Megan O’Malley reflects on myths about women throughout the ages.
“Mommy brain is real,” my friend told me as I reluctantly admitted I could feel a dullness in my mind. It took me a few years to admit that I was disoriented by my post-partum, embarrassed that I could not be everything I was before motherhood, that gaining a new aspect of myself meant I had to drop something else.
I am of a generation of “Oregon Trail” women, the computer game, not the actual pioneer migration. We came of age hearing Anita Hill confront sexual harassment and seeing two women senators represent California. We knew there were challenges in our journey, and we learned how to stock up, head out and press on.
In her book “Divine Might,” Natalie Haynes interrogates Greek and Roman narratives to reconsider the goddesses of Greek myth. She considers how the stories of Greek goddesses have mostly been rendered by men and how they deserve some empathy for their famous or infamous acts.
Haynes explains varied and occasionally contradictory versions of Artemis, noting how the Greeks adapted her to fit the different sacred women in communities they conquered. There were social pivots achieved through cultural comingling.