March 16, 2015 • 48 mins
Hatshepsut was one of the most successful kings in ancient Egypt -- who also happened to be a woman. Cristen and Caroline talk with Egyptologist Kara Cooney about Hatshepsut's rise to power, why her legacy was erased from history and what women leaders today can learn from this fearless pharaoh.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff Mom Never Told You From how Supports
dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Caroline
and I'm Kristin. And today on the podcast we have
a really special guest. Kristen and I are talking to egyptologist,
professor and pretty much all around amazing person, Kara Cooney.
(00:27):
Cooney is the author of The Woman Who Would Be
King hat cheps that's Rise to Power, all about this
amazing figure in history, hat cheps A, who was the
sixth pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty. And you know, honestly,
we don't know a lot about her inner life, her
personal life, but we do know quite a bit now
about how she ruled, and she definitely was an interesting
(00:50):
and different figure for history, unique if only in the
fact that she was a female pharaoh or a woman king,
which seems like an oxymoron almost um. And what we're
gonna talk to Cooney about is just how she was
such a powerful and effective ruler who really maintained her
(01:10):
empire's position in the world. And we're going to find
out more about how she came to that power and
also how her gender played such a strong role, not
only in the path that she had to take to
grasp that power, but also in her legacy being diminished
(01:31):
in a lot of ways. And the reason that we
don't know more about sort of the inner workings of
how she came to power beyond the actual steps that
you have to take to become king, has to do
a lot with the fact that those darn Egyptians did
not record anything other than their super official histories and
facts about their rulers. They were writing down who was
(01:53):
sleeping with whom or how hat cheps that clawed her
way to power. And so there's been a lot of
conjecture over the is about how this woman came to
be a leader. Um, But so one important person that
we can turn to to answer some of those questions
is Kara Cooney. And so, without further ado, let's let
the interview role. First of all, Dr Cooney, could you
(02:17):
introduce yourself to our listeners and tell us a little
bit about why you wanted to write a book on
hot cheps. It sure thing. My name's Kara Cooney, and
I teach at U c l A. I am a
professor at U c l A. And I didn't want
to write a book on hot cheps. And I was
actually approached by my lead age and who said you
should write a book about hot chefs it. And I
just thought, why does this woman keep haunting me? What
(02:38):
is going on? Why did I done this TV show
for Discovery about hot chefs that a couple of years before,
which I assumed he had seen. Otherwise he wouldn't have
asked me to to then write the book. And academics
like to stay in their own little niches, their own
little little boxes. And he said, I said, I can't
write a book about hot cheps it, And he's like,
why not? And I said, because I do the nineteenth
and twentieth dynasty and hot chefs it is the age
(03:00):
sheet and so but more I thought about how silly
that was, and how we we stick too much to
our our expected work and our expected research. And the
more I thought about female power and how interesting um
it is that this woman was able to surmount so
many obstacles and able to climb to the very highest
(03:20):
pinnacle of political authority. I thought, Okay, yeah, I'd like
to write this book, and I'd like to do it
differently than than anyone else has done it before. Well,
could you talk a little bit about the Egyptian attitude
toward women rulers in general, and how powerful women could become,
and also sort of the available avenues to power for
(03:42):
women at the time. Ancient Egypt is an unusual place.
It's it's unique in the world in many ways. Um
it's a it's a giant oasis, if you like, and
it's protected on all four sides geographically Mediterranean Sea to
the north, deserts on the other three sides, cataracts down
to the south. I mean, it's just it's a place
that can develop in a microcosm the zone for thousands
(04:04):
of years, and it encourages a culture that enjoys status
quo and continuity and doesn't like to have a lot
of upheaval and coups. And in Asians, they don't have
to deal with a lot of that because who have
a culture that enjoys continuity. They created a political system
that divinized kingship beyond anything that that had ever been
(04:24):
seen and arguably anywhere in the world. It's it's a
more divinized kingship than than perhaps any other system anywhere
in the world. And when you have a culture that
is very interested in king following king following king in
the same family at nauseam forever divinized. If there's a
problem with the succession, if the king is too young,
if there is an issue, then because you have a
(04:47):
culture that's risk averse and interested in continuity, they'll allow
a woman to come to the throne, to serve as
regent for a young king, or in some cases to
even as acts as king in her own right. And
more women were allowed to rule, come to the center
of the wheel, if you like, in Egypt than than
in any other place, any other place in the world.
And so you can talk about women like hot Cheps.
(05:09):
So you can also talk about tawas Ratnutokras to some extent.
You can talk about a woman named so the Cotep,
you can talk about Cleopatra ne for TV. There are
many female names known from Egypt, and that is an anomaly,
that is that is unusual and different from the rest
of the world. We would love to hear some more details,
especially about the avenues through which these women could attain power.
(05:29):
I know, for instance, in hot Cheps, it's case that
there was a lot to do with religious avenues and
being queen regent. So yeah, could you talk a little
bit more about those avenues. Well, it's it's an interesting
thing that the avenues to power are generally connected to
the king. So a woman acts in support of the
(05:51):
king first and then can catapult herself into power in
her own right and hot chefs. It's case. She was
agent for a very very young king. And when I
say young, I mean one and a half years old,
two years old. You know, when they crowned him, he
was probably chewing on his crook and flail and a
crown wouldn't fit, and they probably couldn't keep him on
the throne for longer than a minute. And he wasn't
(06:12):
paying attention to anything. He probably couldn't really speak any
of the incantations he was supposed to. It was probably
a pretty messy affair. She's the one in control, and
she was then, at the age of sixteen, perhaps in
control of Egypt until he came of age, which would
have taken other fourteen fifteen, sixteen years extraordinary thing within
(06:32):
that amount of time. She then used her ideological power
as Egypt's highest priestess, the god's wife Bomban, to then
catapult herself into the kingship itself. Now, other women had
had different methods but no one ruled Egypt for as
long as hot with with as much power systematized Um
centralized power as hot Cheps. But other women like Um,
(06:57):
like Nutacras or so Beck no Fruit, they came to
power at the end of a dynasty when their father,
the king, was unable to sire her son for whatever reason,
and there was only a daughter left. Then they would
allow Um a woman to be king and comes to
the throne that way. Another woman there for TV. She
came to the throne after the death of her husband Akanat,
and perhaps there's a lot of arguments surrounding her kingship,
(07:20):
but she came to the throne at the time to
had an extreme ideological crisis, and she's holding on to
the remnants of this tattered religious experiment. And another woman
like Kawasa in the nineteen Dynasty, she's very much like
like Um Sobec no Fru and the Talker's rulling at
the end of a dynasty, trying to hold together the
(07:40):
last remnants of her family line. And then there's Cleopatra, who,
very much like hot Chepsoot knows that to rule for
an extended period of time, she has to rule with
a male by her side, a masculine entity had Chepsoot
always ruled with her nephew by her side. He was
growing up as as she went, along as she took
(08:01):
on the kingship Cleopatra first with her father, then with
a brother, one brother after another succession, and each of
whom she may have had a hand in murdering. And
then she ruled arguably alongside to Roman warlord. She made
sure she always had masculine support while she was inhabiting
her own kingship. So there is no such thing in
(08:22):
the ancient world. This is frustrating to me. It's probably
frustrating to you. There's no such thing in the ancient
world as a pure, unsulliated feminine kingship. It doesn't exist.
Every female king or every female political leader in Egypt,
the woman calls herself a king, not a queen, because
there's no political connotations that work. Every female king in
ancient Egypt had a male counterpart or some sort of
(08:43):
masculine entity by her side, and the same holds true
for the rest of the ancient world. If you look
at Northwest Asia, or you look at the Mediterranean region,
or you look at China, you look at the women
who are able to achieve that that highest pinnacle of power.
Every single one of them that ruled for an extended
creative time had some sort of male counterparts as support well.
One of the fascinating things that jumped out to me
(09:05):
about hat cheps suit being sort of accidentally groomed to
rule is how she not only aligned herself with male
human male counterparts, but also male counterparts in a religious
sense as well, in a divine sense. Could you talk
about how she also helps solidify her rule through aligning
herself with the gods, making herself divine in that way. Yeah,
(09:30):
Cheps grew up in the temple. She was God's wise
of Omninie Egypt, most important high priestess during the reign
of her father, probably as young. Training probably began for
her as young as eight or nine years old, maybe
even younger, which means that that temple space, those cool
stone walls, the incense smell, the chanting of the priests,
(09:51):
the sun slanting in through the clorestory windows, all of that,
it was just into It was just in her bones.
It was something that she knew. She also of sawt
her father to Mos of the first come to power,
not being born for the kingship himself, because the king
before him, um in Hotel the First had died without
(10:11):
a son, without an heir, and they had named at
Mos of the First, a living breathing man not directly
related to the king, to be the next king. And
hot Cheps saw her father because she's standing next to
him as his high priestess right, she sees her father
using religion, using the Oracle of alman Rae, using all
of these tools at his disposal to create a firm
(10:34):
foundation for his kingship to say to his people, yes,
I know that we have a dynastic succession problem, but
that God has chosen me, and let me prove it
to you and show you how hot Cheps that actually
reveals more to us, pulls the veil away from the
religious goings on more than any other king before. So
she tells us about the Oracle of alman Rae and
(10:57):
how it actually marked her for power. The oracle was
this way of taking the God's most sacred precious vessel,
the golden Statue of the God, out of its shrine.
It was placed into a portable shrine, placed onto a
boat shaped thing that was held a loss by priests
holding two long carrying sticks, and like twenty priests would
(11:19):
carry this bark out as a temple with the God's
statue carefully and inside, and people would be allowed to
approach the bark asking questions asked the oracle as it's
leaving the temple, things about what was going to happen
in Egypt's political future, what kinds of problems they had
to worry about on one festival day, the oracle was
(11:40):
brought out in a time period of great crisis. People
were worried about the succession, who was going to be
king next, They were worried about um too, most of
the second being sickly. Perhaps we don't know the details
of what was happening, but we know there was worry
about who was going to be king next and who
was going to take power. And the oracle was brought
(12:01):
out and hot sheeps it, writes the story about it,
and records it in her red chapel, and she tells
us that the priest holding the oracle aloft were rudderless, leaderless.
They didn't know where to move, they didn't know where
to go. Because you have to think these twenty priests,
they use some we don't know if they were drunk
or high or sleep deprived of what was going on,
but they use the their their own um power from
(12:23):
the gods to know where to go. This is this
is the way we have to understand it. And they stop,
and everyone in the outer um parts of the temple
or in the temple courtyard the stunned and afraid because
the oracle wasn't moving, and the oracle seems to not
have a direction. And then all of a sudden, hot
scheps It's text tells us the oracle gets up and
(12:44):
is on the move, and it goes right, and then
it goes less, and it goes here than it goes there,
and then all of a sudden, it points itself directly
at hot Chepsa as a girl, as a priestess, is
the god's wife of Almond in the temple, and the
oracle directs itself to her. She throws herself to the
ound in front of it, raises her arms up in
front of it, and says something akin to oh, my father, Aman, ray,
(13:05):
what would you have me do? And the oracle then
proceeds somehow to communicate her. And we don't know how
this happens, but it proceeds to communicate to her that
Egypt needs her, that ahman Ray, the god needs her,
that she is required to move Egypt through this crisis
of succession, through this crisis vacuum of power and accept
(13:27):
it was always so canny to use a religion that
everyone believed in so fervently to mark herself for powers.
Never claims this power as her own personal right. She's
never outwardly ambitious for it. In um in a bald way.
She always cloaks each of every power graph, every move
she makes up that ladder towards power, towards the kingship
(13:49):
itself with religious ideology, always saying I'm not doing it
for myself. I'm only doing this because the god Aman
Ray needs need to do it. Pretty clever. Yeah, it's
an amazing story, it really is. And this was generally
accepted by the people, right They said, okay, well, if
this is the will of the gods, then this is
how it's going to be. Or what was there any
(14:11):
sort of horror or surprise that this happened. You would
think there would be some sort of surprise at marking
a female, especially a female so young, for so much power,
But it doesn't seem that there was any kind of pushback.
There was shocked. She tells us in an in an
later oracle, there's a later oracle that mark you as king,
and then she appeared as king before her people, and
(14:33):
she says that there's stunned. They're weeping before me. They
can't believe it. But she puts it in the sense
of it's a miracle. But what we never see and
what what I don't think we should expect to see
from the ancient world, is any sort of cynical disbelief
in this oracle. And think of politics and religion today.
So many people used religious ideology to support their political
(14:55):
moves to the right or the left or whatever. This
shouldn't be something that surprises us. The ideology that works
best to get people politically on board as the ideology
that people believe in most so, and so it doesn't
mean that that you can't manipulate and use religion at
the same time that you fervently believe in it. There
(15:17):
doesn't seem to be any understanding that the oracle was
somehow cynically manipulated. Nobody seems to talk about it in
that way. But I'm sure that hut Ships that her
priests knew that she was the one that was going
to be watched for power. I don't think this came
as a surprise to anyone. I think that it had
been planned out carefully and politically in advance beforehand, and
then the ideology was used to pay that path. At
(15:40):
the same time, I think they understood it as a
god's choice as well. It's it's a big difference between
us and them, between the modern world the ancient world
that fervent belief in the gods being all around you,
pulling the strings, ruling everything. But that was that certainly
seems to be the way the ancient people approached their
their world. Well, it seems hut Up put a lot
(16:02):
of thought into the way that she was depicted uh
in in temples and across Egypt and remembered. So in
what ways did she position herself as masculine and as
king rather than just being feminine and queen? And why
did she do this? Yeah, Chessford's story is not only
amazing and that she's the only female king who rules
(16:23):
for such an extensive period of time, successfully leading Egypt
better than she found it, but she's also not a
rule breaker. She's a traditionalist. She doesn't expect a patriarchal
society to fit to her feminine self. She knows she's
an anomaly. She knows she's strange, and so as her Coking.
(16:43):
And we can never forget that she had a Coking
by her side throughout her entire rule as regent and
then as king. As he's getting older, she has to
match him. She takes precedence of place before him. She
has the primary spot and festivals, presumably in the throne
room with the higher eyes. She's there, always in the
primary position. But this kid is getting older. When she's crowned,
(17:05):
he's nine years old. It's easy to have precedence of
place over a nine year old, but a fourteen year
old that's much more difficult. How do you how do
you take precedence of place when you're an older woman
next to a young and vibrant man. How do you
do that? And Hot checks a messages that there's worries
about she tries new things, and we can see that
(17:27):
transition in her stack erin and her release, and she
starts out, there's a there's a statue in the met
that shows her as feminine. But masculine simultaneously. It's an
extraordinary piece made of an injurated kind of marble like limestone,
and she has this beautiful, delicate, heart shaped face, very feminine,
very grassile body with narrow shoulders and slender limbs. It's
(17:51):
the body of a woman, and yet she's shown topless.
She's shown wearing not a shirt but a naked their
chest of a man, but it's clearly a woman's upper body,
and in fact, they even show her with breasts but
no nipples, as you would expect if you were showing
a naked female upper body. So she's there is masculine
(18:11):
and feminine simultaneously, and she's obviously not satisfied with with
this visage, with this image of herself, because she then
moves on to a fully masculinized imagery where her body
no longer has that grass stile form, where she shows
herself with with a buff body, pectoral muscles and biceps
and all of that which she obviously didn't have in
(18:32):
real life. That she feels she needs to show this
in her reliase and in her statutory to match the
king that's growing up next to her. So she's she's
got to experiment. She knows that she has to change
her body and the way she depicts herself to match
this coking and to sit patriarchal kingship models in in
their purest form, because the Egyptians believe that that monarch
(18:55):
needed to be masculine, that that masculine rebirth was was
a necessary part of the king's power. So she, it's
some way religiously magically, needs to inhabit that masculine self,
even with her feminine her feminine body. And now back
to the show, so hatchets that was an exceptional rule.
(19:19):
I mean, you mentioned that she left Egypt better than
she started with it, and she amasked all these incredible accomplishments.
But it seems like all we learned about as students
in the classroom are King tut and we know who
Cleopatra is, and yet not her. Why is that? Why?
Why has her history sort of sort of been erased
(19:40):
in a way from our popular understanding of Egyptian history.
I've had to think about this a lot. This is
this is really the crux of her story for me,
because as I'm trying to resurrect her, trying to get
people to pronounce her name, correctly, and people like we
hat chew, what how does it work? It's extraordinary to
me that this woman who did it all, who was
(20:01):
the most and I'd like to use this word badass
woman of the ancient world, who ruled for the longest,
ruled the most successfully, is the one that we've forgotten.
And and here here's where we're going to go with this.
So let's say we go out to a bus stop
and we and we just talked to the every man
or every woman and say, hey, have you ever heard
of somebody named Jezebel? And here you will say, oh, yeah,
(20:22):
I've heard of Jezebel. Good or bad, very bad, very bad.
And you may not know the whole story that that.
You know, she was a Phoenician princess married off to
a king in the levant and was um upset a
bunch of yaway priests for worshiping many gods and was
thrown out of a window and eating my dogs. You
may not know all of that, um, but you know
she's bad. She did something wrong. You may say, well, okay,
how about Cleopatra. Person at the bus stops? You know Cleopatra? Indeed,
(20:46):
I do good story or bad story is very bad,
interested in glamour interested parties, and ended up killing yourselves.
And these things are known in popular culture by normal people,
but had chepstood. People have no idea who this woman is.
They can't even pronounce her name, They have no understanding
of what she did. And I think human culture in
general loves to tell stories, replicate stories, retell stories about
(21:10):
female failure, about women who did it all wrong, as
cautionary tales, as ways to know what happens when when
crisis and female leaders to coincide the crisis. That that
when females rule, they bring on crisis. I'm here to
tell you the historian that females generally are only allowed
into leadership when there's crisis. That's the way they get
into power in the first place. So Chips that, as
(21:34):
as I always say, left easier better than she found it,
did everything right, and that was her ultimate undoing. And
that's the irony of the whole thing. She she created
a perfect package for the king's after her to take
credit for what she herself had done. She did it
all so traditionally, even depicting herself as a masculine entity,
(21:56):
that in many cases all they had to do was
erase her name and put in a different name and
take credit for all of her vast achievements and buildings
and and just all that she did. She did it
too perfectly in a way. It was that much more abstracted,
that much more um uh normal, so that a male
king could just say, yeah, I did this, erase her
(22:18):
name very shortly after her reign was over, put all
of the other names in their place in her place,
and un thus we've forgotten her. So the women who
were the most successful are those that we don't tell
stories about, and the women that were the biggest failures
Shakespeare writes plays about them. M it's a really interesting
(22:38):
that's a really interesting division to draw and troubling one
at the same time, though, Yeah, indeed, you know it's
it's funny. I was. I did my first, one of
my very first discussions about hot chefs to a group
of female CEOs and power brokers in Los Angeles. Small group.
It was. It was a lunchtime lecture and I'm just
informally talking through this And it was in that room,
(23:01):
in that moment, with all of these female power brokers,
that I understood that success was something that indeed could
threaten a woman with a l awesome I guess thee
with somebody else trying to take the credit for it.
That that happens more often than than we would expect
or like to think of in a patriarchal society. And
that right there, I think is the crux of potchups
(23:22):
with the story. Um well, that leads to another question though,
between kind of the parallels between Chips set the women
around her and women in powerful positions today, because as
you're telling this story, it's ringing similar bells in my
mind of things that we have similar patterns of women
in power, whether that's political power or even power in career.
(23:46):
In career context as well. Yeah, I teach a class
that you see like called women in Power in the
Ancient World. In the first two weeks we go through
a discussion of how much power women have today. I
always try to keep ancient history as topical and useful
and applicable to the modern world as possible. Because humans
are humans, we have the same general systems, uh, same
(24:07):
patriarchal system for certain So how can we use these
women from the ancient world as role models, as cautionary tales,
as whatever? How can they help us out today. And
you know, it's it's an interesting thing when you when
you look at patriarchal society as a whole, it does
systematically bar women from power. And I start my own
(24:28):
talk about how chef said I put I put hot
chops it in in context. I start my own lecture with
four slides where I show how today women have so
little political power. There are very few leaders of state,
prime ministers or presidents around the world who are female.
Why are we so hostile to that? Why are we
so ambivalence to that power. There's even fewer female CEOs
(24:50):
and leaders of fortune companies who are women. In the
United States, it's four percent candidates, just over six percent
female CEOs. It's nothing. When we allow the free market
and the human organisms that pick who they want to
have leadership over money, we do not choose women. It's extraordinary. Um.
The military is improving because you have a very top
down hierarchical um system in the United States, so you
(25:12):
do see female officers except for the Marines, but in
the Air Force, the Army, and the Navy at and rising.
So that's improving ideological power and females there's just none.
Judeo Christian Islamic traditions do not suffer females and leadership positions,
So all of this is applicable, all of this is useful,
and in my class women in Power in the ancient world,
(25:35):
we look at cognitive differences between males and females. Brain differences, um,
how how a female thinks or forgives versus a man,
how a well a female might think of her survival
versus a man. All of these things I think are
important to bring out into the open and understand so
that they can be transcended. For example, did you know
that women hold grudges longer than men do, so somebody
(25:58):
cuts you off or betrays you politically, that a woman
is more likely to hold the grudge and cut that
person off than a man. And that if we learn
as females not to burn our bridges to get over
those those impasses, we would be better political leaders. But
we have other we have strengths as well. For example,
micro loan lenders don't like to give micro loans to men.
(26:21):
They like to give them to women because the woman
will buy the cow, make the cheese, make the business,
and take care of her family. Too many micro loans
that go to men are brought into a bar and
exchange for political capital for drinks at the bar. And
you know that, and men often think that way because
our brains work in different ways. I like to look
at the biological sources of it all. I like to
(26:42):
think about how a female hunter gathering, you know, the
human origins or sources for how we might think and feel.
Her survival depended on her connection with her sister, with
her mother, with her close family. A man's hunter gather
survival depends on finding game far away, making connections with
other troops far away, warfare with troops far away. These
(27:04):
are things that he depends on. So he is automatically
going to be more politically inclined genetically perhaps the cognitively
than a female who is going to be genetically cognitively
more interested in looking towards her inner circle. All of
those things translate into how we perceive political power. So
(27:24):
when and I put a slide up in my lecture
where I put up an image of Maggie Factor, Hillary Clinton, Condoleeza, Rice,
Angela Merkel, all of these women inaction at a podium talking,
and I put up a male slide next to it,
and the females look angry and the males leaderly and strong,
and we have these visceral reactions, these emotional reactions, misperceptions
(27:47):
even or just perceptions of what power is for males
or female without even thinking about it. And a lot
of the time we think females can't have power. They're
too hormonal, they're too they're too mercurial, they won't be
able to have a consistent leadership style. We need the men.
We we can't trust this, we're hostile towards it, or
(28:07):
ambivalent to, or more intellectually inclined or or open about
female power. But for me, just like a baby might
be if it's a white baby more inclined and attracted
to white faces, or a black baby might be more
interested in cognitively looking at black faces like itself. That
doesn't mean that can't be transcended later in life. So
(28:28):
by the same token of female might actually be misperceived
as being self interested, as being um selfish, or be
seen as angry or hormonal. But if we're open about
how we feel about female leadership, then these things can
be transcended. So I like to look at the biological
(28:49):
roots of it at the sources of our distrust and
female power, and it's a very source of it all
is the fact that women can have babies and men cannot.
And I always go back to the story of Marissa
Meyer CEO of JA who and everyone was was freaking
out that she had that baby. How can she possibly
be CEO of YAH who would have a baby simultaneously,
your feminist planets on TV saying, of course she can
(29:09):
have a baby and b CEO of Yah who simultaneously.
When that story came out, I was at home on
leave breastfeeding my child and I have five months off,
and I remember holding my kid, looking at the TV
and saying, there's no way she can do is you
can't do it? Because I had little support and help
in that moment. I was going through postpartum depression and anxiety,
and these are the things that women have to deal with.
(29:30):
We need help to transcend our own bodies to maintain power.
I needed u c l A, my university, to give
me time off to go a little bit crazy, go hormonal,
come back to the real world. Put my kid too
into bay care system so I could be that that
powerful female. If we don't have governmental systems societal help.
(29:52):
We cannot transcend our bodies, have children and have it all.
These things are all very interesting to me. I don't
like to deny the biological and say, of work, you
can do it all. I like to bring all of
that in and say, okay, now what are we going
to do next. It was a long issue for that
gave me some sort of an insight into how I
think about all of this absolutely well, and it reminded
(30:12):
me of one thing that jumped out to me at
the end of the book and the acknowledgments. You're talking
about that period of time when you just had your
son and the book comes along and you're dealing with
writing a book while grappling with this new thing that
is childcare in your life. But you you right. I
could not have understood hat shepst before motherhood happened. And
(30:36):
I was just wondering if you could, especially because the
podcast is called Stuff Mom Never Told You. Um, I
was just wondering if you could sort of explained that
in a little bit A little bit. I mean, I
know that you already did someone in the previous answer,
but um, that was something that really jumped out to me.
I have never felt more isolated and more confused and
in a darker place than than when I had my son.
(30:59):
Through that post part of a year, it was a
very tough year, and I actually through a car accident
and had to be your head trauma and almost died.
And that year was worse arguably than than that that
year post head traumer. It was tough because everything that
you thought as a that I thought as a woman,
that I could have was made intensely vulnerable in a
(31:22):
way that that I'd never experienced before that that child.
Having that child stripped me bear in a way that
that i've I still am grappling with and thinking about,
because you're never more vulnerable and you're never more of
a slave to your own body. And I think that
(31:44):
in Western culture, not only do we like to deny
death and pretend that it will never happen, you know,
we like to live forever on plastic surgery. And people
die in hospitals outside of our site. They don't die
in front of our own eyes. In the same way,
you know, women today, especially women who want power and
want careers, put off having a child. I put off
having a child until I was thirty eight years old.
(32:05):
And you think, yeah, I'm not going to be a
slice of this. I'm gonna do it right. I'm gonna
be fine. You know, when I had my kid, I
was the first natural breach birth at US Aliens sixteen
years and fifty people watch my birth. It was a
rock star birth. It was and you know, you have
that that joyous, exuberant moment, you know, a badass kind
of moment you think you could do anything. And then
(32:25):
the long, slow water torture of sleep deprivation and breast
feeding which was very hard for me, um and postpartum
hormonal problems which was very hard for me, hits, and
then it's a different thing. It's something that you can't
really surmount. And for the ancient people that was unavoidable.
(32:46):
They couldn't put off child bearing. They this was what
every royal woman was expected to do. She was expected
to be a wound, to be a baby producer. That
was her job first and foremost. And yes, we're a
woman could give the child off to a wet nurse.
You know, in many ways, they had their daycare and
everything figured out as well. She was a working woman
(33:07):
hip as well, and she had support. She probably had
a lot more support than I did giving birth in
that in that year after the baby, But to understand
the obstacles to female power, I think I had to
go through that, that childbirth experience and understand that the body,
the female body, is really the ground zero, the biggest
(33:31):
obstacle for why female powers are attainable. And if we
don't have social support systems in place, you'll you'll never
be able to get it. I've got to tell you,
your answers make me want to like run up down
the street high fiving people. I loved your responses and
(33:51):
and it touches on so many different things that we
use recurring themes in the podcast. Recurring themes that we
hear especially are our women listeners, especially mothers who have
careers and are balancing all this stuff as well. So,
I mean, yeah, it's it's you know, we did a
whole series on lean in and women in the workplace
(34:12):
and all of that stuff, and so, I mean, it
is kind of fascinating to hear those same ideas applied
to ancient women who really, I mean, the more things change,
the more they stay the same. It soundssolutely people are
people are people. The biggest difference though, is life expectancy.
So we get to live till we're eighty or ninety.
They got to live till they were forty. Big different
(34:33):
and they had to bury so many children. We have
no notion of this. It's a baby died. Now. It's
a weird and strange thing that people are ashamed of,
they can't talk about. In the ancient world, we would
have buried half of our children under our mud group floor,
and little cot would have been a normal thing. Yeah. Right,
That's that's some severe trauma. That's something that we can't
even we can't even fathom. Right, Well, I mean I
(34:55):
got the impression because of issues like that, that people
in Egypt and in the world in general, faith that
they did have to pack in so much stuff into
their brief lives. And you know, hatch ups, that was
certainly no was certainly no different. I mean, if anything,
she packed thirty times more into her life. And so
(35:16):
that kind of leads me to our next question, which
is her legacy and what you consider her legacy to
be sort of in general in Egypt and in our history,
but also in terms of the perception of women rulers.
What affected her legacy have Yeah, and chips is that
extraordinary woman who who did it all right and got forgotten.
(35:37):
That's the point that that intrigues me the most, upsets
me the most, that I that I kind of mess
with a lot because I don't think it's it's that
unusual today. It's the woman who knows she can't change
the patriarchy. I don't try to try to fit it.
And that's you know, that's the way she has to
(35:58):
work it. If a woman wants it all today to
have the baby, to have the job, she can't change
her body and she can't change the economy of her womb.
She can't change the fact that it takes that long
to jest dates breastfeed, those things are unavoidable. And you know,
arguably women have to spend more time with their children
(36:20):
with the upbringing, with the breastfeeding than they did. And
when I when my mother was was bringing up her
kids when bottle feeding was normal, I mean in some
ways that it made things easier in some ways not um,
there are great expectations on on women having children with
careers to do the motherhood all in completely and totally
with you know, two years of breastfeeding, which I did,
(36:41):
and you know, baby carrying and which I did, and
family bed which I did, and all all of those
things so intense, so intensely, and still do the career
and the and the powerful side so intently and not
lose any of it. On either side. It's impossible, it's
impossi able to do. Something will be lost. And and
(37:03):
yet we as women gain something as as we go
through and we and we learned, we think differently, we
rule differently, we um, we we behave differently when we
have power. And now that we're finally allowed to have power,
people see females I think as more of an asset
um as, and they're less um misperceived, and there's less
(37:27):
hostility towards female power. I think Hillary is going to
have quite a run um in the next couple of years,
and and we'll see, I think in the next eight years.
The discussion of misogyny in the way that the Barack
Obama administration has been a discussion of racism and how
people perceive or misperceive the agenda of a certain person
(37:49):
because of their the color of their skin, and how
they grew up, their gender um These things are being
discussed and talked about very much like gay marriage and
what it means to be gay, and what it means
to have that identity. All of these things are being
openly discussed and talked about and very much transcended. Um,
so hot chepstood. I mean, she just she she helps
us do that because of her success and because of
(38:11):
her power. And if I can help to resurrect her
and get people to be able to pronounce her name,
then that then I can, you know, I can somehow
understand what it means to try to have it all
because that's what we want, and that's what she did,
and and she got raised for it. You know, her
name and names were raised, her images were erased. Um.
(38:33):
How often does that happen today? I think we need
to keep our eyes open. If Hillary does become president,
will what will be her legacy? D How will that work?
What's the legacy of Maggie Thatcher? What's the legacy of
of an Angela Merkel? How does how does that work? Um?
I think legacy is super important because if you look
at women in the ancient world, they never have a
(38:55):
genetic legacy. They never do. They don't get to become
king on their on their own right, get a boyfriend
or a lover and have a child that's going to
follow them onto the throne. It always ends up with
some other families, some other dynasty, some other man taking
over after them. They're just placeholders. They just stop gaps
are just convenient things to have in the moment. How
(39:16):
can we women create a legacy didn't happen in the
ancient world? How can we transcend it into it now?
It's an interesting question and a perfect question, I think
to leave this conversation at These are all the questions
that we had for you. Is there anything though about
at Cheps that women in power your work, um, that
(39:37):
you'd like to tell us about that we didn't ask you? Um?
What what's next on your plate? Yeah? I think you
guys say everything that was great, UM, So I don't.
I don't think I need to add anything like that.
And what's next for me? Um? I am going to
move on to a book about political ideologies, how people
link religion and and power, and and I'm going to
(40:01):
write a book about Akanat in a biography about Akanaton
as the first religious fanatic in the world. And I
think religious extremism is certainly something that we talk to
talk about every day, all the time on the news,
and I'm going to do what I do with hot
chests that go jump dive back into the past and
try to see when it happened first time, how it happened,
(40:22):
why it happened, and see if I can make that
ancient story as applicable as possible to what we're dealing
with today. We'll definitely be looking forward to that and
might have to ask you to come back on the
podcast when that No, no, probably you have to wait
a couple of years. It'll take me a while, but
I'm on it. I'm on it. We'll just pencil listen
(40:42):
for a couple of years from now. Also, if you
want to tell our listeners where they can learn more
both about you and your book, that would be great. Yeah. Sure.
So I'm out there in the world digitally. I try
to keep a good present for my Facebook pages among
fifty followers and it's Karaconi each typtologists starts the k
K R A C O N E Y. And I've
(41:04):
got a new web page up with all my articles
posted and uh academic work. I actually my academic work
is um I'm a coffin specialist with a little strain
but essentially I look at at social competition and how
people compete with one another using funerary arts kind of
like um, like we use weddings, you know, where if
(41:27):
you see the bride walking down the aisle and address,
you know pretty much what socionomic class she belongs to,
maybe with her ethnicity is what she's trying to prove.
I do the same thing with Coffin. So a lot
of that work is is on my website. And yeah,
my my book, The Woman Who Would Be King Is
is available in bookstores everywhere. And uh, thank you guys
so much for having me on the show. Well, thanks
(41:49):
for taking the time to talk to us. This has
been really really fascinating, awesome, so huge thanks to Dr
Kearney for taking the time to talk to us about
hat ships, set and women in power. I know that
Caroline and I walked away from that conversation still talking
(42:10):
about so much of what Cooney had to say and
how hatch ups that story applies to women in power
and even just women like us who are dealing with
day to day careers as well. So I don't know
about you, Caroline, but that was a really inspiring interview
for for us to do. Yeah. Absolutely, I thought she
(42:32):
hit on so many incredible points, not only about this
amazing figure in history, but also just about womanhood and
what her own path has been like. Yeah. So to
learn more about Dr Cooney and to check out her book,
The Woman Who Would Be King, you can head over
to Kara Cooney. That's see oo n e y dot com.
(42:54):
And now I want to hear from you. What are
your thoughts on hatch ups, set women in power? What
we can learned today from ancient women. Moms Stuff at
how stuff works dot com is our email address. If
you want to tweet us, you can do that at
mom Stuff podcast or messages on Facebook. And we've got
(43:14):
a couple of messages to share with you when we
come right back from a quick break and now back
to the show. Well, I gotta let her hear from
Danielle about our Women in the Construction Industry podcast. She writes,
I was excited to see the title of the podcast
(43:34):
because I have more than a few stories on the subject.
First of all, my mom was the first female to
work at a construction site in Ontario. She was definitely
hazed and couldn't use the outhouse for fear that the
men on her crew would pick it up with a
forklift while she was in it, which apparently happened regularly.
She did say that after some time, the men she
worked with became close like big brothers and looked out
(43:56):
for her. As for myself, I've worked in the our
or a culture and forestry industries for the past seven
years or so. I found school to be an amazing
experience and never felt different from the men. I felt
that my teachers encouraged me and motivated me to work
just as hard as the boys, and they never singled
me out based on my gender. Once I started working
in the field, however, I encountered men who seemed to
(44:18):
loathe me just for being female, and others who are
completely in awe that I would do a physical job.
I'm more skilled than some of the men I've worked
with when it comes to handling a chainsaw, and I
believe that having to teach myself the technique has helped.
I agree with your points that women don't get the
mentorship that men do, and so we have to learn
the hard way. I've heard some of the most ridiculous
(44:39):
and disgusting things from coworkers, and have also worked with
some that seemed to think I was invisible. I've also
noticed that if I shortened my name Danielle to Danny
on resumes, I get way more interviews and callbacks, which
I assume is because the company believes I'm male. Thankfully,
most of my job positions have put me on small crews,
(44:59):
so eventually the men and I become close and in
some cases good friends. I always joke with my female
friends that when I start to work with new people,
I'm only seen as a woman for two weeks, and
then I become a man. At that point, no one
helped me carry anything or does any favors. They get
that I'm working just as hard as them, and sometimes,
because of my small size, even harder. I think that
(45:21):
even at the higher corporate level I find myself now,
women don't get the same pay, respect, or job opportunities
as mem However, I'm optimistic that this next generation of
female workers, like the six year old mentioned in your
podcast my niece, will continue to break down the gender
barriers in the male dominated jobs. So thanks Danielle, and
(45:42):
I have a letter here from Mary. She says, first off,
thank you, thank you, thank you. That podcast you all
did over women in construction was fantastic. It was ruthless,
brutally truthful, and enlightening. I'm emailing you because I'm a
current senior pursuing a degree in construction management. I was
previously an engineering made yere, but I changed because construction
is the perfect blend of hands on organization and creativity. Essentially,
(46:06):
I see it as architecture slash engineering slash contractor combined
into one. I haven't had any firsthand experience on a
job site yet, but I will say I am one
of two girls in the entire program at my school.
All the rest are gents. It was the same in
my engineering classes, and it was the same in my
technical classes in high school. Hardly any girls. And to
(46:27):
be honest, I've never known why there is more opportunity
in this field than practically any other. Companies are fighting
to hire women because there is such a low percentage
of us applying. When I graduate, I can be an estimator,
b I am specialist, scheduler, safety coordinator, project engineer, project manager.
The list goes on and on. Have I experienced prejudice?
(46:47):
It depends on how you see it or take it.
If someone says something inappropriate I often fire something witty
right back. Women have to be ready to face these
kinds of situations. It's important not to take it super personally.
Harassment rarely. How in school, my classmates respect me and
they learned to because I work my butt off and
I complete really quality work. As a woman, I'm more
(47:08):
motivated to do my best to represent the gender and
gain a higher level of respect. It's sad, but the
reality is some of the guys just don't know how
to react with a strong, tomboy woman who likes to
play in the dirt, drive nails with a hammer, and
wants to kick butt in this industry. From what I've seen,
the guys who do understand all of this are the
ones in management and supervisory positions. The construction management field
seems to be way less brutal than the trades field.
(47:30):
From a woman's standpoint, I'm thankful for women like Nicole
Curtis on HDTVs. Rehab Addict, who are true trailblazers. She's
making the field more open to women, and I hope
to do the same someday. Dude, I love Nicole Curtis
and Rehab Addict. My boyfriend sit around the house and
watch it all the time. So if she I agree,
she is a good figure. And I'm glad you're getting
(47:51):
out there and do what you love to do. Thanks
for writing in, and thanks to everybody who's written into us.
We've gotten so many letters, in particular about women in instruction,
so keep all of them coming. Mom. Stuff at House
at works dot com is our email address and for
links to all of our social media as well as
all of our videos and blogs, including Seven Queens Who
(48:13):
Fought to Rule. If you're really into learning more about
powerful women of your head, on over to stuff Mom
Never Told You dot com for moral this, and thousands
of other topics. Doesn't how Stuff Works dot com
Welcome to Stuff Mom Never Told You From how Supports
dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Caroline
and I'm Kristin. And today on the podcast we have
a really special guest. Kristen and I are talking to egyptologist,
professor and pretty much all around amazing person, Kara Cooney.
(00:27):
Cooney is the author of The Woman Who Would Be
King hat cheps that's Rise to Power, all about this
amazing figure in history, hat cheps A, who was the
sixth pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty. And you know, honestly,
we don't know a lot about her inner life, her
personal life, but we do know quite a bit now
about how she ruled, and she definitely was an interesting
(00:50):
and different figure for history, unique if only in the
fact that she was a female pharaoh or a woman king,
which seems like an oxymoron almost um. And what we're
gonna talk to Cooney about is just how she was
such a powerful and effective ruler who really maintained her
(01:10):
empire's position in the world. And we're going to find
out more about how she came to that power and
also how her gender played such a strong role, not
only in the path that she had to take to
grasp that power, but also in her legacy being diminished
(01:31):
in a lot of ways. And the reason that we
don't know more about sort of the inner workings of
how she came to power beyond the actual steps that
you have to take to become king, has to do
a lot with the fact that those darn Egyptians did
not record anything other than their super official histories and
facts about their rulers. They were writing down who was
(01:53):
sleeping with whom or how hat cheps that clawed her
way to power. And so there's been a lot of
conjecture over the is about how this woman came to
be a leader. Um, But so one important person that
we can turn to to answer some of those questions
is Kara Cooney. And so, without further ado, let's let
the interview role. First of all, Dr Cooney, could you
(02:17):
introduce yourself to our listeners and tell us a little
bit about why you wanted to write a book on
hot cheps. It sure thing. My name's Kara Cooney, and
I teach at U c l A. I am a
professor at U c l A. And I didn't want
to write a book on hot cheps. And I was
actually approached by my lead age and who said you
should write a book about hot chefs it. And I
just thought, why does this woman keep haunting me? What
(02:38):
is going on? Why did I done this TV show
for Discovery about hot chefs that a couple of years before,
which I assumed he had seen. Otherwise he wouldn't have
asked me to to then write the book. And academics
like to stay in their own little niches, their own
little little boxes. And he said, I said, I can't
write a book about hot cheps it, And he's like,
why not? And I said, because I do the nineteenth
and twentieth dynasty and hot chefs it is the age
(03:00):
sheet and so but more I thought about how silly
that was, and how we we stick too much to
our our expected work and our expected research. And the
more I thought about female power and how interesting um
it is that this woman was able to surmount so
many obstacles and able to climb to the very highest
(03:20):
pinnacle of political authority. I thought, Okay, yeah, I'd like
to write this book, and I'd like to do it
differently than than anyone else has done it before. Well,
could you talk a little bit about the Egyptian attitude
toward women rulers in general, and how powerful women could become,
and also sort of the available avenues to power for
(03:42):
women at the time. Ancient Egypt is an unusual place.
It's it's unique in the world in many ways. Um
it's a it's a giant oasis, if you like, and
it's protected on all four sides geographically Mediterranean Sea to
the north, deserts on the other three sides, cataracts down
to the south. I mean, it's just it's a place
that can develop in a microcosm the zone for thousands
(04:04):
of years, and it encourages a culture that enjoys status
quo and continuity and doesn't like to have a lot
of upheaval and coups. And in Asians, they don't have
to deal with a lot of that because who have
a culture that enjoys continuity. They created a political system
that divinized kingship beyond anything that that had ever been
(04:24):
seen and arguably anywhere in the world. It's it's a
more divinized kingship than than perhaps any other system anywhere
in the world. And when you have a culture that
is very interested in king following king following king in
the same family at nauseam forever divinized. If there's a
problem with the succession, if the king is too young,
if there is an issue, then because you have a
(04:47):
culture that's risk averse and interested in continuity, they'll allow
a woman to come to the throne, to serve as
regent for a young king, or in some cases to
even as acts as king in her own right. And
more women were allowed to rule, come to the center
of the wheel, if you like, in Egypt than than
in any other place, any other place in the world.
And so you can talk about women like hot Cheps.
(05:09):
So you can also talk about tawas Ratnutokras to some extent.
You can talk about a woman named so the Cotep,
you can talk about Cleopatra ne for TV. There are
many female names known from Egypt, and that is an anomaly,
that is that is unusual and different from the rest
of the world. We would love to hear some more details,
especially about the avenues through which these women could attain power.
(05:29):
I know, for instance, in hot Cheps, it's case that
there was a lot to do with religious avenues and
being queen regent. So yeah, could you talk a little
bit more about those avenues. Well, it's it's an interesting
thing that the avenues to power are generally connected to
the king. So a woman acts in support of the
(05:51):
king first and then can catapult herself into power in
her own right and hot chefs. It's case. She was
agent for a very very young king. And when I
say young, I mean one and a half years old,
two years old. You know, when they crowned him, he
was probably chewing on his crook and flail and a
crown wouldn't fit, and they probably couldn't keep him on
the throne for longer than a minute. And he wasn't
(06:12):
paying attention to anything. He probably couldn't really speak any
of the incantations he was supposed to. It was probably
a pretty messy affair. She's the one in control, and
she was then, at the age of sixteen, perhaps in
control of Egypt until he came of age, which would
have taken other fourteen fifteen, sixteen years extraordinary thing within
(06:32):
that amount of time. She then used her ideological power
as Egypt's highest priestess, the god's wife Bomban, to then
catapult herself into the kingship itself. Now, other women had
had different methods but no one ruled Egypt for as
long as hot with with as much power systematized Um
centralized power as hot Cheps. But other women like Um,
(06:57):
like Nutacras or so Beck no Fruit, they came to
power at the end of a dynasty when their father,
the king, was unable to sire her son for whatever reason,
and there was only a daughter left. Then they would
allow Um a woman to be king and comes to
the throne that way. Another woman there for TV. She
came to the throne after the death of her husband Akanat,
and perhaps there's a lot of arguments surrounding her kingship,
(07:20):
but she came to the throne at the time to
had an extreme ideological crisis, and she's holding on to
the remnants of this tattered religious experiment. And another woman
like Kawasa in the nineteen Dynasty, she's very much like
like Um Sobec no Fru and the Talker's rulling at
the end of a dynasty, trying to hold together the
(07:40):
last remnants of her family line. And then there's Cleopatra, who,
very much like hot Chepsoot knows that to rule for
an extended period of time, she has to rule with
a male by her side, a masculine entity had Chepsoot
always ruled with her nephew by her side. He was
growing up as as she went, along as she took
(08:01):
on the kingship Cleopatra first with her father, then with
a brother, one brother after another succession, and each of
whom she may have had a hand in murdering. And
then she ruled arguably alongside to Roman warlord. She made
sure she always had masculine support while she was inhabiting
her own kingship. So there is no such thing in
(08:22):
the ancient world. This is frustrating to me. It's probably
frustrating to you. There's no such thing in the ancient
world as a pure, unsulliated feminine kingship. It doesn't exist.
Every female king or every female political leader in Egypt,
the woman calls herself a king, not a queen, because
there's no political connotations that work. Every female king in
ancient Egypt had a male counterpart or some sort of
(08:43):
masculine entity by her side, and the same holds true
for the rest of the ancient world. If you look
at Northwest Asia, or you look at the Mediterranean region,
or you look at China, you look at the women
who are able to achieve that that highest pinnacle of power.
Every single one of them that ruled for an extended
creative time had some sort of male counterparts as support well.
One of the fascinating things that jumped out to me
(09:05):
about hat cheps suit being sort of accidentally groomed to
rule is how she not only aligned herself with male
human male counterparts, but also male counterparts in a religious
sense as well, in a divine sense. Could you talk
about how she also helps solidify her rule through aligning
herself with the gods, making herself divine in that way. Yeah,
(09:30):
Cheps grew up in the temple. She was God's wise
of Omninie Egypt, most important high priestess during the reign
of her father, probably as young. Training probably began for
her as young as eight or nine years old, maybe
even younger, which means that that temple space, those cool
stone walls, the incense smell, the chanting of the priests,
(09:51):
the sun slanting in through the clorestory windows, all of that,
it was just into It was just in her bones.
It was something that she knew. She also of sawt
her father to Mos of the first come to power,
not being born for the kingship himself, because the king
before him, um in Hotel the First had died without
(10:11):
a son, without an heir, and they had named at
Mos of the First, a living breathing man not directly
related to the king, to be the next king. And
hot Cheps saw her father because she's standing next to
him as his high priestess right, she sees her father
using religion, using the Oracle of alman Rae, using all
of these tools at his disposal to create a firm
(10:34):
foundation for his kingship to say to his people, yes,
I know that we have a dynastic succession problem, but
that God has chosen me, and let me prove it
to you and show you how hot Cheps that actually
reveals more to us, pulls the veil away from the
religious goings on more than any other king before. So
she tells us about the Oracle of alman Rae and
(10:57):
how it actually marked her for power. The oracle was
this way of taking the God's most sacred precious vessel,
the golden Statue of the God, out of its shrine.
It was placed into a portable shrine, placed onto a
boat shaped thing that was held a loss by priests
holding two long carrying sticks, and like twenty priests would
(11:19):
carry this bark out as a temple with the God's
statue carefully and inside, and people would be allowed to
approach the bark asking questions asked the oracle as it's
leaving the temple, things about what was going to happen
in Egypt's political future, what kinds of problems they had
to worry about on one festival day, the oracle was
(11:40):
brought out in a time period of great crisis. People
were worried about the succession, who was going to be
king next, They were worried about um too, most of
the second being sickly. Perhaps we don't know the details
of what was happening, but we know there was worry
about who was going to be king next and who
was going to take power. And the oracle was brought
(12:01):
out and hot sheeps it, writes the story about it,
and records it in her red chapel, and she tells
us that the priest holding the oracle aloft were rudderless, leaderless.
They didn't know where to move, they didn't know where
to go. Because you have to think these twenty priests,
they use some we don't know if they were drunk
or high or sleep deprived of what was going on,
but they use the their their own um power from
(12:23):
the gods to know where to go. This is this
is the way we have to understand it. And they stop,
and everyone in the outer um parts of the temple
or in the temple courtyard the stunned and afraid because
the oracle wasn't moving, and the oracle seems to not
have a direction. And then all of a sudden, hot
scheps It's text tells us the oracle gets up and
(12:44):
is on the move, and it goes right, and then
it goes less, and it goes here than it goes there,
and then all of a sudden, it points itself directly
at hot Chepsa as a girl, as a priestess, is
the god's wife of Almond in the temple, and the
oracle directs itself to her. She throws herself to the
ound in front of it, raises her arms up in
front of it, and says something akin to oh, my father, Aman, ray,
(13:05):
what would you have me do? And the oracle then
proceeds somehow to communicate her. And we don't know how
this happens, but it proceeds to communicate to her that
Egypt needs her, that ahman Ray, the god needs her,
that she is required to move Egypt through this crisis
of succession, through this crisis vacuum of power and accept
(13:27):
it was always so canny to use a religion that
everyone believed in so fervently to mark herself for powers.
Never claims this power as her own personal right. She's
never outwardly ambitious for it. In um in a bald way.
She always cloaks each of every power graph, every move
she makes up that ladder towards power, towards the kingship
(13:49):
itself with religious ideology, always saying I'm not doing it
for myself. I'm only doing this because the god Aman
Ray needs need to do it. Pretty clever. Yeah, it's
an amazing story, it really is. And this was generally
accepted by the people, right They said, okay, well, if
this is the will of the gods, then this is
how it's going to be. Or what was there any
(14:11):
sort of horror or surprise that this happened. You would
think there would be some sort of surprise at marking
a female, especially a female so young, for so much power,
But it doesn't seem that there was any kind of pushback.
There was shocked. She tells us in an in an
later oracle, there's a later oracle that mark you as king,
and then she appeared as king before her people, and
(14:33):
she says that there's stunned. They're weeping before me. They
can't believe it. But she puts it in the sense
of it's a miracle. But what we never see and
what what I don't think we should expect to see
from the ancient world, is any sort of cynical disbelief
in this oracle. And think of politics and religion today.
So many people used religious ideology to support their political
(14:55):
moves to the right or the left or whatever. This
shouldn't be something that surprises us. The ideology that works
best to get people politically on board as the ideology
that people believe in most so, and so it doesn't
mean that that you can't manipulate and use religion at
the same time that you fervently believe in it. There
(15:17):
doesn't seem to be any understanding that the oracle was
somehow cynically manipulated. Nobody seems to talk about it in
that way. But I'm sure that hut Ships that her
priests knew that she was the one that was going
to be watched for power. I don't think this came
as a surprise to anyone. I think that it had
been planned out carefully and politically in advance beforehand, and
then the ideology was used to pay that path. At
(15:40):
the same time, I think they understood it as a
god's choice as well. It's it's a big difference between
us and them, between the modern world the ancient world
that fervent belief in the gods being all around you,
pulling the strings, ruling everything. But that was that certainly
seems to be the way the ancient people approached their
their world. Well, it seems hut Up put a lot
(16:02):
of thought into the way that she was depicted uh
in in temples and across Egypt and remembered. So in
what ways did she position herself as masculine and as
king rather than just being feminine and queen? And why
did she do this? Yeah, Chessford's story is not only
amazing and that she's the only female king who rules
(16:23):
for such an extensive period of time, successfully leading Egypt
better than she found it, but she's also not a
rule breaker. She's a traditionalist. She doesn't expect a patriarchal
society to fit to her feminine self. She knows she's
an anomaly. She knows she's strange, and so as her Coking.
(16:43):
And we can never forget that she had a Coking
by her side throughout her entire rule as regent and
then as king. As he's getting older, she has to
match him. She takes precedence of place before him. She
has the primary spot and festivals, presumably in the throne
room with the higher eyes. She's there, always in the
primary position. But this kid is getting older. When she's crowned,
(17:05):
he's nine years old. It's easy to have precedence of
place over a nine year old, but a fourteen year
old that's much more difficult. How do you how do
you take precedence of place when you're an older woman
next to a young and vibrant man. How do you
do that? And Hot checks a messages that there's worries
about she tries new things, and we can see that
(17:27):
transition in her stack erin and her release, and she
starts out, there's a there's a statue in the met
that shows her as feminine. But masculine simultaneously. It's an
extraordinary piece made of an injurated kind of marble like limestone,
and she has this beautiful, delicate, heart shaped face, very feminine,
very grassile body with narrow shoulders and slender limbs. It's
(17:51):
the body of a woman, and yet she's shown topless.
She's shown wearing not a shirt but a naked their
chest of a man, but it's clearly a woman's upper body,
and in fact, they even show her with breasts but
no nipples, as you would expect if you were showing
a naked female upper body. So she's there is masculine
(18:11):
and feminine simultaneously, and she's obviously not satisfied with with
this visage, with this image of herself, because she then
moves on to a fully masculinized imagery where her body
no longer has that grass stile form, where she shows
herself with with a buff body, pectoral muscles and biceps
and all of that which she obviously didn't have in
(18:32):
real life. That she feels she needs to show this
in her reliase and in her statutory to match the
king that's growing up next to her. So she's she's
got to experiment. She knows that she has to change
her body and the way she depicts herself to match
this coking and to sit patriarchal kingship models in in
their purest form, because the Egyptians believe that that monarch
(18:55):
needed to be masculine, that that masculine rebirth was was
a necessary part of the king's power. So she, it's
some way religiously magically, needs to inhabit that masculine self,
even with her feminine her feminine body. And now back
to the show, so hatchets that was an exceptional rule.
(19:19):
I mean, you mentioned that she left Egypt better than
she started with it, and she amasked all these incredible accomplishments.
But it seems like all we learned about as students
in the classroom are King tut and we know who
Cleopatra is, and yet not her. Why is that? Why?
Why has her history sort of sort of been erased
(19:40):
in a way from our popular understanding of Egyptian history.
I've had to think about this a lot. This is
this is really the crux of her story for me,
because as I'm trying to resurrect her, trying to get
people to pronounce her name, correctly, and people like we
hat chew, what how does it work? It's extraordinary to
me that this woman who did it all, who was
(20:01):
the most and I'd like to use this word badass
woman of the ancient world, who ruled for the longest,
ruled the most successfully, is the one that we've forgotten.
And and here here's where we're going to go with this.
So let's say we go out to a bus stop
and we and we just talked to the every man
or every woman and say, hey, have you ever heard
of somebody named Jezebel? And here you will say, oh, yeah,
(20:22):
I've heard of Jezebel. Good or bad, very bad, very bad.
And you may not know the whole story that that.
You know, she was a Phoenician princess married off to
a king in the levant and was um upset a
bunch of yaway priests for worshiping many gods and was
thrown out of a window and eating my dogs. You
may not know all of that, um, but you know
she's bad. She did something wrong. You may say, well, okay,
how about Cleopatra. Person at the bus stops? You know Cleopatra? Indeed,
(20:46):
I do good story or bad story is very bad,
interested in glamour interested parties, and ended up killing yourselves.
And these things are known in popular culture by normal people,
but had chepstood. People have no idea who this woman is.
They can't even pronounce her name, They have no understanding
of what she did. And I think human culture in
general loves to tell stories, replicate stories, retell stories about
(21:10):
female failure, about women who did it all wrong, as
cautionary tales, as ways to know what happens when when
crisis and female leaders to coincide the crisis. That that
when females rule, they bring on crisis. I'm here to
tell you the historian that females generally are only allowed
into leadership when there's crisis. That's the way they get
into power in the first place. So Chips that, as
(21:34):
as I always say, left easier better than she found it,
did everything right, and that was her ultimate undoing. And
that's the irony of the whole thing. She she created
a perfect package for the king's after her to take
credit for what she herself had done. She did it
all so traditionally, even depicting herself as a masculine entity,
(21:56):
that in many cases all they had to do was
erase her name and put in a different name and
take credit for all of her vast achievements and buildings
and and just all that she did. She did it
too perfectly in a way. It was that much more abstracted,
that much more um uh normal, so that a male
king could just say, yeah, I did this, erase her
(22:18):
name very shortly after her reign was over, put all
of the other names in their place in her place,
and un thus we've forgotten her. So the women who
were the most successful are those that we don't tell
stories about, and the women that were the biggest failures
Shakespeare writes plays about them. M it's a really interesting
(22:38):
that's a really interesting division to draw and troubling one
at the same time, though, Yeah, indeed, you know it's
it's funny. I was. I did my first, one of
my very first discussions about hot chefs to a group
of female CEOs and power brokers in Los Angeles. Small group.
It was. It was a lunchtime lecture and I'm just
informally talking through this And it was in that room,
(23:01):
in that moment, with all of these female power brokers,
that I understood that success was something that indeed could
threaten a woman with a l awesome I guess thee
with somebody else trying to take the credit for it.
That that happens more often than than we would expect
or like to think of in a patriarchal society. And
that right there, I think is the crux of potchups
(23:22):
with the story. Um well, that leads to another question though,
between kind of the parallels between Chips set the women
around her and women in powerful positions today, because as
you're telling this story, it's ringing similar bells in my
mind of things that we have similar patterns of women
in power, whether that's political power or even power in career.
(23:46):
In career context as well. Yeah, I teach a class
that you see like called women in Power in the
Ancient World. In the first two weeks we go through
a discussion of how much power women have today. I
always try to keep ancient history as topical and useful
and applicable to the modern world as possible. Because humans
are humans, we have the same general systems, uh, same
(24:07):
patriarchal system for certain So how can we use these
women from the ancient world as role models, as cautionary tales,
as whatever? How can they help us out today. And
you know, it's it's an interesting thing when you when
you look at patriarchal society as a whole, it does
systematically bar women from power. And I start my own
(24:28):
talk about how chef said I put I put hot
chops it in in context. I start my own lecture with
four slides where I show how today women have so
little political power. There are very few leaders of state,
prime ministers or presidents around the world who are female.
Why are we so hostile to that? Why are we
so ambivalence to that power. There's even fewer female CEOs
(24:50):
and leaders of fortune companies who are women. In the
United States, it's four percent candidates, just over six percent
female CEOs. It's nothing. When we allow the free market
and the human organisms that pick who they want to
have leadership over money, we do not choose women. It's extraordinary. Um.
The military is improving because you have a very top
down hierarchical um system in the United States, so you
(25:12):
do see female officers except for the Marines, but in
the Air Force, the Army, and the Navy at and rising.
So that's improving ideological power and females there's just none.
Judeo Christian Islamic traditions do not suffer females and leadership positions,
So all of this is applicable, all of this is useful,
and in my class women in Power in the ancient world,
(25:35):
we look at cognitive differences between males and females. Brain differences, um,
how how a female thinks or forgives versus a man,
how a well a female might think of her survival
versus a man. All of these things I think are
important to bring out into the open and understand so
that they can be transcended. For example, did you know
that women hold grudges longer than men do, so somebody
(25:58):
cuts you off or betrays you politically, that a woman
is more likely to hold the grudge and cut that
person off than a man. And that if we learn
as females not to burn our bridges to get over
those those impasses, we would be better political leaders. But
we have other we have strengths as well. For example,
micro loan lenders don't like to give micro loans to men.
(26:21):
They like to give them to women because the woman
will buy the cow, make the cheese, make the business,
and take care of her family. Too many micro loans
that go to men are brought into a bar and
exchange for political capital for drinks at the bar. And
you know that, and men often think that way because
our brains work in different ways. I like to look
at the biological sources of it all. I like to
(26:42):
think about how a female hunter gathering, you know, the
human origins or sources for how we might think and feel.
Her survival depended on her connection with her sister, with
her mother, with her close family. A man's hunter gather
survival depends on finding game far away, making connections with
other troops far away, warfare with troops far away. These
(27:04):
are things that he depends on. So he is automatically
going to be more politically inclined genetically perhaps the cognitively
than a female who is going to be genetically cognitively
more interested in looking towards her inner circle. All of
those things translate into how we perceive political power. So
(27:24):
when and I put a slide up in my lecture
where I put up an image of Maggie Factor, Hillary Clinton, Condoleeza, Rice,
Angela Merkel, all of these women inaction at a podium talking,
and I put up a male slide next to it,
and the females look angry and the males leaderly and strong,
and we have these visceral reactions, these emotional reactions, misperceptions
(27:47):
even or just perceptions of what power is for males
or female without even thinking about it. And a lot
of the time we think females can't have power. They're
too hormonal, they're too they're too mercurial, they won't be
able to have a consistent leadership style. We need the men.
We we can't trust this, we're hostile towards it, or
(28:07):
ambivalent to, or more intellectually inclined or or open about
female power. But for me, just like a baby might
be if it's a white baby more inclined and attracted
to white faces, or a black baby might be more
interested in cognitively looking at black faces like itself. That
doesn't mean that can't be transcended later in life. So
(28:28):
by the same token of female might actually be misperceived
as being self interested, as being um selfish, or be
seen as angry or hormonal. But if we're open about
how we feel about female leadership, then these things can
be transcended. So I like to look at the biological
(28:49):
roots of it at the sources of our distrust and
female power, and it's a very source of it all
is the fact that women can have babies and men cannot.
And I always go back to the story of Marissa
Meyer CEO of JA who and everyone was was freaking
out that she had that baby. How can she possibly
be CEO of YAH who would have a baby simultaneously,
your feminist planets on TV saying, of course she can
(29:09):
have a baby and b CEO of Yah who simultaneously.
When that story came out, I was at home on
leave breastfeeding my child and I have five months off,
and I remember holding my kid, looking at the TV
and saying, there's no way she can do is you
can't do it? Because I had little support and help
in that moment. I was going through postpartum depression and anxiety,
and these are the things that women have to deal with.
(29:30):
We need help to transcend our own bodies to maintain power.
I needed u c l A, my university, to give
me time off to go a little bit crazy, go hormonal,
come back to the real world. Put my kid too
into bay care system so I could be that that
powerful female. If we don't have governmental systems societal help.
(29:52):
We cannot transcend our bodies, have children and have it all.
These things are all very interesting to me. I don't
like to deny the biological and say, of work, you
can do it all. I like to bring all of
that in and say, okay, now what are we going
to do next. It was a long issue for that
gave me some sort of an insight into how I
think about all of this absolutely well, and it reminded
(30:12):
me of one thing that jumped out to me at
the end of the book and the acknowledgments. You're talking
about that period of time when you just had your
son and the book comes along and you're dealing with
writing a book while grappling with this new thing that
is childcare in your life. But you you right. I
could not have understood hat shepst before motherhood happened. And
(30:36):
I was just wondering if you could, especially because the
podcast is called Stuff Mom Never Told You. Um, I
was just wondering if you could sort of explained that
in a little bit A little bit. I mean, I
know that you already did someone in the previous answer,
but um, that was something that really jumped out to me.
I have never felt more isolated and more confused and
in a darker place than than when I had my son.
(30:59):
Through that post part of a year, it was a
very tough year, and I actually through a car accident
and had to be your head trauma and almost died.
And that year was worse arguably than than that that
year post head traumer. It was tough because everything that
you thought as a that I thought as a woman,
that I could have was made intensely vulnerable in a
(31:22):
way that that I'd never experienced before that that child.
Having that child stripped me bear in a way that
that i've I still am grappling with and thinking about,
because you're never more vulnerable and you're never more of
a slave to your own body. And I think that
(31:44):
in Western culture, not only do we like to deny
death and pretend that it will never happen, you know,
we like to live forever on plastic surgery. And people
die in hospitals outside of our site. They don't die
in front of our own eyes. In the same way,
you know, women today, especially women who want power and
want careers, put off having a child. I put off
having a child until I was thirty eight years old.
(32:05):
And you think, yeah, I'm not going to be a
slice of this. I'm gonna do it right. I'm gonna
be fine. You know, when I had my kid, I
was the first natural breach birth at US Aliens sixteen
years and fifty people watch my birth. It was a
rock star birth. It was and you know, you have
that that joyous, exuberant moment, you know, a badass kind
of moment you think you could do anything. And then
(32:25):
the long, slow water torture of sleep deprivation and breast
feeding which was very hard for me, um and postpartum
hormonal problems which was very hard for me, hits, and
then it's a different thing. It's something that you can't
really surmount. And for the ancient people that was unavoidable.
(32:46):
They couldn't put off child bearing. They this was what
every royal woman was expected to do. She was expected
to be a wound, to be a baby producer. That
was her job first and foremost. And yes, we're a
woman could give the child off to a wet nurse.
You know, in many ways, they had their daycare and
everything figured out as well. She was a working woman
(33:07):
hip as well, and she had support. She probably had
a lot more support than I did giving birth in
that in that year after the baby, But to understand
the obstacles to female power, I think I had to
go through that, that childbirth experience and understand that the body,
the female body, is really the ground zero, the biggest
(33:31):
obstacle for why female powers are attainable. And if we
don't have social support systems in place, you'll you'll never
be able to get it. I've got to tell you,
your answers make me want to like run up down
the street high fiving people. I loved your responses and
(33:51):
and it touches on so many different things that we
use recurring themes in the podcast. Recurring themes that we
hear especially are our women listeners, especially mothers who have
careers and are balancing all this stuff as well. So,
I mean, yeah, it's it's you know, we did a
whole series on lean in and women in the workplace
(34:12):
and all of that stuff, and so, I mean, it
is kind of fascinating to hear those same ideas applied
to ancient women who really, I mean, the more things change,
the more they stay the same. It soundssolutely people are
people are people. The biggest difference though, is life expectancy.
So we get to live till we're eighty or ninety.
They got to live till they were forty. Big different
(34:33):
and they had to bury so many children. We have
no notion of this. It's a baby died. Now. It's
a weird and strange thing that people are ashamed of,
they can't talk about. In the ancient world, we would
have buried half of our children under our mud group floor,
and little cot would have been a normal thing. Yeah. Right,
That's that's some severe trauma. That's something that we can't
even we can't even fathom. Right, Well, I mean I
(34:55):
got the impression because of issues like that, that people
in Egypt and in the world in general, faith that
they did have to pack in so much stuff into
their brief lives. And you know, hatch ups, that was
certainly no was certainly no different. I mean, if anything,
she packed thirty times more into her life. And so
(35:16):
that kind of leads me to our next question, which
is her legacy and what you consider her legacy to
be sort of in general in Egypt and in our history,
but also in terms of the perception of women rulers.
What affected her legacy have Yeah, and chips is that
extraordinary woman who who did it all right and got forgotten.
(35:37):
That's the point that that intrigues me the most, upsets
me the most, that I that I kind of mess
with a lot because I don't think it's it's that
unusual today. It's the woman who knows she can't change
the patriarchy. I don't try to try to fit it.
And that's you know, that's the way she has to
(35:58):
work it. If a woman wants it all today to
have the baby, to have the job, she can't change
her body and she can't change the economy of her womb.
She can't change the fact that it takes that long
to jest dates breastfeed, those things are unavoidable. And you know,
arguably women have to spend more time with their children
(36:20):
with the upbringing, with the breastfeeding than they did. And
when I when my mother was was bringing up her
kids when bottle feeding was normal, I mean in some
ways that it made things easier in some ways not um,
there are great expectations on on women having children with
careers to do the motherhood all in completely and totally
with you know, two years of breastfeeding, which I did,
(36:41):
and you know, baby carrying and which I did, and
family bed which I did, and all all of those
things so intense, so intensely, and still do the career
and the and the powerful side so intently and not
lose any of it. On either side. It's impossible, it's
impossi able to do. Something will be lost. And and
(37:03):
yet we as women gain something as as we go
through and we and we learned, we think differently, we
rule differently, we um, we we behave differently when we
have power. And now that we're finally allowed to have power,
people see females I think as more of an asset
um as, and they're less um misperceived, and there's less
(37:27):
hostility towards female power. I think Hillary is going to
have quite a run um in the next couple of years,
and and we'll see, I think in the next eight years.
The discussion of misogyny in the way that the Barack
Obama administration has been a discussion of racism and how
people perceive or misperceive the agenda of a certain person
(37:49):
because of their the color of their skin, and how
they grew up, their gender um These things are being
discussed and talked about very much like gay marriage and
what it means to be gay, and what it means
to have that identity. All of these things are being
openly discussed and talked about and very much transcended. Um,
so hot chepstood. I mean, she just she she helps
us do that because of her success and because of
(38:11):
her power. And if I can help to resurrect her
and get people to be able to pronounce her name,
then that then I can, you know, I can somehow
understand what it means to try to have it all
because that's what we want, and that's what she did,
and and she got raised for it. You know, her
name and names were raised, her images were erased. Um.
(38:33):
How often does that happen today? I think we need
to keep our eyes open. If Hillary does become president,
will what will be her legacy? D How will that work?
What's the legacy of Maggie Thatcher? What's the legacy of
of an Angela Merkel? How does how does that work? Um?
I think legacy is super important because if you look
at women in the ancient world, they never have a
(38:55):
genetic legacy. They never do. They don't get to become
king on their on their own right, get a boyfriend
or a lover and have a child that's going to
follow them onto the throne. It always ends up with
some other families, some other dynasty, some other man taking
over after them. They're just placeholders. They just stop gaps
are just convenient things to have in the moment. How
(39:16):
can we women create a legacy didn't happen in the
ancient world? How can we transcend it into it now?
It's an interesting question and a perfect question, I think
to leave this conversation at These are all the questions
that we had for you. Is there anything though about
at Cheps that women in power your work, um, that
(39:37):
you'd like to tell us about that we didn't ask you? Um?
What what's next on your plate? Yeah? I think you
guys say everything that was great, UM, So I don't.
I don't think I need to add anything like that.
And what's next for me? Um? I am going to
move on to a book about political ideologies, how people
link religion and and power, and and I'm going to
(40:01):
write a book about Akanat in a biography about Akanaton
as the first religious fanatic in the world. And I
think religious extremism is certainly something that we talk to
talk about every day, all the time on the news,
and I'm going to do what I do with hot
chests that go jump dive back into the past and
try to see when it happened first time, how it happened,
(40:22):
why it happened, and see if I can make that
ancient story as applicable as possible to what we're dealing
with today. We'll definitely be looking forward to that and
might have to ask you to come back on the
podcast when that No, no, probably you have to wait
a couple of years. It'll take me a while, but
I'm on it. I'm on it. We'll just pencil listen
(40:42):
for a couple of years from now. Also, if you
want to tell our listeners where they can learn more
both about you and your book, that would be great. Yeah. Sure.
So I'm out there in the world digitally. I try
to keep a good present for my Facebook pages among
fifty followers and it's Karaconi each typtologists starts the k
K R A C O N E Y. And I've
(41:04):
got a new web page up with all my articles
posted and uh academic work. I actually my academic work
is um I'm a coffin specialist with a little strain
but essentially I look at at social competition and how
people compete with one another using funerary arts kind of
like um, like we use weddings, you know, where if
(41:27):
you see the bride walking down the aisle and address,
you know pretty much what socionomic class she belongs to,
maybe with her ethnicity is what she's trying to prove.
I do the same thing with Coffin. So a lot
of that work is is on my website. And yeah,
my my book, The Woman Who Would Be King Is
is available in bookstores everywhere. And uh, thank you guys
so much for having me on the show. Well, thanks
(41:49):
for taking the time to talk to us. This has
been really really fascinating, awesome, so huge thanks to Dr
Kearney for taking the time to talk to us about
hat ships, set and women in power. I know that
Caroline and I walked away from that conversation still talking
(42:10):
about so much of what Cooney had to say and
how hatch ups that story applies to women in power
and even just women like us who are dealing with
day to day careers as well. So I don't know
about you, Caroline, but that was a really inspiring interview
for for us to do. Yeah. Absolutely, I thought she
(42:32):
hit on so many incredible points, not only about this
amazing figure in history, but also just about womanhood and
what her own path has been like. Yeah. So to
learn more about Dr Cooney and to check out her book,
The Woman Who Would Be King, you can head over
to Kara Cooney. That's see oo n e y dot com.
(42:54):
And now I want to hear from you. What are
your thoughts on hatch ups, set women in power? What
we can learned today from ancient women. Moms Stuff at
how stuff works dot com is our email address. If
you want to tweet us, you can do that at
mom Stuff podcast or messages on Facebook. And we've got
(43:14):
a couple of messages to share with you when we
come right back from a quick break and now back
to the show. Well, I gotta let her hear from
Danielle about our Women in the Construction Industry podcast. She writes,
I was excited to see the title of the podcast
(43:34):
because I have more than a few stories on the subject.
First of all, my mom was the first female to
work at a construction site in Ontario. She was definitely
hazed and couldn't use the outhouse for fear that the
men on her crew would pick it up with a
forklift while she was in it, which apparently happened regularly.
She did say that after some time, the men she
worked with became close like big brothers and looked out
(43:56):
for her. As for myself, I've worked in the our
or a culture and forestry industries for the past seven
years or so. I found school to be an amazing
experience and never felt different from the men. I felt
that my teachers encouraged me and motivated me to work
just as hard as the boys, and they never singled
me out based on my gender. Once I started working
in the field, however, I encountered men who seemed to
(44:18):
loathe me just for being female, and others who are
completely in awe that I would do a physical job.
I'm more skilled than some of the men I've worked
with when it comes to handling a chainsaw, and I
believe that having to teach myself the technique has helped.
I agree with your points that women don't get the
mentorship that men do, and so we have to learn
the hard way. I've heard some of the most ridiculous
(44:39):
and disgusting things from coworkers, and have also worked with
some that seemed to think I was invisible. I've also
noticed that if I shortened my name Danielle to Danny
on resumes, I get way more interviews and callbacks, which
I assume is because the company believes I'm male. Thankfully,
most of my job positions have put me on small crews,
(44:59):
so eventually the men and I become close and in
some cases good friends. I always joke with my female
friends that when I start to work with new people,
I'm only seen as a woman for two weeks, and
then I become a man. At that point, no one
helped me carry anything or does any favors. They get
that I'm working just as hard as them, and sometimes,
because of my small size, even harder. I think that
(45:21):
even at the higher corporate level I find myself now,
women don't get the same pay, respect, or job opportunities
as mem However, I'm optimistic that this next generation of
female workers, like the six year old mentioned in your
podcast my niece, will continue to break down the gender
barriers in the male dominated jobs. So thanks Danielle, and
(45:42):
I have a letter here from Mary. She says, first off,
thank you, thank you, thank you. That podcast you all
did over women in construction was fantastic. It was ruthless,
brutally truthful, and enlightening. I'm emailing you because I'm a
current senior pursuing a degree in construction management. I was
previously an engineering made yere, but I changed because construction
is the perfect blend of hands on organization and creativity. Essentially,
(46:06):
I see it as architecture slash engineering slash contractor combined
into one. I haven't had any firsthand experience on a
job site yet, but I will say I am one
of two girls in the entire program at my school.
All the rest are gents. It was the same in
my engineering classes, and it was the same in my
technical classes in high school. Hardly any girls. And to
(46:27):
be honest, I've never known why there is more opportunity
in this field than practically any other. Companies are fighting
to hire women because there is such a low percentage
of us applying. When I graduate, I can be an estimator,
b I am specialist, scheduler, safety coordinator, project engineer, project manager.
The list goes on and on. Have I experienced prejudice?
(46:47):
It depends on how you see it or take it.
If someone says something inappropriate I often fire something witty
right back. Women have to be ready to face these
kinds of situations. It's important not to take it super personally.
Harassment rarely. How in school, my classmates respect me and
they learned to because I work my butt off and
I complete really quality work. As a woman, I'm more
(47:08):
motivated to do my best to represent the gender and
gain a higher level of respect. It's sad, but the
reality is some of the guys just don't know how
to react with a strong, tomboy woman who likes to
play in the dirt, drive nails with a hammer, and
wants to kick butt in this industry. From what I've seen,
the guys who do understand all of this are the
ones in management and supervisory positions. The construction management field
seems to be way less brutal than the trades field.
(47:30):
From a woman's standpoint, I'm thankful for women like Nicole
Curtis on HDTVs. Rehab Addict, who are true trailblazers. She's
making the field more open to women, and I hope
to do the same someday. Dude, I love Nicole Curtis
and Rehab Addict. My boyfriend sit around the house and
watch it all the time. So if she I agree,
she is a good figure. And I'm glad you're getting
(47:51):
out there and do what you love to do. Thanks
for writing in, and thanks to everybody who's written into us.
We've gotten so many letters, in particular about women in instruction,
so keep all of them coming. Mom. Stuff at House
at works dot com is our email address and for
links to all of our social media as well as
all of our videos and blogs, including Seven Queens Who
(48:13):
Fought to Rule. If you're really into learning more about
powerful women of your head, on over to stuff Mom
Never Told You dot com for moral this, and thousands
of other topics. Doesn't how Stuff Works dot com
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