“Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an end?” wondered Alice, pondering her expectations of the NJCL.
As scholars in high school and beyond, are we female classicists or are we just here to be the objects of stifled laughter?
This essay is the second in a two-part series. Part one is accessible here.
The National Junior Classical League’s annual convention is approaching, reigniting an annual discussion of its irresponsible, misogynistic approach toward educational classics.
The convention’s creative arts contests are particularly concerning. Its costume section has been problematic (to say the least) for the past several years. Each year the JCL provides a male option, female option, and couples option. This year’s options include Polyphemus, the Sibyl of Cumae, and Pygmalion and Galatea.
Due to recent controversy over the couples option, the NJCL has chosen to add an alternative, Deucalion and Pyrrha. Judging by the fact that it’s in a different font on the poster, the addition was clearly a sloppy afterthought, a reluctant concession to the pushback surrounding Pygmalion and Galatea, whose story is not one of love, but of fetishization and rape.
It is interesting that the NJCL chose to provide an alternative option this year, considering their history in regard to the couples option. In 2018, the mythological couple was Hades and Persephone, perhaps one of the most famous rape stories in Greek mythology, and one that is especially misrepresented as love modernly. (Not to mention that Persephone is Hades’s niece and is kidnapped and raped as a child.)
The female options are also deeply rooted in stereotypes. This year, students can dress up as the Cumaean Sibyl. One look through the actual text of Ovid’s Metamorphoses would provide you with the Sibyl’s history: that Apollo tried to pressure her into sex, offering her the gift of eternal youth, and that when she refused, he gave her a life spanning thousands of years, but as an old woman, due to his own resentment over the rejection. His love is conditional and fleeting, entirely dependent on the Sibyl’s virginity. And so it becomes clear that the Sibyl was not loved by the god, but only, like so many other women, an object of lust. After declining to fulfill Apollo’s lust, he drops her like a hot brick, the Sibyl herself saying that he “‘too perhaps will either not know me, or will deny that he loved me.’” So she “will be viewed as non-existent” to the mythological world and in real-life history: only as a woman who could have satisfied a god but just would not love him enough. And when Apollo himself denies the relationship, who is to believe her? The choice to include the Sibyl as the female costume shows a deep apathy toward its historical and modern implications: a powerful man pressuring a woman into sex, then denying that he ever loved her when refused. Previous conventions have also heavily relied on sexist archetypes. 2018 and 2019 featured the Danaids and Tullia Minor, women famous for committing mariticide.
The dramatic interpretation readings show an even more egregious lack of respect for women both in and out of the classics field.
It would seem that, to the JCL, female characters in mythology can be one of two things: helpless virgins viewed as sex objects or violent, vindictive murderesses. Perhaps the NJCL will feature Philomela and Tereus as next year’s inevitably careless choice.
The convention also includes a dramatic interpretation section, which requires participants to memorize a passage in Latin. Inexplicably, every passage is gendered. It is disturbing that the NJCL feels the need to assign a gender to nearly every aspect of its convention, but the dramatic interpretation readings show an even more egregious lack of respect for women both in and out of the classics field.
The male options for dramatic interpretation provide a view into what the JCL views as significant Latin text. The ½ and I level reading is the myth of Apollo and Daphne, another tale of rape remembered as a teenage love story. After being chased like prey (to use Ovid’s metaphor), Daphne turns into a laurel tree, prompting Apollo to kiss her and claim ownership of her. An immobile, voiceless woman being sexually abused by a man: Daphne and Galatea have a lot in common.
Calling this pattern thoughtless would ignore the purposeful perpetuation of misogyny.
The female options begin on the lowest level with Narcissus and Echo, yet another female character famous for her voicelessness, and end with an excerpt from the Metamorphoses about a woman murdered by Juno for her affair with Jupiter. The other two readings for the girls are from Alice in Wonderland, a fairy tale about a clueless young girl written by Lewis Carroll, whose behavior toward children has come under scrutiny. It features cats, potions, and a white rabbit always running behind, but not quite as behind as the NJCL’s outdated views on gender. By contrast, the participants’ male counterparts will be reading about Sisyphus and reciting Ab Urbe Condita. The JCL mocks its female participants by choosing Alice in Wonderland. Coming up on my sixth year as a Latin student, I cannot imagine entering a competition to recite a children’s story as my competitors read from Livy. The NJCL has chosen to patronize their female participants, whose work and identities are supposedly unimpressive and not to be taken seriously. For the NJCL, the girls are there to entertain the rest of them, so it is perfectly okay to assign them a humiliating joke of a passage.
The hurdles placed in our way are compounded by the toxic atmosphere.
It becomes clear that there simply is no place for women in classics. The field is so deeply imbued with misogyny that it becomes difficult to continue as female classical scholars. The hurdles placed in our way are compounded by the toxic atmosphere. Women studying classics learn early on that it is a “boys’ club”—like math, like science, like politics. Just about every field viewed as more intellectually challenging is exclusively reserved for men, and if a woman participates, she is perceived as less competent than her male colleagues or lauded as an exception to the alleged female incompetence of classics. My female classmates and I have experienced this time and time again in our own Latin class.
Calling this pattern thoughtless would ignore the purposeful perpetuation of misogyny. Such systematic oppression is methodical and formulaic. There is nothing accidental about it. It is not thoughtless. It is a deliberate reflection of how our culture views women in academia—and women in general.
Further Reading
This dress code (page six) for the 2019 Tennessee JCL convention forbids “overly revealing clothing,” likely only for the girls, since they specifically note that boys cannot wear sleeveless shirts. By restricting the female participants’ dress in this way, they further the sexualization of girls.
My colleague Hannah Dubb and I have published an annotated bibliography on violence against women in antiquity; it can be found here on Diotíma. We extend thanks to Dr. Serena S. Witzke for the publication.
