Warriors, Witches and Women
An Interview with writer Kate Hodges
On Disobedient Femmes, I interviewed author Kate Hodges who has just published Warriors Witches, and Women: Mythology’s Fiercest Females.
Ms. Hodges discusses how both feminism and stories about monsters and ghosts helped inspire her book, which is a compendium of fascinating female figures from World mythologies. The book includes figures from mythology such as Cassandra as well as actual women who have become legends such as Yennenga, a warrior, princess and mother who lived over 900 years ago in Burkina Faso.
Other characters include:
Bewitching, banished Circe, an introvert famed and feared for her transfigurative powers.
The righteous Furies, defiantly unrepentant about their dedication to justice.
Fun-loving Ame-no-Uzume who makes quarreling friends laugh and terrifies monsters by flashing at them.
The fateful Morai sisters who spin a complex web of birth, life and death.
Here’s an excerpt fro the interview:
“I’ve always been interested in goddesses mythology, the supernatural world. And monsters, and witches and but I’ve always been interested in them from a kind of cultural perspective.
I chose people who told kind of illustrated different forms of femininity and, and the female experience. There are people who are real homebodies in this, there are there are goddesses who kind of who are literally creating worlds. I choose people who had stories that still resonated today that still had something that we could all find resonance with.”
Suzanne: What do you think it’s important for everyone, women and men to know about some of these figures in the past?
First of all, it’s great to read about them just on a really basic level, it’s brilliant to absorb their stories. You can read these stories and come away feeling inspired by their stories. Also it’s important because because of what they show us. For example, somebody like Medusa, who has been traditionally kind of demonized monster. I wanted to dig behind the monster ideation, find how she’d been used as a totem of all that is wicked about women, all of that that’s monstrous about women and to actually chip away and find out what the story was underneath.
What I was really kind of surprised about when I was researching this was the way that different women’s stories have changed over the years,depending on who’s telling the story.
From feminist fairies to bloodsucking temptresses, half-human harpies and protective Vodun goddesses, Warriors, Witches and Women retells each heroine’s story and raises important questions about how we may draw on these stories to understand the lives of women at present. For more about Kate Hodge’s work, visit https://katehodges.org.
Listen to the full interview here:
