Can Odysseus even HAVE an Odyssey without female characters to help him, terrorize him, and sometimes both? Join Sonja and Vanessa as their guest, classics scholar Amy Meyers, dishes on Scylla, the Sirens, and the intimidating goddess, Athena. Like an arrow through a dozen axe holes lined up, Homer’s male hero shoots through the decidedly feminine architecture of his labyrinthian odyssey.

Sources mentioned:

The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson

The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Robert Fagles

The Distaff Side: Representing the Female in Homer's Odyssey by Beth Cohen

Sonja takes Vanessa down a rabbit hole to the 12th century for a scandalous romance, starring a very learned woman named Heloise. If you’re tired of the passion ending at the altar, this episode’s for you: spicy letters, secluded country estates, lots of reading, divine and carnal love, and keeping passion lit–even in the face of late-in-life eunuchism. IWAW celebrates that love can be messy!

Letters of Abelard and Heloise by Pierre Bayle

Sonja and Vanessa visit Circe’s Island, both in the Odyssey and in Madeline Miller’s brilliant novel. For those keeping score: time with Calypso + Circe = 80% of Odysseus’s 10-year trip home is on Love Islands with gorgeous, immortal women. Vanessa quizzes Sonja on ancient Greek witchcraft and why women keep giving grown men baths, and Sonja, as always, knows a thing or two. Spoiler Alerts for Madeline Miller’s Circe!

Works referenced:
Circe by Madeline Miller

“Bias, She Wrote: The Gender Bias of the New York Times Bestseller List,” by Rosie Cima

“Patterns of Persecutions: ‘Witchcraft’ Trials in Ancient Athens,” by Esther Eidinow

Theogony by Hesiod

“Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” by Joan Scott
“Circe’s Etruscan Pharmaka: Reconsidering a Fragment of Aeschylean Elegy,” by Jessica Lightfoot

The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell

Sonja and Vanessa pop some popcorn and dive into Uberto Pasolini’s 2024 film,The Return.Who gets the spotlight more, Odysseus or Penelope? In terms of power, would we rather be poem Penelope or film Penelope? Is Telemachus even a little less whiny? Does Argos the dog get his moment? And although all the gods are cut from the script, how did they convince Athena, the goddess-of-glow-ups, to be 60-year old Ralph Fiennes' personal trainer?

Other books referenced in the episode:

The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien

The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson

We would love to hear your thoughts and questions! Please join us on Patreon, where you can subscribe for free or throw us some book money:patreon.com/InWalksaWoman. Also follow us on Spotify and on Instagram: @inwalksawoman.

What do we know about what real life would’ve been like for Penelope in the Odyssey—and for that matter what do we know about the lives of women in the Bronze age or classical era of ancient Greece? Join us as Vanessa’s non historical-brain tries to keep up with Sonja’s fine-tuned sense of history, along with IWAW’s first-ever guest, classics scholar, Dr. Heather Harwood.

This is the first in a five-episode series on women, goddesses, and monsters in the Odyssey and its retellings.

Welcome to “In Walks a Woman,” the podcast where we look at history and literature from a female perspective. Join Sonja Czarnecki, history teacher, and Dr. Vanessa Eicher, life-long lit nerd, both moms and seasoned educators, as we go down well-worn historical and literary pathways with new questions about the female experience and how the stories of our past and in our fiction frame women's lives today.