Women Who Went Before

Oct 31 2024 14 ep. 49 mins 222
Women Who Went Before Podcast artwork

Women Who Went Before is on a gynocentric quest into the ancient world. Join hosts Rebekah Haigh and Emily Chesley as they interview the world’s top scholars and unearth the lives of women from the past. It’s a history podcast and detective journey in one, sifting through texts and tropes to find the women who lived beneath. | Season 2 episodes every other Thursday!

  History  Religion & Spirituality  Education
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Virginity and the Hype About Hymens

Oct 31 2024 59 mins  
Dr. Julia Kelto Lillis asks, "To whom does a woman’s virginity belong?" Join her and your hosts as we dive into the world of early Christian purity culture, what wine has to do with the V-Card, and why the gods like to make babies with virgins. Like today, the concept of virginity was culturally significant in the ancient world. But unlike today, virginity as an act of devotion t

Wandering Wombs: Greco-Roman Gynecology and Women’s Health

Oct 17 2024 58 mins  
In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Rebecca Flemming and talk about ancient gynecology, wandering wombs, and what agency, if any, women had over the healing of their bodies. How did medical writers in Greece and Rome describe a woman’s anatomy and its inner workings? And how did those beliefs influence the treatments they prescribed? Read transcript and episode show notes: http

Bodily Matters: The Lifecycle of an Ancient Woman

Oct 03 2024 16 mins  
In a time when society is thinking passionately about bodily rights and who gets to make decisions about women’s bodies, Season 2 turns to history. Women in the ancient world mattered, and so did their bodies—maybe learning about them can give us new questions as we face our own world. In our season intro episode, meet an ancient high-priestess of Ur and the first known author

Out of Pandora’s Box, Recovering Hope

Jan 23 2023 58 mins  
On the Season 1 finale we talk with Dr. Deborah Lyons about ancient Greek myths, breaking cultural boxes, and why we should all strive to be killjoys. Pandora's box, Penelope's gifts, Helen's beauty in Sappho's poetry, and more. Why does it matter that Pandora didn't actually have a box in the earliest versions of the myth? How were objects and the practice of gift-giving gendered

In Her Own Words: Ancient Women Authors

Jan 10 2023 59 mins  
In the penultimate episode of season 1, “In Her Own Words: Ancient Women Authors,” we talk with historian and classicist Dr. Kate Cooper about gatekeeping, the privilege of individualism, and those rare surviving moments when women wrote for themselves. The famous Greek poet Sappho, who wrote of love and loss. Faltonia Betitia Proba, the elite Roman woman who adapted Virgil to

Suffering Witches to Live: Jewish Women and the Legacies of Religious Law

Dec 05 2022 59 mins  
In Episode 8 our hosts talk with Dr. Elizabeth Shanks Alexander about whether women can keep track of their own periods, religious law as a boys’ club, and why ancient rabbis cared about witchery. Episode show notes: https://womenwhowentbefore.com/suffering-witches-to-live.Women Who Went Before is written, produced, and edited by Emily Chesley and Rebekah Haigh. The music is comp

Women Get a Head: Gender and Other Weapons

Nov 21 2022 47 mins  
Dr. Caryn Tamber-Rosenau explains how two lethal women perform gender in the Hebrew Bible. Judith and Jael were talented Jewish heroines who skillfully played their hands (and bodies) to save their people from invading armies.How might the stories about Clytemnestra and the Ugaritic goddess Anat have shaped these biblical narratives? How does the book of Judith intersect with Judas

Scepter and Sword: African Warrior Queens

Nov 07 2022 56 mins  
Dr. Solange Ashby teaches us about Nubian warrior queens, Hollywood stereotypes about Egyptian women, and why you shouldn’t trust Wikipedia.Meet the powerful, voluptuous queens of Meroe—Amanirenas, Amanitore, Amanishakheto. While Roman noblewomen were supposed to stay hidden at home, these queens were ruling and leading their troops into battle. Hear how Nubian families tracked

Was the Oldest Profession a Profession?

Oct 24 2022 53 mins  
We interview Dr. Thomas A. J. McGinn about Roman prostitution, marriage laws, and a strange Cinderella story. What was a paterfamilias and how did they determine a woman’s life? Were prostitutes merely doing their civic duty? Why did early Christians call the Roman government the pimp-in-chief?Autonomy and agency are the overarching themes of this episode. We explore them in laws

“The Two Breasts of the Father”: Does Your God Look Like You?

Oct 10 2022 49 mins  
We talk to Dr. Susan Ashbrook Harvey about how gender shaped ancient thinking about God, women's church choirs, and the complex web of metaphors for the divine within Syriac Christianity.Women Who Went Before is written, produced, and edited by Rebekah Haigh and Emily Chesley.The music is composed and produced by Moses Sun. This episode was fact-checked by Jillian Marcantonio and G