Unknown Speaker 00:01 Testing 11234 ready to start our session here. Number four, Unknown Speaker 00:08 hold validity of tradition new forms of women's communal resistance. I'm just now meeting Helen O'Hanlon. And then And I'm Katie cannon. I'm on the faculty at Harvard Divinity School this year as a research associate in ethics and have joined the faculty of the Episcopal Divinity School for next year. But what I'm talking about today is black women it's cultural custodians of revolution. And I'll format this morning is that I will do the first 30 minutes and then Elena will do the next 30 minutes and then we'll open for questions and conversation the last 30 minutes and if everybody can follow that then we ready to roll out the way I like to use began my first 30 minutes is to find out who's here and in doing that I just like to hear your name and one book that you've read recently most recently by a black woman so that when I talk I can talk from examples you know about and not talk about something that everybody said well I haven't read that book yet so it'd be very important meeting to share if it's not the most recent book the most impression on book or the book that that that would allow us to get some good conversation about can we start with it Maria Unknown Speaker 01:25 My name is muddy vs and Color Purple Violets walk over the ball I kind of Unknown Speaker 01:38 lost impressive last last one some of us are Unknown Speaker 01:46 a little nice Audrey Lorde stressed poems and Christy and Dumansky Alzheimer's collected essays just again Unknown Speaker 02:09 process of applying our most recent Celeste gank and Unknown Speaker 02:18 carrying water color shift Unknown Speaker 02:26 I just finished my back and also by the rigid choice Unknown Speaker 02:40 to vote and Their Eyes Were Watching can with Unknown Speaker 02:51 color purple for me Unknown Speaker 02:58 that's always helpful. Because if I pull all my examples from Sula. That's it just read through this document I have shared with you and elaborate and talk from it and then pull the examples about what it means to be. The black woman is a cultural custodian of revolution from the books you've named. The combined force of the inherited tradition of race, sex and economic discrimination imposes on the vast majority of black women severely disadvantaged status. Black women in the development, analysis and appraisal of various coping mechanisms against a white oriented male structure society do not appeal to fixed rules or absolute principles of what is right or wrong and good or bad. But instead they embrace values related to the causal conditions of their cultural circumstances. The cherished assumptions of dominant ethical systems predicated upon both the existence of freedom and a wide range of choices have proven to be false and the real live texture of black life does black women have fashioned value patterns and ethical procedures in their own terms, as well as mastering transcending radicalizing and sometimes destroying the basic negative orientations imposed by the mores of the larger society. In other words, they have created and cultivated a set of ethical values that allow them to prevail against the odds with moral integrity, and their ongoing participation in life. The best available literary repository for this underground treasure of values it's a black woman's literary tradition, the work of black woman writers can be trusted as seriously mirror in black reality. The writings are important chronicles of black survival and their plots, actions and depictions of characters. Black women writers flesh out the positive attributes of black folks who hidden beneath the ordinariness of everyday life using the subject matter close to the heart of black America. That black woman's literary tradition shows how the results of slavery and their consequences forced a black woman into a position of cultural custodian of revolution. Black female protagonist a women with hardball honesty, a malaise of dual allegiance down to earth thinking, the ones who are forced to see through shallowness hypocrisy and phoniness in their continuous struggle for survival. When I checked the literature to see what was the best example of who portrayed this in the most graphic way, Alice children's statement that I've cited here, captured it for me. She says emancipated Negro a woman of America did the only thing she could do. She earned a penance by Washington earning, cooking, cleaning and picking cotton. She helped her man and if she often stood in the front line, it was to shield him from a mob of men organized and dedicated to bring about his destruction. The Negro mother has had a better job of teaching her children the difference between the white and the colored signs. Before they're old enough to attend school. She had to train her sons and daughters to say, sir and ma'am to those who were their sworn enemies, she couldn't tell her husband a white man whistled at me. Not unless you wanted him to lay down his life before organize kilos. His strike only and anonymous numbers are worse, perhaps to see him helpless and ashamed before her because she could offer no protection or security because he could offer no protection or security the negro woman has worked with and for her family. She built churches, schools, homes, temples and college educations. I will soap suds and muscles. Unknown Speaker 06:39 And then when like the now let's skip to the quote that I've taken from The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison that also talks about the black woman as a cultural custodian of revolution. She says then they had grown edging into life from the back door becoming everybody in the world was in a position to give them orders. White women said do this, white children said, Give me that. White men said come here, black men said lay down. The only people they need not take orders from were black children and each other. But they took all of that and recreated it in their own image. They ran the houses of white people and knew it. When white men beat their men they cleaned up the blood and went home to receive abuse from the victim. They beat their children with one hand and stole for them with the other. The hands that fell trees also cut umbilical cords. The hands that run the necks of chickens and butchered hogs also nudged African violence into bloom. The arms that Lola's cheese bales and sacks rock babies into sleep. They padded biscuits into flaky ovals of innocence and shrouded the dead. They plowed all day and came home to NASA light plums under the lens of their men, the legs are strapped to amuse back were the same ones a strap with their men's hips. And a difference was all the difference there was. And now I'd like to just elaborate these eight core characteristics that I have, as a black woman, as a cultural custodian of revolution. In both these excerpts, and also as I talk about the characters from these first novels, the first thing that's very evident is that black women, in order to be cultural custodians of revolution, have to look at the world with their own eyes. If we look at Zora Neale Hurston is novel, her classic there as watching God, we find that Janie Crawford, her whole struggle is trying to learn how to look at the world with her own eyes, how to find self authenticity, how to become her own woman. And even though there were the categories and the moles and the boxes to squeeze in, and to make her live in a pretzel kind of reality, the struggle from the beginning of the novel to the end is how she's always pushing against the limits. And she's always saying her grandmother, for instance, was trying to tell her that the black woman is the mule of the world. The white man gives the black community a burden and to carry it and the black and he throws it down. And then the white black man tells the black woman to pick it up. And so Jane is grandmother nanny is trying to convince Dana that she doesn't want that for Dana. And so she wants Dana to marry because you think marriage is the only way to not be the middle of the world marry a man who has money and has some wealth and has some material things like the man that her grandmother wanted to marry was only men in the on the SEC on the college side of town who had a piano in his house or Oregon. And the Janie said no, but I want love and she said no, that's the trick that always get black women in a band anyway, wanting love, you know, and but the grandmother was trying to take care of values that she had brought forth as a freed woman from slavery, trying to hope that the next Next Generation would have it a little better. But Janey from the what makes her such a revolutionary character is that she knows the lies. And that is so critical in any kind of bonding of solidarity across race lines with black women and other women is that part of the what we call in theological terms epistemological privilege of the oppressed is that when the view from below when you on the bottom, you can see both the top and the bottom, and people who are more privileged, oftentimes do not understand the lies that hold the structures in place. Unknown Speaker 10:36 An example outside of the literature and in real life is that I did my doctoral work across the street at Union seminary. And we had two positions up for grabs. One was an Afro American church history and the other than women in ministry. And so the white women caucus got together and sent their representatives to the curriculum committee, and the black students, male and female got together and so they bonded together to have a solder moment to hold both positions, and we will not lose either. We will not lose the position half American church history, and we will not lose the position in women's studies. Okay. Well, we get when they got to the curriculum meeting, the Dean decided to change the agenda. That was no longer an issue on that agenda. The black students said, Whoa, wait a minute. There's something going on here. The white women said, okay, but it's not on the docket. He changed the agenda. Black students automatically knew that that was a tactic and a strategy for the Dean the move or fought with the power. When they walked out before the meeting ended, the white woman asked the dean and other faculty, would they safeguard their interest in concern? The white men said, Yes, we will. Of course, we lost both positions. When the white women realized what happened, they cried. And they said, but they lied to us. They lied to us. And the blessing said, Well, what's new about that? It's that kind of insight that one learns early on, when you're in a press situation, what the lies on what the true stop. And June Jordan refers to him as a combat stance, and his jacket shank, he calls it the jungle posture. That means that you learn how to live in a minefield, you learn. And that's what it is to look with the world with your own eyes. You know, when you in a situation of danger, my mother describes it as when you have your head in the lion's mouth, you treat the line very gently. But if you grew up in a society that you don't even know that there's a line that you don't even know you can be destroyed. That's a privilege. That's that's not a privilege that's afforded to most black women. That's where the intersection of race sex and class comes head on. And so when black women writers talk about the black woman Chow, what they're talking about, is how black women are responsible for telling the next generation male and female, how to survive in that minefield, how to live with a jungle pasta combat stance, how to know that you can be destroyed, it will win, and nobody will give a damn that you can't even appeal to the laws of the land. Because there are very few rights that the laws will respect if you're black, female and poor. So the character Janie in there as watching God and also the way Sealy lives in the color, purple CLE can one of the key things about looking at the world, your own eyes, in The Color Purple, so we can't do it by ourselves? You know, Janie is able to do it in a different kind of way than see this absolutely has to have Suge we have to have somebody we can't do it alone, and which is critical in terms of understanding how women can be about resistance. If we try to stand alone, we will get annihilated. One of the things that's very clear in liberation ethics is that the way you destroy any race of people, any group of people in agenda is your first Alien, isolate them alienated and then Exterminate. Okay, and so, Sealy has to have Suge, in order for her to understand, well, love is critical. If you get that part, loud noise somebody gives a damn about it's critical. Because when you know that a lie is a lie, and you're trying to and everybody else is saying it's the truth. You have to somebody cares enough to help you get that self esteem to believe that what you are seeing is really what it is formed your own judgment. Number two. Once you know, you see the world with your own eyes, you form your own judgment of the judgment you for me, is how to believe what it is in and of itself. I guess a good example, this is in Alice Walker's collection of pros in search of her mother's gardens, where she talks about the fact that she's blind in one eye and she has a glass not the glass that she has. They moved the scar tissue off. And for all her life she for early in her life she would always walk with a head cast down because she was shamed of the eye The SCADA and it had been hit by Bibi shot my brother was playing in the yard one day. And when our daughter looks at her daughter says you have a whole world in your Unknown Speaker 15:11 and didn't see it as a deformity or anything that she believes should be ashamed of, but open that up for her for Alice walking away that she couldn't have never done for herself. Well, once she know once she knew that it was that she was gonna live with this eye. And her daughter could affirm it. Once again, another person says it's okay. Then she could live with it without with a hand up in a whole different kind of way. Then all along trying to not let people see that she's on her tail and slightly want to where you can find that in all the black women's literature you find characters that once they know some, this is not right. Then there's somebody who comes along and says, You're right, that's not right. And that gives them the kind of conviction to hold on. So they don't get annihilated part of the revolution, revolutionary nature of black women, as custodians custodians of revolution, is that survival is key to the mass fear of life. See, most people want to move about revolution above survival, but we can't live without our lives. You know, and a lot of people try to talk about survival as animalistic and to graphic to basic before a person who's oppressing in primarily three different angles. Just merely surviving is critical, keeping yourself alive. Evil, the character in Sula when her daughter Hannah says to mama, did you love us? And evil looks at us like What do you mean? I love you. She said when black people were dying from TV TB like flies, I stayed alive for you didn't i three beats to my name I kept you alive. Like no, I didn't have time to play hopscotch. No, I didn't play ring around the roses. But that's the kind of revolutionary nature of black women's existence in this country, not only in the literature, which mirrors that reality but also in the real life context of life. Three, this is critical. Black woman is cultural custodians of revolution, D mythologize its whole bodies of so called Social legitimacy. If you start with I guess the new trend in black women's literature really began with Jordan Hurston and her work and coming forth to I think the youngest black one right now its glory nearly in her novel, The Women of Brewster Place, if you haven't read that, I highly recommend that one. She got the award in 19, I think 82 For the first novel Award, Best first novel award. But in that novel, they d mythologize whole bodies are so so called Social legitimacy. What black women have always been up against, is the social norm of what it is to be a woman in the society. And the model is always the white woman. And what most of the black women write about, and the critics talk about, is that one of the greatest damaging effects for black women is that the whole beauty body image being told that we will never meet the standards of beauty. And so therefore, when you get a novel like The Bluest Eye, but almost every black woman novel deals with the physicality of the person, feel it is described as black, ugly and poor. But that ugly is always in the me, Mr. Blank, often referred to as ugly, ugly, ugly, who would want you You're ugly, and you're also alive, meaning that she would not tell that she was being battered, she would not talk about the abuse that was going on in our home. But once again, when we get to selfie in the color person, Sophia in The Color Purple, severe is the character throughout that novel, The D mythologize is whole, a whole body of so called Social legitimacy. Women are not supposed to carry caskets to feel safe. Why not? You know, women are supposed to man their husbands severe be Tombow, as hard as he beats her, you know, as is when he gets tired when she's not coming back until the staff everywhere they try to hold her and said, This is what needs to be a woman. Sofia goes against it when it's everyplace. So this is what needs to be black severe. Because again, of course, she pays a great price. She is a character that's most abused and beaten down. And that's often the case when anybody goes against the norm. That's why we have to have solidarity. That's why we can't do about sales. Unknown Speaker 19:34 But to feel is that character. When they and when I think the most precious line in it for me about Sofia in the mythologizing is when the white woman that she is raised brings her child over to her house, and she said but I don't love your son because he's gonna grow up to oppress me too. And that's a kind of revolutionary statement that most black women who work as domestics never get to make you Let's assume that you love those white children you you raised or else you wouldn't do it, you know? And once a female can say that it's like, wow, that's right. Because he I grew up to be trained as a domestic in North Carolina. And I was raising and taking care of white kids who were older than I, and I couldn't understand why God allowed that being so theologically minded from age three, it's like, something's wrong here. You know, and I would cook and clean and wash and scrub and it was like, and they would walk around, and they'd ask me things like, Should I wash my hair and beer? It's like, what do you say to a white person when they asked you that? I mean, I ain't know when there was a trend. And I knew if I said, I think this is the pit, I will be fired, you know. And so I couldn't be up at it. And it pained me, it gave me a great deal of pain to have to kind of wallet and shuffle and not say anything, because then it just reinforced that I was less than that I was in fear that I was done. So it was always a catch 22 kind of feeling. But I rejoiced when Sophia said, you know, I really don't like this baby. For face for basic freedoms. And I guess that basically, that is to say that it's about survival, that what black woman is cultural custodians of revolution about it's not so much changing structures and power relations. That comes in times, but right now it's just trying to hold on to life against all the odds, just trying to make sense to get the basic necessities covered. It using the color purple, which most people have read, it's Sealy and the basic freedom would be understanding that. When she goes she doesn't have much choice when her children are taken away from her when those babies are taken away. She doesn't have much choice when her stepfather just hands it over to Mr. Blank. But she goes in and she starts calming these kids hair, and the hair and Macomb since the mother died, I mean, the basic veil trying to just give them some attention. The fact that they hate her Harpo hates this woman who has now come and round the nature of his own mother step. But the basic freedoms food, clothing and shelter, just taking him she goes to work on Mr. Blank sits down, because he knows that she has to provide for the family. Bernice Johnson Reagan says it better than anybody I've ever heard. And she said it here at bonded electric several years ago. And she says everything that the black community needs. For instance, with the image she used was can we could take it from this window. And she said that, but this window is falling in on the black community, all this substance. And the black woman's posture is a bit of a partial to hold off the combat with his caving in to pick from it to give to the next generation. And because that's the part that because that's the situation of most black women in the United States, there is no time to reflect there's no time to figure out if even what we're taking from here is what we need what the next generation needs. And my part my position is that that is not what the next generation needs. Because we have more young black women under the age of 30. Let's get to phrenic manic depressant die from high blood pressure strokes heart attacks, than ever, because it's survival skills, the sum of all the things that I learned and that my mother taught me that humans are no longer effective in this technological age, it's moving so fast. And so we killing off this next generation because we don't have the leisure, the privilege and the time to figure out what it is they need when the life is moving so fast. And what Brian Johnson Reagan said and what I also say the reason I teach so hard and passionate when I do is that we need sisters sustaining solidarity with us to hold them up. While we figure out what we need, you know, well, the people are willing to say, well, there's a common bond here, or women who have not had it as hard to just just hold it because it's not like telling us we don't need people to tell us what we need, we can figure that out if we can just get from under the pressure long enough. So right now in the face of basic freedom is extending been over pasture holding off death, which is caving in on the community, to give to the next generation, those basic basic needs to keep a group of the next generation alive. And we're not doing too good a job at it. Five is resisted temptation to capitulate to the demands of the status quo. Unknown Speaker 24:32 And that's a hard one, the more the there's a big gap and the black community that's captured in the literature, but it's the real situation is that more and more black women trickle into the petty bourgeois situation. And yet the permanent underclass is getting larger, more and more black women are falling down until situation of poverty that they will be in and as we move into the 21st century but Those of us who have been allowed the privilege to move into the petty bourgeoisie or the bourgeoisie class, or whatever upper mobility that's happening, have a responsibility to resist the status quo, to not just then blame the victims to not say, Well, I pull myself up. And so therefore they can. And that often that is so prevalent in the black community right now, lack of sensitivity or caring for those who are less fortunate, by the very ones who have come through that way. I mean, I get a lot of flack from black professional women, because they don't want to know that I come from poor rural black south, it's like you're teaching at Harvard now. Pass was like, How can I pass like, I'm gonna pass as you know, it's like, don't remind us of those painful places. We don't want to know about the ceilings of the world. I mean, more white women have read The Color Purple than black women, because black women are saying it's a nasty book. It's too much incest, while they expose them that side of us, I don't know that aspect of reality. And the black woman who lived that life or ceiling, I'm not reading the book, because most of them can't afford it. You know, but that's the that's what it mean to be a cultural revolution that this fear form basically comes from those women who have moved out of that class. And those women who've never been in that class, and asking them if they're going to be right about revolutionary attitudes and beliefs that they don't conform, create possibilities where none existed before this is to our black woman's literature from beginning to end. I'll go back to Janie in their eyes, Were Watching God. And Janie knows that there's something missing in her life, she knows that there's a hole in her soul and it's going to be filled and she knows you're not going to stuff it with anything. And that takes account that goes back to looking at the world, our own eyes, but it means that she's not grabbing hastily to fill up this this need to be an authentic person in her own right. So Jamie waits for teacake who is a man about 19 years 20 years younger than she used to come along. And she gives up the privileges that her former husband had. He wanted her on a on a high stool and to be a pretty play optic. And Jamie knew that that was not going to get it. But one day he came in and he was very dissatisfied with the dinner and he hits her. And he said something fell off the shelf and would never go back on again. And so she just waited for the possibility. She just waited until they get into this big squabble publicly in the store. And she just told him, she just called him on the fact that he was not a man. She'd be literally and they say he died from that. So is there a new person it broke his ego, the super ego to hit and she just said well, you thank you so much. Let me tell you there's nothing between your legs. And he just rivet up through right up. So about when TK came along, Jamie was allowed to play checkers she was allowed to work in the swamp she was able to do the common labor she was like the dance she was like to be a person. And together they made a very harmonious kind of team. The way to get manifested in the color purple I think creating possibilities where none existed before is the conversation so many conversations between shoot and ceiling. When one is where Sophia has been beaten, Harpo comes and Celia says we want to beat it. You got to get her to mind. And Sophia comes to see let's say Why did you betray me? Why did you say that? Why did you tell him to beat me. And as a first time silly start to believe that she has a right but to fear helps me understand how to create a situation when nothing exists for that is to begin to understand that she didn't have to be destroyed by Mr. Blank. She'll taps into see this all the creativity. When Sealy finds out that Mr. Blank has been keeping letters, the Netta has been sending to her. She has she wants to kill him. And she'll comes and takes what she has and changed it to a needle. So she keeps each comes this wonderful design of pants Unknown Speaker 29:30 creating a possibility. I mean, who would have thought that Seeley who was an artist and writing her letters would have been so talented. I mean, this woman who has been described as poor black and ugly and a liar could become this genius of a designer once he gets to Memphis. And so all the way through that novel you will find each one of those female characters creating possibilities where none existed before. The eldest is Seven and Eight, seven incidents of unpredictability. Maya Angelou, I think capitalist is best in her work, how, because she's talking about the real life context. And it's all autobiographical, but how at any minute, because of the way racism gender discrimination class elitism works to Joe, humanity can be taken away from you as a black woman. And part of what it means to be a cultural custodian of revolution is how not to be devastated by how to know, okay, this is happening, you have to keep moving, you have to just keep moving. Just the other day I was I went to Harvard Square to get some boots fix. And the man said he wouldn't fix him. He didn't do that kind of work. Well, I knew it was racist. I mean, it's like, but I couldn't sit and cry couldn't sit down and say all this is pitiful. All I mean, it's like, just go with it, go to the next one, go to the next. That's the unpredictability when you when you're black female in society, that negates both your femaleness and your blackness. And if you don't have the economic means, therefore, you gotta know that at any point in time, in any given day, you're going to be put down, and you got to not be devastated by it. And the last one, is the quality or quality of steadfastness I can afford it today, as for more than grin and bear it, but really, it involves the ability to hold on onto life against formidable odds. It's not that suffering is glorified, is that suffering is a given. And because it is a given didn't, then what you know, it's not like you take on suffering. So you can be an honorable, personal, self righteous person, or you take on suffering. So due to the AI grand, it's not about that. It's not about a hit parade of oppression. It's about you, you black female, but you got to suffer. Okay, so what, then you move on from that point. And that's what it means to hold on in life against formidable art. And if you it is a trait that's true in all the protagonists in black women's literature that I've covered so far. And that for instance. Unknown Speaker 32:05 Dai is taping everything that happens in this room, and that if you don't want to be recorded, don't speak. Unknown Speaker 32:16 I wanted to speak Unknown Speaker 32:25 Okay, well, we're moving back in time here a bit to classical drama. And you might ask why feminists should be interested in classical drama at all. Given that it's all written by male writers, and certainly makes no attempt seriously to represent a female perspective, I think we should be interested for a few reasons. First of all, most most universities teach Western culture courses. And a very large percentage of those texts are drawn from classical literature. Either we want to dump those texts altogether, or we want to find something valuable that in the for ourselves, I think we can find a lot that's valuable in them as feminists and for ourselves. And primarily, I think we trauma remains interesting for feminist today, in part because it is so heavily populated by figures of female resistance and revolt. Compare the west of Western literature in such courses and until you get to the 19th century, there simply isn't any female resistance and revolt, virtually speaking. There's lots of it in Greek drama. Everybody knows, I assume Sophocles, Antigone, who defends the right to bury her brother against a state edict and the name of the unwritten laws quote unquote. And while the issues that Antigone raises concerning civil disobedience are certainly tweeted ambiguously in the play. The Greek gods through their prophet Teresa Reyes, make it very evident in this play that Antigone is right. In Aristophanes, Lysistrata the old comic poet Aristophanes, the heroine, Lysistrata mobilizes the women of Greece for a sex strike in favor of peace, and she brings the nation of tortured men to their knees, and Escalus is supplants which probably many who have not read. The chorus in this play are 50 women called the Danielle's who have come to Greece, from Egypt because they have refused to marry their uncouth and brutal cousins, supported strangely enough by their father, the Greek city of Argos agrees to act as their champion, when they are finally forced to marry their cousins because the Greeks lose the battle against these men. 49 of the 50 Danny kids killed their husbands on their wedding night. One of them fell in love with her husband and saved him. This is one of many revolts in Greek drama against The institution of marriage in Aristophanes women at the assembly, or Ecclesia zeusie. The women take over the Greek assembly in Athens in disguise and vote themselves into power. The rest of the play explores the implications of the communistic regime established by these women and are Stephanie's women at the FISMA foria That women decide to take revenge on the tragic poet Euripides because of his misogyny. This is just a run through a few plots. In escuela Surah stay at the first play is called the Agamemnon. There the Greek Queen quite a master revolts against her husband's killing off her daughter if a denier so that the Greeks could take the expedition to Troy. She takes a lover and decides to take over the rule of Argos herself. Her her cause after her murder by arrestees in the second play of the trilogy, her son arrestees is taken up by powerful female deities of revenge called the Orion yes or finally humanity's in a trial for risked his life versus the male deity Apollo in the final play the trilogy, the humanities. Unknown Speaker 36:19 In Euripides, Medea, the heroine who's a barbarian princess from the end of the Black Sea, who's married a Greek, quote unquote hero named Jason, the hero or the heroine decides after she has been betrayed by her husband Jason, to take revenge on him for betraying his oath of allegiance to Her. She couldn't have a legal marriage, but she had an oath by the gods. Not only does she manage in the course of the play to kill off Jason's new bride, and the new bride's father, but she decides that the only way she can truly revenge herself on her extremely unfeeling and collage husband is to kill their children. She gets off scot free in the end of the play, and in fact, she is treated to a rescue by the gods themselves. Her grandfather, the son sends a chariot to take her off to safety in Athens at the end of the play. But in this play, Medea revolts not only against Jason's betrayal, but against women's law in general, and against the institution of marriage. Specifically, I'd like to read a brief brief passage from her first speech, where she's trying to persuade a chorus of Corinthian women of Greek women, about how disastrous her situation and the situation of all married women in general is. And she says, It was everything to me to think well of one man, and he, my own husband has turned out holy, vile, of all things which are living and can form a judgment. We women are the most unfortunate creatures. First, with an excess of wealth, it is required for us to buy a husband and to take for our bodies a master. That means you have to pay a dowry to get a husband, for not to take one is even worse. And now the question is serious, whether we take a good or a bad one, for there's no easy escape for a woman, nor can she say no to her marriage. She arrives among new modes of behavior and manners, and needs prophetic power unless she has learned at home, how best to manage him who shares the bed with her. And if we work out all this well and carefully, and the husband lives with us and lightly bears his yoke, then life is enviable. If not, I'd rather die. A man when he's tired of the company in his home, goes out of the house and puts an end to his boredom, and turns to a friend or companion of his own age. But we are forced to keep our eyes on one alone. What they say of us is that we have a peaceful time living at home while they do the fighting and war, how wrong they are. I would very much rather stand three times in the front of battle than bear one child. I think we probably wouldn't disagree with most of the statements in this speech. The chorus of women Unknown Speaker 39:09 become extremely sympathetic to MIDI after the speech clearly recognizing their own word in the speech, despite the fact that Medea is a barbarian woman. And they read it strongly in feminist terms. And this is what they say at the end of this first thing, I will just read a few lines here. They say flow backward to your sources, sacred rivers, and let the world's great order be reversed. It is the thoughts of men that are deceitful their pledges that are loose, ie Jason's broken his oath, whereas it's usually women who are depicted in literature as adulterous and betrayals betrayers story shall matter in my condition to a fair one. Women are paid their do no more shall shall evil sounding fame be theirs, sees now uses of the ancient singers to tell the tale of my unfaithfulness for not unassisted Phoebus load of music bestow the liars divine power or otherwise I should have sung an answer to the other sex. Longtime as much detail of us and much of them. So in media, they see a spokesman for the silenced voice of women in ancient literature. Nothing that happens in the rest of the play, even including the monstrous killing of her own children my my Madea which causes her such pain can undo this earlier feminist reading of Medea situation in the play, although it obviously modifies it. And in this play, Euripides Medea turns out to be not simply the barbarian princess in which that she was in earlier Greek tradition. But a traditional Greek hero trapped in the limits of a women's role, woman's role. She very clearly in the play, follows Greek heroic ethics, Greek male heroic ethics, which are known to us from the Iliad in The Odyssey, Homer's Iliad, the Odyssey onward, she knows how to hurt her enemies and help her friends, which regrettably, was the primary ethic for Greek hero. She is a search for noble birth, she doesn't want to be mocked by your enemies. She's not ashamed of her intelligence and her courage. In fact, she wants to act on them. And she's not ashamed of her own aurat erotic passion, and the fact that erotic passion, and individual self assertion can be a reasonable set of motivations upon which a woman can act. I've given you only a few examples here of the nature and range of female revolt and resistance in Greek drama. But I think this revolt in resistance defies easy Catterick categorization. It nearly always occurs in response to male abuse of women's interest, and therefore always has some element of justification in it, despite many of its negative consequences. Sometimes, in fact, this revolt of women is defended by the outcome of the play, as in the case of Antigone, your Lysistrata. This revolt is not always consistently motivated. Sometimes it has a sort of traditional set of women's justifications for action, such as a desire for peace or a desire to defend the interests in the family. But very often, it in fact, turns against the family that you might have expected a woman to protect. And as we can see from the speech, it's quite reasonable to understand why a woman could see yourself as having little or no stake in the household, of which he is a part of, in fact, the real revolt and resistance of women in Greek drama is often against male control in marriage, or in favor of an assertion of female power and heroic identity. Women resistance in Greek drama is not always even punished, although it often is, it's often represented as extraordinarily monstrous, and that it turns against children and the interests of the family, and masculinize is the woman who undertakes the revolt. Women in Greek drama who resist and revolt are often represented as terrifying furies. Nevertheless, assertiveness is often explicitly for a good cause. Unknown Speaker 43:27 And often silences, it's the initial opposition which is raised towards it. Well, why do we have such a dominant, dominant and revolutionary rule for women in a drama written and acted by and for men? And how do we explain the presence of these female characters which are so at odds with what we know about the lives of real Greek women in Athens and the fifth century BCE. Now here, I want to take undertake a very short digression on what the position of women actually was in Athens at this period. Women in Athens, citizen women now I'm referring to were excluded from the legislative, judicial and military life of the state. They had absolutely no positive political and economic rights, they spent their lives under the authority of a male guardian. They were married at 12 to 18 to a husband who was over 30 and could be expected to have at best the Paternal relationship to her. Her function was explicitly and it said over and over again agreed prose texts to produce heirs for her husband's family. If her father's family died without a male heir, she was expected even to abandon the marriage in which he already was and marry her father's closest male relative in order to produce heirs for his family. Male honor was clearly an explicitly over and over again, tied up with female respectability and even invisibility women spent ideally their life in the worse, in women's quarters inside the house, there were male and female quarters inside the house, cooking, weaving guarding the goods of the household and taking care of the children. Whereas men and Athens ideally spend as much time outdoors as they possibly could. To give you an idea of the ideal silence imposed on respectable women in Athens, let me read you two very brief passages from Athenian prose writers. The first comes from Xena funds, or economics or household manager. It's a treatise on household management. And I quote from a dialogue between the philosopher Socrates and an Athenian landowner named cried tabulous. Socrates says, anyway, cried tabulous, you should tell us the truth for we all are all friends here. Is there anyone to whom you commit more affairs of importance than you commit to your wife? Right tapulous? There is not Socrates is there anyone with whom you talk less, cried topless, there are few or none, I confess, or to quote from the famous funeral ERATION of Pericles, which is given to us in the cities, the Peloponnesian Wars. Here, Pericles is celebrating at a funeral, the glories of Athens of the mid fifth century BC, he he dedicates one sentence the women, quote, great will be your glory and not falling short of your natural character, and greatest will be hers who is least talked off for good or for bad. We have court cases, in fact, where the existence of respectable women is actually contested in the court because no one has ever seen them. An important exception to this silence and visibility of the respectable Athenian women, however, is in the area of religion. And if you look at the religious calendar for the year in the state of Athens, and you imagine women attending even a small proportion of the religious events to which which they were allowed to attend, they clearly were out of the house, an extraordinary amount of the time, at least for these events, and played a very important role in religion, which I will come back to shortly. If you read prose texts other than dramatic texts, what you see is an a lengthy justification for women's inferior status, that medical writers represent her physical and mental health as destabilizing for the ancient doctors. The womb, wandered. It was an organ that didn't stay in place in the body and wandered to different parts of the body, including limbs had other places causing diseases and destabilizing the personality. The only way that you could ensure female health was to keep the womb heavy and wet way down with pregnancy, menstruation or intercourse. Similarly, the Greek philosophers argue that because of female woman's physical nature, she had insufficient reason and control for exercising virtue as a full citizen. Unknown Speaker 48:14 To return then to the problem of women and drama, where female characters do all the time violates the silence that was appropriate for respectable women who claim intelligence and exercise it in effective and often extremely well reasoned rhetoric, who leave the household and act in the political sphere denied to them in life. By definition, as Madea herself points out, all female action should be negative, because it's not something that women ought to do. Women in drama are, in fact, often represented as deceiving can Trivers incapable of doing good? And yeah, this is not always the case in Greek drama. How can we explain this dichotomy between life and literature? And what can we take out of it? First of all, I think we have to understand something about the nature of the genre, tragedy, or the genres tragedy and comedy. Tragedy in particular, is based on myths. These myths came down for from a path in which governments were monarchical or aristocratic. And they center on stories of families, you simply cannot have a drama based on these myths without dealing with women characters, and the role of women in the family. Second of all, Greek drama had no internal stage, everything is represented as taking place outside. So if you have female characters, they automatically have to violate the rule for the rules for the lives of respectable women. Third of all, Greek drama is in general, about conflict, about violations of the norms and about social problems. And those social problems are often rip presented by the voice of women. Nevertheless, I think this isn't a sufficient explanation. Because after all, the dramatist could choose his myth, he could choose the way he characterizes women, and what he has them do in this place. So I think we have to look at these questions in another way, we have to look at what kinds of symbolic issues, female resisting and revolting characters represent in the conflicts of Greek Greek drama. Now, there are two places I think you can look, one is on the level of psychology. And this level has been explored, for example, by a sociologist named Slater in a book called The glory of Hera, which maybe some of you might have read. There, he argues that the powerful female characters in drama reflect the psychosexual experience of the Greek male child, and that the tensions of drama recreate those of the poet's infancy. His general view is that because women were so extraordinary ly excluded from so many important aspects of Greek society, and so confined within the household that the role of the mother is likely to be extraordinarily ambivalent, especially in relation to the male child. On the one hand, she lives at her ambitions through this child. And on the other hand, she envelops and embraces this child because he is the only person through whom she can get any power in her life, especially in her later life. So in other words, drama is the kind of working out of male psychological conflicts in female disguise. And in fact, this female disguise for working out male conflicts takes place literally in something like the role of pantheous and your remedies, ba chi, for those of you who read it, they're the king of the country. pantheous resists the phenomenon of Dionysiac religion, with which women are associated in the play and words associated in actual religious practice. And finally, after trying to fight very hard against this phenomenon, and against these dynasty qualities and himself, the king pantheous Literally dresses in women's clothes, and goes off, to try to understand the phenomenon of Dionysiac religion on the mountain and to control it. And in doing so, he understands something about the nature of reality, which he didn't understand before. Unknown Speaker 52:30 Now, this Amazonian quality, this terrifying quality of Greek women, which later sees is produced by these psychosexual cop conflicts, is nevertheless a very ambivalent one in Greek drama, because at the same time that we have terrifying, terrifying, rebelling women, the women are also to some extent, admirable, even in male terms, because their behavior is modeled on the masculine resisting women tend to behave in masculine quote, unquote, manners. Okay, second of all, however, I think women, some are used to symbolically represent a series of social and political conflicts in Athenian Society. And we can talk about this more later, I'm just going to sort of outline some possibilities here. I think women are very central, in the representation of a conflict in between the interests of family and state, in Athenian Society. And this was an important historical conflict for the Athenians, because the price of the glorious democracy, which we so often hear glorified in Western culture, text, for example, was the suppression of the family in order to break down a basically aristocratic society in the sixth century BCE, and produce a democracy in which at least all male citizens were potentially Derrida robotically and politically equal with all other male citizens. The price was the suppression of the family, how are you going to get people to consent to a democracy? How are you going to get to have to give up powers to the have nots? Well, essentially, what you do is to privatize the family as much as possible, and keep it to influence and private wealth out of the public sphere, and try to propagandize for a devotion by male citizens to the state. The result of that is that women were privatized and moved in every way out of the sort of overall arena of the state, except in the area of religion. And religion. Is the area explicitly sad, often in Greek drama to have been given to women as a kind of compensation for their loss in other areas. It's not, it's not that women always represent the interests of the family in Greek drama quite the opposite. They often turned against it to assert their own interests, but I think we see be worked out in the battle between the genders, a specifically male conflict, a failure to deal with to resolve the conflict between the interests of the family and state between private life and public life. And female characters often step into the breach when the contradictions raised between the values and needs of these two spheres come up and reach a sort of entitled intolerable point of tension. In other words, the gender battle in Greek drama has something to do with male failure to understand and deal with the world. In in rational terms. Now, to close on a more positive note, I would like to say a few things about one plate, which where it seems to me that women's role as mediators between public and private interests in the sphere of religion, women, as communicators with the sub, or the super cultural, is viewed in positive terms. And I think this boy is Aristophanes, Lysistrata. Now in our staff and his little sister Lysistrata, as I said before, for those of you haven't read it, we start out with a woman sex strike for peace. This woman's sex drive for peace is undertaken in response to ally and intolerable war between the Greeks, between the Athenians and the Spartans called the Peloponnesian War. And the women represent themselves as totally fed up with the abuse of their own interests, they take over the Acropolis. In Athens, the older women take over the Treasury to make sure that women can't be used. Money Sorry, can't be used for war, and the younger and more attractive women resist their husbands at home. Now, I think the reason that this female revolt is represented positively. Unknown Speaker 57:00 Although in fact, in the beginning of the play, the male men as usual in Greek drama are just horrified by the idea that women could be asserting themselves at all. They turn out to be wrong and display, and they turn out to be wrong precisely because everything that the women do in this play conforms to their role in private and public religion. That first of all, the name Lysistrata is significant with Strata means dissolver of armies. We happen to know from some inscriptions that were discovered in 1955, that the name of the priestess of Athena poea is the most important caught up in the Greek propolis was Lysa. Magee and her name means exactly the same thing as Lysistrata dissolver of armies, it's very clear that the character Lysistrata is a stand in for this priestess of Athena. And in fact, if you read the play carefully, despite the fact that it contains all the usual slurs on the female character, like their sex mad, they're mad for drink, and they're unable to act collectively or rationally. Lysistrata never falls victim for one second to any of these quote unquote typical female vices. Quite the opposite. She acts in her role as women as priestess, bringing a group of headstrong males to their senses. The other major female character on the Athenian side, and this plays named Marini, which was also we know from inscriptions was the name of the contemporary priestess of Athena Nikkei, the other important called on the Acropolis. The third important female character in this play land paedo, the woman from Sparta who comes to represent Spartan women, there was the name of the Queen Mother of Sparta at this particular time. So it's very clear that, as I say, despite the fact that this is a comedy, and despite the fact that there are many frivolous aspects of the play, that the major characters here are, are acting in their role as priestesses. And as people who represent something important in Athenian Society, which is sort of one might say, super political, and important for the survival of the community as a whole. Throughout the play, the women use powers which are common both to their role in the household and to their role in religion, in order to bring the man to their senses, for example, was a kind of prize for for skill and weaving if you got to be allowed to do it. And that's the image that Lysistrata uses as the what she's going to do to bring the community back to its senses. She's going to weave an imaginary cloak. Sexual self control, which is what the women exercise in this play was again something that women used in religion in order to bring back fertility. The State. I don't want to run over too much here in terms of time, but there was a major all female women's festival called the theists before they were numbered during the year. But this is the most important one, it was a three day festival, in which women left the home and household. All public business was moved out of the Acropolis in the Agra and the central parts of the state. And the women performed a series of very important rituals, which I won't go into here. In order to ensure the fertility of the land for the next year. The women also use their powers over burial, they Barrow bury this magistrate who comes to try to interfere with their sex strike. They use, quote, unquote, up to a bass to throw water on the men of the chorus who are trying with large phallic sticks to penetrate into the Acropolis where they're controlling the money for war. In fact, the women here although they take over the Acropolis, never symbolically leave the confines of the rules that they're supposed to be staying within as married women, they are resisting sex rather than succumbing to it. And in that sense, they behave as proper housewives, and as people who are have the proper values in relation to religion. So this play ends with the success of the women and a return to the status quo rather than a permanent revolution, one should add up but nevertheless, it clearly is a play which celebrates some important powers that women have to contribute to the state in their role as women. To give you another quotation along these lines from a play by Euripides, who was not, in fact, I think so misogynist, as the women in our staff and his play think he is Unknown Speaker 1:01:56 that this is a heroine named melanin be the wise who was famous, although we don't have all of the play for the fact that she made wise and rational statements throughout this play, defending women against men slurs, and this is a quotation we have from her. Quote, they manage the home and guard within house the seaborne wears. No house is clean or prosperous, if the wife is absent, and in religion highest I judge this claim, we play the greatest part. In the oracles of Phoebus women expound Apollo's will recall the oracle at Delphi in which the major spokesman for the God was the priestess, the devil at the Delphic Oracle, and at the holy seed of the donor beside the sacred oak woman conveys the will of Zeus to all Greeks who may desire it. As for holy rites performed for the fates, and the nameless goddesses, they are not wholly in the hands of men, among women, they flourish all so righteous is woman's part and holy service, how then should her kind be fairly abused? Shall we not cease the vain reproaches of men, and those who deemed too soon that all women must be blamed, like if one be deemed a sinner? Unknown Speaker 1:03:17 Okay, in some, then what I want to say is that despite the many negative ways in which female resistors and revolutionaries act and Greek drama, it seems to me that the female revolt and Greek drama recognizes a series of social contradictions in Greek society, and recognizes that those social contradictions are, in part predicated on a suppression of women and their interests and identities. Women, power and positive revolt may be based on deception very often, but it's also based on female powers over fertility, and on their mediating role in culture. Unknown Speaker 1:04:04 Women's revolt becomes a kind of model of salvation in a world which fails to conform over and over again, to the rationality that men expect from it. And this is what Greek tragedy so often demonstrates. Unknown Speaker 1:04:27 We have about 2526 or 27 minutes to talk with you and we'll talk among ourselves about the literature of traditional new forms of women's communal resistance. And if you have common questions, both Helene and I may maybe respond to or specific questions and what we've shared feel free at this point. And remembering the announcement that was made Unknown Speaker 1:04:56 you about how you see the role of money Do you see the role of African values as forming an inspirational background or feeding into some of these tenants have outlined here? And if you think that men and women and black men and women interpret African values differently. Unknown Speaker 1:05:24 The question is how I see African values and forming the tenants of black woman's cultural custodians, and do black men and women interpret those values. Similarly, similar and different. I've been to Africa several times, but have not used any kind of transition from Africa to the black experience of Afro American United States. In my work I primarily do from 1619 forward. And several people have asked me that since I've finished my dissertation, if I was going to go back and do work in that area, and I've chosen deliberately at this point in my life not to because there's just so much everything I'm doing so pioneering, and has not been done before that it's just untouched ground. And that's why I have not crossed the Atlantic to go. Unknown Speaker 1:06:13 Like, for example, the role of the African tradition that only Marshalls character encounters in the Caribbean. And the role of that, and as part of her search for what anticipate or NetEase input? Or what would you Lord talks about going back to a Caribbean retirement and in a much more much less literal way? Going, actually. And the reason I'm asking the question is that I teach a course on the Caribbean. With my students, we've been sort of looking at the role of African traditions in the Caribbean. And one of the things that I'm puzzling over is that sometimes, both in my experience working in Jamaica and and things that I've read it's part it's things that sort of polarization is created, where men are seeing Peter Wilson as the most explicitly men are seen as more involved with African guys and women are seen as the more sort of traditional Christians. But I feel that it's just the that the African values are coming out in a different way and the book I mentioned, but I think that it's very clear that the spiritually the spiritual inspiration that she's drawn, so that's the language. Unknown Speaker 1:07:43 Well, I get intimidated by my field and my guild, that you don't talk outside to guild. And so therefore, being a newcomer on the block, I just clearly stated once, this is my scope, but I agree that when Alice Walker talks about in terms of Africa, it was I read that it was identical to my experience, and my assessment of what's happening there with multinational corporations and colonialism and under development, but in order to talk professionally about it, then people will ask me all about this African stuff. And it's much more of a feeling personal experience of perception, then do I have the citations for it? And so that's why I take it literally when he said that so I respond to your living. I would like to say something about the difference in the way that why I use black women's literature and not like men's literature, is that black women's literature is much more insolent and circular in his movement, to talk about the insularity of the black community and black men, right, that the trend is to talk move much more vertically, the black community and dealing with the white world. And Barbara Christian talks about this in black women, novelists where then they get destroyed by or beaten down by the white world, then they come back to the community black women write about the community, the interpersonal relationships, life within a community, not oblivious or numb to the impact of the outer world, but it's much more a bell jar kind of effect that drops down and what life was in under that Bill job. But I don't cross the Atlantic. And maybe when I get a little more comfortable, and seasoned and wiser than I'll speak with a lot more authority. Unknown Speaker 1:09:29 Figures inserting the ideas of goddesses. I was struck by what the slowly said that the one part of Greek society that was open to women where they were empowered was in their religion, and that the ideas of goddesses were prevalent in that society and it seems that when that was lost, you'd have this great expanse of literature where there is no mention of women as in towering figures. And of course, an Alice Walker, she comes to the idea that God is she changes her God to a mother figure, a woman figure. And also do you like your professor of divinity? And you've been saved in the traditions of a patriarchal idea of religion? And that's it sort of, I'm just throwing out an area, rather than a question. I see a great deal of connection between the two. Unknown Speaker 1:10:34 You want to restate the question? Okay. I'll try to Unknown Speaker 1:10:39 try to restate the question. In general, what what we would like opened up for discussion, I guess, is the what what kind of role in the sense of empowering that women had in the ancient world and black women now relate to the question of the gender of deity? But that'd be fair. I think I think I think for Greek women and made an enormous amount of difference, it's very clear if you look at women's coughs, historically speaking, and this also shows up in tragedy by you know, what goddess says women are interested in the women related to female goddesses. Those female goddesses lived in a, in a pantheon that was patriarchal. And in fact, that question is very directly addressed in something like the Homeric hymn to the meter, which I highly recommend to anyone to read, because it deals with a female goddesses coming to terms with the fact that she's living in a patriarchal universe. But that the text of that story, it's the Demeter Persephone story. It's a story about what happens to the mother whose daughter is taken away in marriage without her permission, and the feelings of separation and loss, and her revolt, to get the daughter back, which she succeeds in doing, in fact, for two thirds of the time, from the god of the underworld, typical has been represented as the god of death. This text, for example, explores that question, and it was that story, the Demeter Persephone story that was the central texts for all for all all female cults. So it's very clear that the central relationship in all female, all female female cults was the mother daughter relationship and the exploration of the mother daughter uniting and creating bonds which allow them to sort of survive marriage separation and all the other problems of patriarchy. So it's not, I think, I think pillow plural gods were extraordinarily important in the ancient world and very empowering for Asian women insofar as they had any power at all. I could pursue that further I mean, goddesses like Athena, for example, who were in androgynous and that their female goddesses who are born from men, because Athena was born from Susan's head. He had the wisdom to swallow her mother whose name means intelligence meatus. So that he could control meat as his offspring. And so Athena is born from Seuss's head and sees herself as the child of the mind of the father. But even she has a kind of consciousness which sort of mediates between female consciousness and male consciousness. And you see that power, both let's say in the hands of escolas, or stay at where Athena is able to mediate between the Arrhenius or the Furies who represent the women's side and Apollo who has totally blind and can only view the male side of the question, the resolution of that play brings in some way a kind of, not very satisfactory, perhaps solution to those two different sets of consciousness about the world. So even even androgynous status, recognizes there are two sets of perspectives and tries to bring them in some kind of alignment. I think Lysistrata as a stand in for Athena in the role of Priestess is doing the same kind of thing. So I think female goddess was were very, very important and absolutely central to the way that women imagine in their lives. Unknown Speaker 1:14:14 I don't see I was walking in The Color Purple, making God a goddess. I see what she's doing is I liberate the ethics we call debunking disentangling unmasking the patriarchy. Old patriarchal understandings of God. Most feminist theologians and ethicist do use the color purple now as a theological texts because of that God chapter. And I use in my lesson canon have now canonized didn't open up the Scripture, it is scripture, but because but the God that that is so well depicted in The Color Purple, is one that is shooting see the describing it is she'll tell sealer she's got to get me and offer Abul you know, and so therefore, it's that it's definitely not a male god but it's a goddess in all nature's is God that harms if you'd be still you can hear it and a God that loves what we adore and admires the things we like and when she says but we don't find God in church, we go to church to celebrate the God we found as in ourselves. So it's it's, it's a real deep kind of spirituality that we all have got within us. And we call it a Mongo D and that we all create an image of God. And therefore, every every human being is a human being with a touch of God in them. And so therefore, the spirituality is finding that God is in us, and celebrating that God with all other human beings, and with nature, because she doesn't make that separation there. And that's why she says, God really gets pissed off, who out by the color purple, we don't notice it. And, and I think that that's key, because a friend of mine, who's a botanist says that the most common color of wildflowers is purple. And if we get so busy with life, and so busy moving and being and all the other things that happen to us that we don't even notice purple, then we're missing out on God and we lose our spirituality. So the kind of God that I was walking depicts, is a very spiritual God. And it still says, It's not here, she is an IT guy who loves what we love and wants us to be happy. Unknown Speaker 1:16:23 As I look through these eight points that you gave yourself, the black woman's story of revolution. One thing that becomes very obvious to me is the centrality of your sense of community. You know, you said at one point that we need solidarity and I wonder if how's the is there a possibility for solidarity outside community. And by community, I don't mean here, deep personal friendships or relationships, but a sense of sharing a vision and sharing the practices, the constructive paths towards that vision. And I say that, in view of the resistance rotations of the mass of the status quo was one thing, which I see very different in the eyebrow society is a lot of individualism. And I see both in, in my old Hispanic culture and in the black culture, much more recessive community or the need for survival. Unknown Speaker 1:17:30 And I wonder if you would comment on that. Unknown Speaker 1:17:33 I don't know how to restate your question out of solidarity and community, as in resistance to the status quo. I think the best example of and in answering that question would be in The Color Purple, when the whole that whole family structure, extended family all are trying to figure out how to get Sophia out of jail. And they put their minds together to say, what are we going to do, and Mary Agnes was at that point called squeak, decides that she will go because she has white blood in her at some point to talk to the sheriff, and to negotiate for Sophia to get out of jail. The solidarity is the willingness to stand, knowing that we all in this together the whole, that whole family, all those people, whether they were blood relatives or not, knew that it was their moral responsibility to try to get Sofia free, and to do to go to any left by enemies necessary to do that. And not at any point in the novel that we see after squeek has been raped by the law enforcement agent, does she go back and say, Look what I've done for you. It's just a given, you know, that kind of solidarity, when they decide CLE and Suge and Squeak, decide they're leaving. It's like, well, what are we gonna do with the children, Sophia say, I'll take care of, you know, you go on, I'll take, I'll stay here and take care of him. It's that kind of, it's a lack of possessiveness, and it's the lack of individuality that I must, I can only do this apart from everybody else, but we're all in it together. And I don't know where that comes from. I don't know. If the more one is pressed down, we know that none of us can escape it or, but it is there in oppressed communities. And it gets distorted. I mean, like people do call rank on each other and everything but it's prevalent, and it's a good quality when it's their unhealthy mindset. This lady has been trained. I wonder if Unknown Speaker 1:19:38 you could explain further. What you meant about young men in the ancient Greek society growing up with women, that their poetry and drama reflects their ambivalence, because it would seem to me that when a male grows up in a society that shows a woman's powerless, it just reinforces his status. And, you know, he accepts it. It seems even in our own society that men were from a position of women, that they are the dominant. Unknown Speaker 1:20:22 Okay, the quest the question concerns pursuing further the the comment that I made about male writers projecting onto Greek drama. psychosexual conflicts that they heard about women and therefore women and drama being represented as terrifying and powerful and ambivalent, and dangerous and powerful forces. We actually, I mean, Slater's theory is really based on very thin evidence, and it's actually largely derived from literature. And we wish that we actually knew more about Greek child rearing practices, and what family life was actually like, however, something like Xenophon, so economic is, does give us a very specific statement that the ideal for upperclassmen, at least, was to spend as little time in the household as possible. And that is, the ideal for women was essentially to be what he calls the queen bee. That is to have her own sphere in which the govern, and if she doesn't, well, then thank God, the man has man has to spend as little time as possible there. Now, all we also do know, and this is certainly a fact is that up until age seven, a Greek male child would spend his time largely at home, in the sphere of the mother, and probably see relatively little of his father, less and less as you go up that scale in terms of class. And then at age seven, the boy would suddenly move very radically into a world which was largely a world of men. And Slater's view is essentially has to do with the powerful psychological influence that a mother living under the repressive circumstances that a Greek woman had to live, would have had to her son. That is that she would have had a very powerful effect on him for two reasons. One is that he was the person on whom she could take out her anger, okay, to is he was the person through whom she could live out her ambitions. I mean, I, a mother of a Greek son had the hope, at least in her old age of getting whatever powers that is an authority she had through him, clearly not through her husband. Okay, and his argument is that essentially, this ambivalent mother figure would have such a powerful effect on the sort of formation of the psychological consciousness, you have to buy a Freudian theory, for example, in order to buy this theory that this explains why you would have so many sort of terrifying we powerful women agree drama, even though in fact, women in Real Life couldn't do any of the things that they're represented as doing in great drama. I myself think that there might be something to this theory, but I think it's totally inadequate to explain the sort of whole range and variety of forms that female and resistance and revolt takes and Greek drama are the words, I think, I think, if you buy anything to do with the Freudian view of, you know, male development, leaving out the Freudian view of female development, which is highly contested at this point, I think, you know, it has some value as an explanation on a certain level, but it simply does not, you know, help us that much to read any specific text, or the way a specific female character is characterized in a specific situation. So, I guess I buy it up to a certain point. And I don't know if that explains it well enough. But you might look at something like Portnoy's Complaint in a 20th century terms where again, precisely that kind of mother figure is represented as having an enormously powerful psychological effect on the male writer much more than the father figure, even though in fact that the mother herself was not socially empowered in any you know, political terms. So that maybe that would be an example that would help you to understand the point that he's making. Unknown Speaker 1:24:32 There's a there's a conflict here that I've thought about myself, when, if you need an affirmation, to know that you're right. How do you find Unknown Speaker 1:24:45 your own person? Unknown Speaker 1:24:46 If you feel something, if you feel different from everyone else, and you come up with an idea that is truly different, and no one is are you wrong? How When you Unknown Speaker 1:25:02 said philosophical question, right? If a tree falls in the forest and you don't hear, did it really fall? It For Me, it happens. I think in terms of the power of love and loving, negative Vani has a line in one of her poems that says, I nothing, and you must be less than that to care. When I was in New York, living in New York, I did volunteer work with women at Rikers Island. And the resistance for them to believe that they had any worth was just unbelievable to me. It's like, why are you here? What do you want from us? Because they were so beaten down and their self esteem was so low that it was, it was hard for them to believe that I can be there out of fear, just as a human being system, the system. And I think the only way that that believability happens is that somebody can love us. Even when we're in our worst state about ourselves. We have a song in the church in the black church called Love lifted me I was thinking deep and Sam would love love to me. It's like, the only way that I personally have come to believe anything that I believe that I know, to be true, is that there was somebody who believed in me when I couldn't believe in myself, and kept telling me that was gonna be okay. And one day, I believed it. One day it sunk in, I was like, oh, that's what they were saying. But it was like, it was not like, I can believe it before I was affirmed in it. And I don't know what was behind that. But I know that if I can let the love in, then I can, it can come from the people I wanted to come from See, I can't say this is believable. Who My mother says it's okay. Because I've been waiting for life, you know, but there are people around me all the time telling me that it's okay, if I will open be open to that, that the love is there, if I'll be open to it, that I am somebody if I'll be open to it. But if I lock those people out and just say I only want that affirmation, and I only want to hear from this person at this point in time, then I don't get it. But it is just like what else worked out so bad in the culture, it's there, the harm in life is there. That affirmation I need to go forth for the day is there if I'm just open to it. But it's human nature not to be open to it. I mean, not human is socialized. It's not a human nature. We're socialized to want that affirmation from the people we think are most powerful. And so it's very hard to get it from a little child on the street who has nothing he says, you know, like, a lot of times I'm walking around all groom and, and he's a whiner. So why don't you smile? It's like, it's like, how did he know? But I think that it's there, if we're open to one. Unknown Speaker 1:27:44 I could just make one comment along those lines in Greek drama. I mean, if you contrast the character of Antigone, for example, who when she finally leaves the stage, I don't know if you remember the scene, she goes through a lot of self doubt, precisely because she hasn't had a single person. We leave the chicken here, who, who backed her up in terms of love, her sister tries to do it. But her sister betrayed her so badly in the first scene that she can't really listen to it. And she goes through her death with this enormous sense of isolation, almost, you know, not being able to explain why she did what she did. So she starts falling back on these crazy arguments, like, you know, I wouldn't have ever done it except for a brother or something, you know, some attempt to rationalize why she did it because she has no one who can back her up, even though that love is in fact, there. She's got a fiancee kills himself. But she doesn't see that. Compare that to something like Lysistrata and the empowering nurse that she gets from, let's say, all the other women who back her up in the strike. Unknown Speaker 1:28:47 I just wanted to say something you might want to add to this list as very important. Woman's relationship to language, Christine increasing, because it strikes me that the black woman's voice, the black woman's voice right now is really much more revolutionary than the black male voice. And that would be writers like Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston, there's a real effort to kind of claim the black woman is definitely removed from language. The normal language is still the white pale. That there's a real effort to kind of carve out a place in language and come up with a whole new language. And it strikes me as the one that of course is very angry, but is also very loving. That's what I find in James speeches. Your Eyes Were Watching God, and whole sections of the color purple and Toni Morrison, as you well know, really very voice and I think that's an important moment of resistance. That's implicit in everything you've done, because of course you choose chosen literary authors as examples of all of this. And I think that's an option. The use of language and the validation of language is very important. How would that function? So the classical theory I don't know what woman's relationship to language was? Unknown Speaker 1:30:00 Do you want to come in first? Unknown Speaker 1:30:01 I think you're right. And Finn repeat what about language as the language itself has been a mode of resistance? And the, the dilemma is, is there a such thing as Black English, you know that conversation has gone around and around in English classes and, and in public schools and everywhere else. And there's a privilege for black women writers to capture it in print. And yet black women whose black people who speak it are ridiculed for it, and put down. So that's the dilemma. And I don't know how to resolve it myself. But it is true that language is a mode of resistance, Unknown Speaker 1:30:42 to delay and cry and real kind of joyousness in the way that these writers are using. It doesn't seem at all. They feel bad about it. Unknown Speaker 1:30:54 Well, that's it. And in, I try to always put my work in terms of the real life context and the literature and dialogue. And it's amazing how a person can get away and be praised for it in writing, and be denied jobs, life, liberty and pursuit of happiness in real life because they speak that way. And so that's an that's an ethical dilemma for me, and I tried to figure it out. I mean, it's an ethical dilemma about the work that I try to try to make some balancing out about it. Why is that the case? Is it when a person has arrived at a certain level professionally, they can then resort back to that and it's okay, as long as they don't, they don't have to live that way. Because there's so many ceilings in so many Janie's. In my community, I'm just a short story. I've when I first started working in Jordan Peterson's work, it was 1972. And I'd come home from seminary and my mother said, we were sitting around the kitchen reading, distracts on the road, and she was reading out loud, I said, Why isn't this wonderful? This is so beautiful. And she said, Kate, for this, you get a Master's for this. I said, why? She said, Because you can not sit on the front porch and hear people talk like this all the time. And I said, That's right. That's it. That's it. And she's like, but it is that looping of the culture that I'm about because those women who speak that language don't need to know the value, or the beauty or the power, or that it even is a form of resistance. So yeah. Unknown Speaker 1:32:24 This could be a large topic in terms of classical drama. First of all, I think, I think female characters and drama are one of the ways in which they're most wrong. We characterize very often in terms of their revolt is through their extraordinary power over language. Clytemnestra being a, you know, an example that maybe a number of you have confronted, I mean, quite a minister can run rings around anybody in terms of language. And it's partly because she recognized she can use every level of language, not just rational speech, which he's perfectly capable of using when she wants to, but she can exploit this sort of doubleness of language. And I think in a negative sense, that's represented as relating to women's sort of capacity to live a double life. In fact, the necessity, they have to live a double life because they can never act except, you know, as a kind of act of undermining and strategy because they can't, you know, act justifiably in any context. But because of that, there's something about, there's sort of sort of affinity established between female nature and the nature of language and women are seen as having kind of special power over it. And this was, again, a very important feature of women's religious cults insofar as we know something about them, a large part of women's calls had to do with women shouting, aggressive and obscene statements, in some way, as part of the cult ritual, sort of, presumably both exposing various aspects of sexuality, and expressing a kind of resistance and aggression against their usual role. So when women speak as resistors, in Greek drama, I think that's also with speech that they had, you know, within the confines of their own relationships to each other, and was really seen as a sort of important and positive role in a way of their place in society as a whole. Unknown Speaker 1:34:24 They're pleasant societies associate with silence, Unknown Speaker 1:34:27 except Except, except within the cult context, where they're, you know, justified and quite in doing quite the opposite and saying anything they want to say, more or less in aggressive terms, and that that was supposed to be a very positive part of what they were doing in these fertility cults. So I think all together the the, the relationship between women language is really, really crucial. And as I say, it's precisely their power over language which enables them to to open up reality to men in a good way, as well as bad way to open up the terrifying aspects, but also to open up the things that male political language and so on closes out. And that's quite explicit possibilities Unknown Speaker 1:35:21 we have just a few more minutes. And there are other questions or comments before we break our last time together this year. Unknown Speaker 1:35:32 This is just a comment on what you were saying. We talk about checking out reality. And it's very difficult to go as a minority as a one minority to a group of Anglo feminists, because you have no one to check out reality with. And for me, it's been important that even in situations with other Hispanic women where we might disagree, still, there's the possibility of checking at least little pieces of my understanding I totally crazy, or does this resonate with you? And you know, many times we don't agree completely, but she says no, I don't want to be but But you're right, you know. So, for me, the question of survival and solidarity has has come to that point of needing someone against who will help me check out reality we, it's like, constantly, you have to go out of your mind to live in the in the Anglo patriarchal world, and you need someone to help you say, Well, yeah, you know, you, you crazy 90%, but 10%, you're not so crazy. And that has become very, very important. And though I almost always finish going back on my word, after every meeting that I am, where I'm the only Hispanic I said, I'll never put myself in the situation again. And then of course, I get invited. And again, I dragged myself, to just feel horrible about the whole thing. But I think that's very important. And I appreciate that you brought that up, because for me to classical day to day dilemma, Unknown Speaker 1:37:16 I can point, the thing about somebody being able to say you're 90% crazy, but 10% All right, is partly partly that love you or support you even if they don't support all of your ideas. And that's something that sometimes I have a hard time with my students because I like to have a lot and sometimes people feel like if somebody doesn't agree with something. And it's important to create that kind of baseline for people where the idea isn't a property, but it's part of a process and an interaction that they will be supported throughout even if they are Unknown Speaker 1:38:00 totally out. I can't repeat that. That was wonderful. I would like to thank all of you who've shared and who have been here shared in your presence and in your being and in your comments and your questions and it has just been really good for me and I'm glad to be here with you.