Life is unfair and there is a double standard for women. Hatshepsut’s story helps us to see how somebody saw that reality, took that reality on board, didn’t deny it, didn’t say it didn’t exist and moved around the blockades in her path to get what it was that she wanted.
Hatshepsut was very aware of what people may have thought of a woman’s power being self motivated. And so she always depicted herself with great humility. The reason we don’t remember her is because she was so good.
Think about the women we do remember in our society, those female rulers, they’re always the ones who either had the sexual affairs, got beaten in battle, ended up being the whore of Babylon, those are the women that we like to tell tales about and that’s what our cultural memory really holds onto.
It’s almost like as biological creatures, when a woman takes power, we feel we need to memorialize that in a negative way and remember the failures and keep repeating those stories and here we have a woman, Hatshepsut, who did everything right, who was incredibly successful and yet no one can pronounce her name and she’s the one that nobody tells tales about because it’s not in a patriarchal society’s best interest to tell those tales.… READ MORE