Dust and Spores

Women in Greek Myth / Mary R. Lefkowitz
2nd ed.
Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007
xix, 238 p.

My word, it has been a long and busy month. I have been hosting houseguests and travelling the whole time, and basically I'm super tired BUT I've read about half a million books, which hopefully I'll have time to touch on.

Anyway, I've decided to talk about the nonfiction stuff I read on here now too because it's been taking up a lot of my time lately, and otherwise I will have nothing to say a lot of the time. So anyway, I'm on a sort of Greek mythology kick, which I am ashamed to admit was kick-started by those stupid Percy Jackson books although I assure you the desire lay dormant before.

So I read this book, Women in Greek Myth one day at the library because it was raining like a something something outside. It's a pretty straightforward and balanced approach to... well... women in myth. The author has taken some flack for not having a more staunchly feminist (and sometimes apologist) standpoint, but I personally found it refreshing to see a book about mythical women that wasn't all about Zeus as serial-rapist.

There are sections on the goddesses, misogyny, rape and abduction, and a lot of it is related to the lifestyles of actual (living) women in Ancient Greece.

So yeah... a good, solid introduction to the topic, and since she's not vehement about her opinions, it's a good way to inform your own reading of the texts without the Scholarly Brainwash that's sometimes hard to overcome.