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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 is in pre-production
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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…
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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 Roma…
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Suffering Witches to Live: Jewish Women and the Legacies of Religious Law
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59:19
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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…
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Women Get a Head: Gender and Other Weapons
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47:02
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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 …
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Scepter and Sword: African Warrior Queens
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56:24
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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. H…
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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…
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“The Two Breasts of the Father”: Does Your God Look Like You?
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49:18
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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-…
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Fall Girl: Theology, Gender, and How Eve Ruined Us All
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50:19
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MacArthur Fellow and NYT bestselling author Dr. Elaine Pagels joins us to talk about manic pixie dream girls, lost Gnostic texts, and why being a heretic might not be so bad. Stereotypes about women aren't solely a modern phenomenon. Two pervasive archetypes in early Christian writings were the devil's gateway and bride of Christ . Where did these …
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We explore ancient Jewish fan fiction, why makeup made the angels fall, and the ever-present problem of ghostwriting with Dr. Annette Yoshiko Reed in Season 1 Episode 2, "Ghostwriting the Daughters of Men: Whose Writing Is it Anyway?" You've heard of the human fall story in Genesis 3, but what about the angelic fall stories in Genesis 6, 1 Enoch, a…
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Invisible Women and How they Make History
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57:44
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We talk to Dr. Sarit Kattan Gribetz about history’s nameless faces, the news negativity bias, and how to raid ancient texts to find women. How were women named and anonymized in Jewish and Christian texts? When did bene Yisra’el mean "sons of Israel" in the Hebrew Bible, and when did it include the daughters too? What do we know about female scribe…
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Missing, Presumed…Absent? Where Were All the Ancient Women?
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20:53
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In our season intro we ask: Why aren't women in our ancient history textbooks? What is antiquity? How were women imagined in ancient Mediterranean societies? And why does women's history matter? Meet the North African woman Perpetua, whose prison diary from Carthage is one of the few surviving literary texts written by an ancient woman. And meet yo…
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