Pandora’s Ballot Box
The Myth of the Irresponsible Female Voter
If I’ve learned anything from the coverage of the 2016 Presidential race, it’s that female voters are a problem. As a group, we are highly sought after, but it seems we can’t be trusted to vote responsibly, so dissecting our choices has become a national pastime. It’s a game everyone can play, whether man or woman, feminist icon or Fox News host, as long as they are willing to tell us how sexist, boy-crazy, brainwashed, or just incompetent we are. These labels are sometimes doled out in the name of feminism or progressivism, as if their application will cause benighted women to see the light. Yet there is nothing feminist, progressive, or even new about our cultural obsession with women’s voting habits. The specter of the irresponsible female voter is, in fact, very old, and she is a powerful mechanism for undermining women’s credibility as citizens and political actors.
Legend has it that some time in prehistory, when Athens was ruled by kings, two marvels appeared on the acropolis. One, an olive tree, was a sign of Athena; the other, a spring, belonged to Poseidon. After consulting the Delphic oracle, King Kekrops assembled the men and women of the city; the oracle had instructed him that the marvels were signs from the gods, and that the citizens should choose one god as the patron of their city.
The men all cast their votes for Poseidon, while the women voted for Athena; because the women outnumbered the men, Athena became the patron of the city, which was given the name Athens in her honor. Gods, however, tend to be sore losers, and Poseidon was no exception. In anger, he flooded the city and outlying areas. To appease him, the Athenians punished the women for electing Athena. From then on, it was decreed, the women of Athens would not be allowed to vote, they would not be permitted to give their names to their children, and they could not call themselves by the name “Athenians.” Athena had become the city’s patron, but at a steep price to its women.
Through the serendipities of academic scheduling, I found myself telling this story to my Greek archaeology class the day before the general election in 2008. The account I have given comes from St. Augustine (City of God 18.9), who tells us he is quoting the first century BCE Roman writer Varro, but the story is likely much older. In fact, it may be the subject of the sculptures on the west pediment of the Parthenon, the grand temple of Athena built on the acropolis during the third quarter of the fifth century BCE.
The pediment of the Parthenon certainly shows the contest of Athena and Poseidon, but like many ancient myths, this one has more than one version. Because of the prominence of women and children on the pediment — who seem to represent mortals, not the gods who judged the contest in another version — some scholars believe (plausibly, in my opinion) that these sculptures show the moment at which the Athenian women lost both the right to vote and their claim to citizenship. If so, this pediment would have joined with the battle of heroes and Amazons depicted on the metopes just beneath it to broadcast a powerful message about the dangers women can present to civilization when they aren’t kept in their proper place.
Although I try to keep politics out of the classroom, teaching this story on the day before a presidential election felt charged, to say the least. I wondered if my students were hearing the barely concealed subtext of my words — Vote! Be involved! The privilege of choosing your leaders is not one given to everyone, and in another time or place, you may not have had it yourselves. But it felt especially charged that year, after an election season in which identity politics had flown thick and fast.
Earlier that year, many Americans had for the first time been given the choice between a woman and a black man for their party’s nominee, and this step forward for the country was matched by a step back in our national political discourse. Women who supported Hillary Clinton were accused of “voting with their vaginas,” while black people who supported Barack Obama were portrayed as subversive and even anti-American. It was hard not to reflect on these events while discussing a myth in which voters are selectively punished for supporting the candidate who most resembles them.
Lately those thoughts have bubbled to the surface again. As the Democratic primary race between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders heats up, the internet has exploded with concern about how American women will use our right to vote, a privilege hard won by our foremothers. Every day, my Facebook feed is filled with thinkpieces (some might say handwringing) about women’s voting habits and with examples of the abuse and harassment we receive for supporting the “wrong” candidate. Offline and in private, the conversations are more personal; my friends and I talk about feeling like we’ve been kicked out of the feminist “club” for choosing one candidate or the other. Everyone feels aggrieved, it seems, and everyone has a reason to.
The most grotesque insults to our intelligence have been those hurled by a breed of Sanders supporter (or putative Sanders supporter) the media has dubbed the “Bernie bro.” Although there is some debate as to the ubiquity and real partisan allegiance of this internet-dweller, he is real, and he is fond of telling women who support Clinton that they are “psychos” and “bitches” whose “vaginas are making terrible choices.” Meanwhile, the former Secretary of State herself is a “twat” and a “lying shitbag.”
I have watched less vulgar “bros” inform women that it is okay to vote for Clinton provided one is not doing so because of her sex, although they never seem concerned about the men who might support Sanders for that reason. The “Bernie bro” would be easy to write off were it not for his persistence and aggression, but as it is, the Sanders campaign has had some trouble reining him in. Sanders himself has recently entered the fray, publicly condemning these behaviors as “crap.”
On the other end of the spectrum, feminists are having our own uncomfortable conversations. At issue is what it means for a woman to support a female candidate — or decline to do so. Both Gloria Steinem and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright have recently weighed in on the latter question: as a guest on the Bill Maher show, Steinem quipped that young women have flocked to the Sanders campaign because “the boys are with Bernie,” while Albright informed the crowd at a Clinton rally that “there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.”
The outrage sparked by these comments has been predictable and in many ways justified. (Both later apologized, to mixed reception.) For my part, while I am disappointed in their remarks, I am not particularly interested in condemning either of these venerable feminists who have done more for American women than I likely ever will. I am interested, rather, in this discourse that they, like the “Bernie bro,” have inherited — one that has for millennia told men and women alike that women’s votes are not to be trusted, and that women are uniquely prone to abusing the privileges of citizenship.
It is worth remembering that the story in which the women lose the right to vote was more than just a cautionary tale for the ancient Athenians. It was one of the foundational myths of their civilization, for it was during Kekrops’ legendary reign that the Athenians believed themselves to have acquired the fundamental elements of civilization: marriage, new religious institutions, the political subdivision of Attica, and the disenfranchisement of women. Given these origins of the irresponsible female voter, it isn’t a stretch to say that she herself is a founding myth of western civilization.
But why did the ancient Athenians need her? Why do we? The answers to these two questions may not be very different. To an Athenian man, the political landscape created by Athena’s victory would have looked uncomfortably close to matriarchy, and the best way to mitigate its dangers was to ensure that women had neither the civic nor the social power to threaten male interests again.
I find the social dimension especially interesting, for while the prohibition on passing one’s name on to one’s children may seem like the least severe part of the women’s punishment, its importance is underscored by their elected patron’s own relationship to sexual reproduction and inheritance. Born from Zeus’ head and forswearing sex and marriage, Athena proclaims in Aeschylus’ Eumenides that “in all things, except for marriage, whole-heartedly I am for the male and entirely on the father’s side” (737–738). She may be a goddess, but it is men’s lineages, not women’s, that concern her.
Without wanting to press the comparison too far, I think we can hear resonances of the Athenian women’s punishment in our current electoral discourse. Although Clinton and Sanders both have female supporters of all ages, I’ve been struck by how often the feminist debate is cast in generational terms, with older women supporting Clinton and younger ones backing Sanders. A recurring question in discussions of this trend has been what women of different generations owe each other; moreover, it seems that each generation feels misunderstood and ill-used by the other. This is not surprising — solidarity is difficult to achieve when every generation of women feels that it is fighting for survival against obstacles that are invisible to the others — but it is deeply unfortunate.
Although it may not offer answers, I believe that the myth of the gods’ contest can help us to see the problem more clearly. The severing of generational ties is such an important part of the strategy to disenfranchise the Athenian women precisely because these ties are essential to the creation and maintenance of power structures. Women preoccupied with intergenerational fighting can’t effectively fight a male-dominated power structure; as the Athenian myth makes clear, the severing of women’s generational ties is a feature, not a bug, of systems that withhold political power from us.
The distrust that even feminist women feel for other women’s votes, then, seems to be less a failure of individual women than a consequence of this very old problem. By subjecting women’s votes to a level of scrutiny that the men who backed Poseidon never had to tolerate, we are all — men and women alike — simply the latest players in a misogynist game that was rigged centuries before our nation came into being. The sooner we find a way to change the rules, the better.
Kathryn Topper is an associate professor of Classics at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on Greek art and archaeology, gender and sexuality in antiquity, and ancient banqueting.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the Paideia Institute.
