching and reading these stories has given me a different vision of “human nature” and what is possible. But they are not the stories that are driving our culture today; they are not the stories most of us were raised on.

When I began to pay attention to our origin tales, I suddenly felt their tentacles everywhere. It was as if I was hearing voices from across the ages—the specific voices of the men and the missing voices of the women. So many of the stories impart the same themes: men are the morally pure and noble ones; women are the ones who succumb to evil and tempt the men. The old stories paint a wildly improbable description of what it means to be a woman: erotically seductive yet emotionally fickle, in need of protection yet dangerous, all at the same time. Who could trust such a creature?

And so, I am calling those old storylines into question.

We’ll start with the story of the first woman.

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Origin Stories
• Introductory Text to Part I
• Eve
• Pandora
• She’s Got the Whole World in Her Hand
• Listening to Cassandra
• The Spell of Galatea
• The Greatest Books
• Know Her Name
• Leaving the Cave
• Part II: Power Stories
• Introductory Text to Part II
• The Old Story of Power
• Women, Power, and the Shadow
• Scars
• In Praise of Fathers
• Doing Power Differently
• The First First Responders
• Vivere Militare Est
• A Day Without a War Metaphor
• A Revolution of Values
• Part III: Brave New Ending
• Introductory Text to Part III
• Innervism
• Meditation
• Do No Harm and Take No Shit
• Overcoming the Impostor Syndrome
• Cassandra Speaks
• Take the Other to Lunch
• Flip the Script
• The Oath
• Legacy
• Dream
• Fernweh
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Also by Elizabeth Lesser
• Copyright
• About the Publisher