THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY SCHREYER HONORS COLLEGE
DEPARTMENT OF COMMUNICATION ARTS AND SCIENCES
ASPASIA AFTER ANTIQUITY
ANELIA G. B. SLAVOFF SPRING 2020
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for baccalaureate degrees in History and Communication Arts & Sciences with honors in Communication Arts & Sciences
Reviewed and approved* by the following:
Michele Kennerly Professor of Communication Arts & Sciences and Classics & Ancient Mediterranean Studies Thesis Supervisor
Lori Bedell Senior Lecturer of Communication Arts & Sciences Honors Adviser
* Electronic approvals are on file. i
ABSTRACT
Scholars have continuously debated who Aspasia of Miletus truly was, starting in the 5th- century BCE to the modern day. She has been presented by the comic poets, ancient philosophers, and now authors of newspaper articles, as both a rhetorician and as exclusively a hetaira. These varying depictions are prominent in newspaper publications in the 20th-century
CE, and can be sorted into two categories: positive depictions that reference Aspasia’s intellect and positive influence in Athens, and negative depictions that reference Aspasia as a hetaira and deny her influence in Athenian society. I found that various authors have used Aspasia to promote their own personal ideologies in newspaper articles and magazine covers. This is possible in part due Aspasia’s primary work not surviving in the historical record, making it unclear what her true personal beliefs would have been. I examine the various depictions of
Aspasia in newspaper articles from 1874 to 1994, and analyze the ways in which authors use
Aspasia to promote their own ideologies. I also discuss how this treatment of Aspasia is indicative of a larger pattern of women’s treatment in the Western rhetorical tradition.
ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF FIGURES ...... iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... iv
Introduction ...... 1
Chapter I Positive Newspaper Depictions of Aspasia of Miletus ...... 9
Chapter II Negative Newspaper Depictions of Aspasia of Miletus ...... 29
Chapter III Aspasia of Miletus in The American Weekly ...... 41
Conclusion ...... 58
BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 62
iii
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1: Kylix depicting young Athenian women on their way to academic lessons ...... 19
Figure 2: "The Dinner Party" by Judy Chicago ...... 22
Figure 3: Aspasia's Place Setting in "The Dinner Party" ...... 23
Figure 4: Aspasia on the cover of The American Weekly ...... 42
Figure 5: Aspasia Graffiti in Monastiraki ...... 61
iv
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This thesis would not have been possible without the support of members of Penn State’s faculty, my family, and my friends. Thank you to everyone who had any part in my journey at
Penn State over the past four years. It’s been one of the best experiences of my life, and I would not change a thing.
To my thesis supervisor, Dr. Michele Kennerly, thank you for introducing me to Aspasia during your rhetorical theory course my sophomore year. You have fostered my interest in the intersection of classics and rhetoric, and you have been incredibly supportive these past few years when it came to my thesis, future plans, and really everything else. Thank you for believing in me and my research.
To my honors advisor, Lori Bedell, thank you for your guidance in my thesis writing, and for helping me throughout my entire honors journey. You have always been there to give me advice, and for every frantic email you received from me, you were able to get me back on track.
To Dr. Ekaterina Haskins, thank you for your help in my analysis of Aspasia in The
American Weekly, and for allowing me to conduct some of this research in your rhetorical criticism course. You have been incredibly supportive of both my research and career goals, and for that I am very thankful.
To my parents, Anne Boyer and Zlatan Slavoff, thank you for your support in everything
I do. I would not be where I am today without you both.
And lastly, to my friends who I have been lucky enough to meet during my time at Penn
State, thank you. You have supported me through some of the best (and most stressful) years of my life, and I love you all. 1
Introduction
How do we take the measure of a life when no primary source material from the person in question remains? How do we know what we are interpreting about their life is correct? What contemporary sources do we trust, and how do we decide upon these sources? These are common questions that must be answered when researching someone whose life story is a mystery.
Aspasia of Miletus is one of these historical figures about whom we know very little definitively. From the 5th-century BCE in Athens to the modern day, authors and artists have presented Aspasia as both strictly a sexually promiscuous hetaira to the Athenian leader,
Pericles, and as a prominent rhetorician and scholar in ancient Athens, known for teaching
Socrates, Pericles, and other esteemed statesmen in the art of rhetoric. Comic poets, authors, scholars, and artists alike have presented these narratives in popular culture during her own time and into the modern day, and they are prevalent in part due to the lack of primary source material from Aspasia herself. It is difficult to determine what sources are trustworthy in their depictions of her, and therefore her history has often been reconstructed in two opposing narratives, although there are the rare sources that depict her as both simultaneously.
Authors such as Plato, and later Cicero, Athenaeus, and Plutarch, considered Aspasia to be a member of the intelligentsia during Periclean Athens.1 Plato depicted Aspasia as a rhetorician explicitly within his dialogue, Menexenus. He presented the idea that Aspasia was the
1 Cheryl Glenn, “Sex, Lies, and Manuscript: Refiguring Aspasia in the History of Rhetoric,” College Composition and Communication 45, no. 2 (1994): 183. 2 true author of Pericles’s famous funeral oration during the Peloponnesian War, and that she was an influential rhetorician in her own right.
Of my own wit, most likely nothing; but yesterday I heard Aspasia composing a
funeral oration about these very dead. For she had been told, as you were saying,
that the Athenians were going to choose a speaker, and she repeated to me the sort
of speech which he should deliver, partly improvising and partly from previous
thought, putting together fragments of the funeral oration which Pericles spoke, but
which, as I believe, she composed.2
Aspasia’s narrative and accounts of her contributions to rhetoric have been constructed by the men around her, and this bias is crucial to consider when analyzing Menexenus. However, Plato provides one of the only contemporary accounts of Aspasia that cites her as a rhetorician who had heavy influence over Pericles’s orations. Even though Plato’s account seems to be a relatively believable one from an acclaimed philosopher who was her contemporary, we must view the source for what it is – an account that does not provide Aspasia her own voice, but rather uses men’s voices to describe something that may or may not be true.
In part due to her status as a metic and the traditional lack of mobility for women in ancient Greek society (although not necessarily applicable to noncitizens), she is also often portrayed in a negative, hyper-sexualized manner throughout history. A core ideology in 5th- century BCE Athens was that a “respectable” woman was separated from civic life, so when noncitizen women defied these norms and engaged in civic life, as Aspasia supposedly did with
2 Plato and Benjamin Jowett, Menexenus (Champaign, Ill: Project Gutenberg, 2013), http://search.ebscohost.com.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=1085304&site=ehost -live&scope=site. 3 her education, they were considered to be indecent and were therefore sexualized.3 Aspasia is an example of a noncitizen woman who engaged in civic life, and these traditional Athenian social norms regarding women’s status in society influenced her reputation. Comic poets critiqued
Aspasia for defying these social norms and exhibiting influence over Pericles. Aristophanes used her as a tool to attack and mock Pericles in The Acharnians, where he explicitly calls Aspasia’s friends “whores” and categorizes her as the same.4 Aristophanes presents a contemporary narrative that directly conflicts Plato’s, illustrating the dichotomy in the way Aspasia has often been presented in popular culture such as magazine and newspaper depictions. These depictions are not inherently negative, and I do not mean to say that being a flirt or hetaira is a bad thing, but the authors use these characteristics to discredit her intellectual influence in ancient Athens.
Due to this varying portrayal and with none of her own written work remaining, Aspasia presents a fascinating example of an ancient woman whose subsequent reception has been shaped by the people around her at the time of her existence, and after the time of her existence by popular culture depictions that were created from this fragmented history. This is not unique to Aspasia, but I am interested in Aspasia specifically due to her continuous reference in modern popular culture and the ways in which she appears in vastly contrasting ways in these references.
Her history is continuously contested and argued, even in the 21st-century, and these dual narratives make her an interesting woman to analyze.
Aspasia is not the only example of a woman whose historical reconstruction is one of fragmentation, so I turned to other authors who have experienced similar constraints of a lack of
3 Rebecca Futo Kennedy, “Elite Citizen Women and the Origins of the Hetaira in Classical Athens,” Helios 42, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 62, Project MUSE. 4 Aristophanes, “The Internet Classics Archive: The Acharnians by Aristophanes,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology, accessed February 20, 2020, http://classics.mit.edu/Aristophanes/acharnians.html. 4 historical record and consistent primary source material for guidance. In the case of Sappho, for example, some of her written work remains, but it is a scattered representation of her overall collection of poems. As Yopie Prins writes in her novel Victorian Sappho, "The close relationship between 19th century philology and Victorian poetics produces this reading of
Sappho, whose texts are made to exemplify the formal mechanism through which a body, person, subjectivity, and voice can be imagined as prior to, yet also produced by, a history of fragmentation."5 Sappho is different from Aspasia in the sense that some of her written work has survived, but it is still a fragmented collection of her work. The representations of ancient women in the modern day are shaped by a history of fragmentation and interpretations that others have made through a fragmented historical record. This fragmentation is precisely why one must look at popular culture depictions of Aspasia and other ancient women with a critical eye.
Fragmented history is an issue that historians face regularly, but it is a phenomenon that occurs more frequently in women’s historical records. Women’s work has not been preserved throughout history to the extent of men’s, and significantly less information has been recorded about women compared to men due to gender bias and the prominence of men historians writing history.6 Because of this lack of preserved original voice, it is easy to assign women ideologies that would not necessarily have aligned with their true beliefs (or at least what we perceive to be their true beliefs). These women can be used as representatives for messages and propaganda because the validity of the claims of their support cannot be confirmed or denied due to the lack of preservation of their personal voice. Through this lack of information about the work and
5 Yopie Prins, Victorian Sappho (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 4. 6 Madeleine M. Henry, Prisoner of History: Aspasia of Miletus and Her Biographical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 5. 5 ideology of these historical women, their true contributions to society are being diminished to whatever new cause they are assigned to that day. This is the case with Aspasia, and I will be further analyzing the ways that she has been assigned narratives to promote alternative ideologies in 20th-century newspaper depictions.
To structure my analysis of Aspasia’s popular culture depictions, I turned to scholars who have done similar research in historical narrative reconstruction. Judith Pascoe is one scholar and educator doing such research, with a specific focus on the highly acclaimed English actress,
Sarah Siddons, who lived from 1755 to 1831.7 In The Sarah Siddons Audio Files, Pascoe discusses how Siddons performed before audio recording was invented by Thomas Edison in
1877, meaning none of her actual performances were preserved for future generations.8 Pascoe attempts to reconstruct how Siddons would have sounded in an effort to reanimate the voice of the woman who was claimed by viewers to be the best actress in the world. Her beautiful and moving performances caused riots in the streets and passionate descriptions in letters and diary entries, and these depictions, although dramatic in their own right, provide an idea of the passion induced by Siddons’s performances.9 Part of Pascoe’s attempts at reanimation came from listening to other, slightly later, performances of the same scripts that Siddons would have performed. From these, she found fragments of the performance that could have been passed on in the acting community from Siddons herself. That is one way to reconstruct voice, by hearing contemporary performers who would have potentially been acting in a similar way just 40 years later. Another method of reanimation Pascoe uses is descriptions of Siddons’s performances
7 Judith Pascoe, The Sarah Siddons Audio Files: Romanticism and the Lost Voice (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2013), ix. 8 Pascoe, The Sarah Siddons Audio Files, ix 9 Pascoe, The Sarah Siddons Audio Files, 2. 6 from people who physically attended the shows. These firsthand accounts provide descriptions of her performances, although likely dramatized, that are helpful in reconstructing Siddon’s acting style and impact. We cannot hear her exact emphasis, pace, and tone, but we can understand the passion and the skill with which Siddons performed through these firsthand accounts of her performances from the theatergoers.
As I read The Sarah Siddons Audio Files, I understood that there are significant constraints one has when attempting to reconstruct the history of a person when their work does not exist in the historical record, but there are also incredibly valuable sources that could aid in this reconstruction and provide a window into the world in which Aspasia lived. However,
Aspasia offers a different constraint in the sense that she lived in Athens during the 5th-century
BCE, a time from which few primary sources referencing her remain due to the vicissitudes of historical preservation, the burning of the Library of Alexandria, and the pillaging of historic sites in the Mediterranean. The primary source material that I previously mentioned, including the works of Plato and comic poets like Aristophanes, are the only references we have to Aspasia from her own time.
Through the work of Prins and Pascoe, I realized the constraints and the value of researching Aspasia’s depictions in popular culture. Fragmentation in Aspasia’s historical record means that little is known of her life, but that there is room for interpretation that presents its own values. Much can also be learned from accounts of from her contemporaries, but these sources need to be viewed with a critical eye. I will analyze the rhetoric that authors have used to discuss Aspasia from the late 19th to the late 20th-centuries. Specifically, I will be tracking newspaper publications from 1874 to 1994 in order to understand popular perception of Aspasia, as well as the narratives that authors assign to her. Through this research, I have discovered that 7 Aspasia has been depicted as both a rhetorician and a courtesan, a scholar and a flirt, indiscriminately throughout the centuries.
Why has there not been a pattern or trend in her depictions? Initially, I thought that her depictions would follow the same pattern as the different waves of feminism, mirroring the ideologies of the suffrage, first-wave feminist, second-wave feminist, and postmodern feminist movements with more liberal and increasingly empowering interpretations of Aspasia’s contributions to history. After searching the archives of The New York Times and The Chicago
Tribune, I found that this was not the case. Instead, throughout the late 19th and 20th-centuries
(and even before), her depictions have switched back and forth fairly regularly, following no distinct pattern or trend. This was at first disheartening, as I no longer had a clear progression of depictions to analyze chronologically. However, I realized that there is power and importance in the fact that there is no pattern. Aspasia was a controversial figure during her time of existence, given her status as a foreigner, possibly a hetaira, and a partner to one of the most prominent
Athenian leaders, and her controversial nature has transcended to the centuries after her death.
Her story is intriguing because there is no pattern in her depiction, and that has consistently been the case even when she was alive.
Instead of examining her depictions chronologically, I instead split the articles that I found into two categories: positive depictions that reference Aspasia’s intellect and positive influence in Athens, and negative depictions that reference Aspasia as solely a hetaira and deny her influence. Through this research, I also found that although Aspasia has been depicted in a variety of different ways throughout the past century, she is consistently utilized to promote agendas for which the authors are personally advocating. These agendas range from promoting the ideology of women’s rights in the early 20th-century, to promoting the traditional, subservient 8 roles of women in American society after World War II. When no work of the woman remains, authors can write narratives that may or may not actually have aligned with the woman’s true ideals. This is not just an issue of varying depictions of Aspasia of Miletus, but rather a feminist issue at its core. History has a pattern of misrepresenting and disregarding the contributions of women in their fields, and this is perpetuated when authors present narratives that support their personal ideologies and use historical women as figureheads for their cause. Aspasia has consistently been discredited and her narrative recreated, which is why I attempt to understand how her narrative has been created to both control and liberate women in the 19th and 20th- centuries.
9 Chapter I
Positive Newspaper Depictions of Aspasia of Miletus
Although primary source material for Aspasia is limited, her name appears with relative frequency in popular culture. Starting in 1100 CE, people began associating Aspasia’s name with her being an authority figure who women should strive to emulate. The first known documented depiction of this association is in the nun Héloïse’s letters to her teacher, the medieval French scholastic philosopher, Peter Abélard. Within this letter, she appeals to what she considers to be an Aspasian ideal – that marriage does not inherently mean mutual commitment, and that plenty of relationships work without the assumption of the social role of marriage.10 Héloïse appeals to
Aspasian ideals throughout her letters to Abélard, and these appeals not only relate to marriage or her lack thereof, but also to her feeling like an outsider in the scholarly world that Abélard inhabits.11 In this early reference of Aspasia’s lifestyle being one to emulate, Héloïse appeals to the qualities of Aspasia’s life with which she most strongly identifies: a relationship that does not result in marriage, and feeling like an outsider in her partner’s sphere of influence.
Aspasia has been a role model for people who consider themselves outsiders in their communities, and this influence extends back to her being mentioned in Héloïse’s letters to
Abélard. These positive interpretations of Aspasia were not just utilized in personal letters and private communications, but they were also utilized in popular culture through newspaper and magazine publications. In this chapter, I will be discussing the popular culture depictions of
Aspasia that appeared in newspaper publications between 1874 and 1994, emphasizing the
10 Madeleine M. Henry, Prisoner of History: Aspasia of Miletus and Her Biographical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 84. 11 Ibid, 85. 10 articles that depict Aspasia as a rhetorician and esteemed member of the academic society in 5th- century BCE Athens. The promotion of this idea that Aspasia was someone to emulate became increasingly prominent in the 19th century, which aligns with cultural curiosity in regard to the
Woman Question. As stated in “Painted Lady: Aspasia in Nineteenth Century Art” by Cory
Geraths and Michele Kennerly, “A preeminent woman of ideas, she was on the lips and brush tips of many on the lookout for antecedent and analogous women to serve as models and antimodels.”12 In this chapter, I will be focusing on the depictions of her that present her as a model woman.
The first article I will be analyzing was also published during the Victorian era, on March
15, 1874 in The Chicago Tribune. This article, titled “Aspasia and Pericles: Further Responses to the Lecture of the Rev. Mr. Bartlett: Vindications of the Character of the Two Illustrious
Greeks”, details the importance of calling things by their “right names”. This was a direct response to a lecture published in The Chicago Tribune by Reverend Bartlett, in which he claimed, “The mistress class was that of Aspasia – brilliant, witty, elegant, and polished; but they were debauched and corrupt.”13 Bartlett went on to say that “he had taken pains to investigate the proofs of the corruptness of Aspasia’s character. He had not the means of consulting the original authorities, but Pericles was a vile man in his personal character – a brilliant, trimming politician, presiding over the most corrupt days of Greece.”14 The article that I will be analyzing was
12 Cory Geraths and Michele Kennerly, “Painted Lady: Aspasia in Nineteenth Century Art,” Rhetoric Review 35:3 (Summer 2016): 199. 13 “Aspasia and Pericles: Further Responses to the Lecture of Rev. Mr. Bartlett: Vindications of the Character of the Two Illustrious Greeks.” The Chicago Tribune, March 15, 1874, https://chicagotribune.newspapers.com/image/466344811/?terms=aspasia 14 Ibid. 11 published in response to this negative depiction of Aspasia and Pericles’s nature by Reverend
Bartlett.
The anonymous author of this piece claims that the lecture by Reverend Bartlett was inappropriate because he portrayed Aspasia in a false and inaccurate way. The author started the article by claiming that we call things by their right names, so it was inaccurate for Bartlett to refer to Aspasia as a courtesan because that was not the extent of who she was.
Yes, by all means let us be careful to call all things, “women included,” by their
right names; and that is just why the Rev. Mr. Bartlett is being “taken to task” for
calling Aspasia a courtesan. We do not – at least judicious people do not – think it
wise to call a man who has been guilty of defalcation a thief; nor do we call a thief
a burglar; in those matters most people do call things by their right names.15
The author of this article believes that Aspasia is not a courtesan, and that it is factually inaccurate to refer to her as such. They continue to refute this idea that she was strictly a courtesan, claiming that Aspasia was married to Pericles in every sense of the word, even though they were not technically married. They wrote, “That Pericles himself regarded Aspasia as really his wife seems certain when we remember that, although legally divorced from his first wife, to whom he had been legally married, he took no other than Aspasia as her successor.”16 This claim heightens Aspasia’s role from that of a courtesan to that of a respected and equal partner to
Pericles, based on the fact that Pericles never remarried and only associated with Aspasia after his divorce.
15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 12 The author also claimed, in response to criticism from Bartlett, that it is logical that
Aspasia had a house of foreign women who sought her guidance. A common criticism of
Aspasia is that she ran a brothel, but the author claims that young foreign women sought out
Aspasia due to her being of the same metic status, and that they worked under her as domestic servants who she rented out to people who needed temporary help in their homes. The author argues that this was not inherently sexual, and that it made financial sense for the women, who were metics and unable to marry in Athenian society, and for Aspasia herself to work in this manner and aid these women.17 The author argues that these young, foreign women may have been perceived as courtesans because they were not tethered to a man in society, which would have been deemed immoral in 5th-century BCE Athens and potentially led members of society to equate them with high-class prostitutes.
The author of this article does not seem to be drawing these conclusions from any sources in particular, so it is difficult to determine how they came across this information that made them argue so vehemently in favor of Aspasia’s reputation. They do cite Plutarch and Athenaeus as classical sources that spoke negatively about Aspasia and mentioned her “dishonorable business.” The author, however, elaborates by saying that Athenaeus was known to be fond of gossip and scandal, immediately delegitimizing his claims. They also recognize that Plutarch and
Athenaeus were writing about Aspasia centuries after she lived, which is another limitation of their accounts of her profession and identity. The lack of reliable primary sources has presented a difficult constraint in my own analysis of Aspasia, and this article enforces that this fragmented history has been an issue throughout her entire documentation. Although ancient authors and playwrights mention Aspasia, there is not much information within these accounts that can be
17 Ibid. 13 interpreted as fact, which the author of this newspaper article emphasizes in his defense of her character.
Although the author of this article focuses on Aspasia’s relationship with Pericles and what she did as a profession, the author also discusses Aspasia’s influence in the field of rhetoric.
They claimed that it was “an undeniable fact that the wisest and best men of her time – men whose teachings, poetry, and philosophy have been the instruction, delight, and consolation of the rarest and best souls through all the ages since – sought her society, admired and honored her, and encouraged their own sons, daughters, and wives to visit her.”18 This statement, although not the focus of the article, indicates that there was some popular culture belief in the
Victorian era that Aspasia was not just a loyal partner to be emulated in the reader’s own marriage, but that she was also a brilliant scholar who taught the great men of ancient Greece.
As early as 1874, she was being referenced in regard to her academic accomplishments and not just in regard to her relationship with Pericles.
This article, “Aspasia and Pericles: Further Responses to the Lecture of Rev. Mr. Bartlett:
Vindications of the Character of the Two Illustrious Greeks,” provides a Victorian example of positive public interpretations regarding Aspasia’s identity. Even though it is a positive interpretation of her character, the author does use Aspasia to promote an alternate agenda that is not entirely based in fact. Although the text begins as a promotion of Aspasia’s character, the author later begins to discuss how Aspasia and Pericles’s relationship is an example of an unconventional relationship for their time period that was relatively successful. This leads the author into a discussion of the concept of purity in reference to a relationship out of wedlock, and into a further discussion of Mormonism, which was becoming prominent in Illinois during the
18 Ibid. 14 1870s. The author claims that even if a custom is unfamiliar or uncharacteristic in a culture, especially with polyamory in the Mormon religion, that does not inherently make it impure. The author uses Aspasia within this article to represent someone who defied societal norms during her time period, and who is an example for people who may consider certain practices impure in the modern day. The author is using Aspasia as a figurehead for an ideology that she may not have agreed with had she been alive during this time period. She was assigned the narrative of someone in an unconventional and successful marriage, and was utilized in this argument due to her lack of definitive identity. Because Aspasia does not have a definitive historical narrative, she was molded to fit the narrative that the author desired.
The second article that I will be analyzing is titled “Ancient and Modern New Women:
Being a History of Their Strangest Moods,” published in The Chicago Tribune on January 5,
1896. This is a progressive piece, given that The Chicago Tribune published it right before the turn of the century, that detailed the societal contributions of women from ancient history to the modern day with a particular emphasis on the “New Woman.” Within this article, the author identifies the concept of the New Woman as a woman who advocates for herself and her advancement in society. The idea of the New Woman came into prominence during the Victorian era and was prevalent into World War II. During this time the definition of the New Woman evolved to mean a woman who was economically independent and experienced freedom and equality in their relationships.19 This was the progressive ideology that influenced this article, and this was the framework within which the author wrote about Aspasia.
After the author’s description of what defines the New Woman, they elaborate by providing examples of women that they divide into the categories: Classic Greece, Ancient
19 June B. West, “The ‘New Woman’,” Twentieth Century Literature 1, no. 2 (1955): 56. 15 Rome, On Through Time, In a Pacific Paradise, and In the Press. For the sake of this analysis I will only be analyzing the section on Classical Greece, but each of these categories include prominent women and their various contributions throughout history. Within the section on
Classical Greece, the author writes about Helen and Penelope, describing how they kept to their
“newness” mold until their late death.20 The author then goes on to describe Sappho as “new to the extent of inventing a ‘musical’ mode and of writing poetry in advance of her age – and of all succeeding ages.”21 After praising these women, in addition to Spartan women who the author claimed to be almost “incredibly new” given their energetic patriotism and relative social mobility in comparison to other women in the city-states of Hellas, the author begins their discussion of Aspasia.22
Aspasia was a new woman, as shown in her Presidency of a literary club. To hear
her brilliant decisions Socrates was wont to draw around him his pallium and
saunter forth undeterred by Lanthippe’s homespun Greek. At the club he was sure
to find the philosophic Anaxagoras and the princely Pericles. As to the architecture
of the Acropolis and general municipal advances in Athens’ time of glory, it is
impossible at this late day to point out definitely Aspasia’s contributions to ideas;
but, as the admired adviser of Pericles, we may be sure she had a great deal to say
upon all progressive subjects.23
20 “Ancient and Modern New Women: Being a History of Their Strangest Moods,” The Chicago Tribune, January 5, 1896, https://search-proquest- com.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/hnpchicagotribune/docview/175218957/9E93ADC1F0B1474BPQ/249?accountid=13 158. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 16 This author of this article is blatantly supportive of the idea that Aspasia was a scholar and major contributor to the advancement of 5th-century BCE Athenian society, including in “all progressive subjects” that Pericles enforced during his time in power.
To begin, this author describes Aspasia as the President of a literary club, referencing the salons that she held to discuss philosophy and rhetoric. By referencing the salons, the author is already advocating for the idea that Aspasia facilitated and contributed to discussions held by the academic leaders of ancient Athens. The author continues, referencing Socrates, Anaxagoras, and her partner, Pericles, as her pupils who would join her to discuss ideas regarding the state of
Athenian society and democracy. Although the author acknowledges that it is impossible to truly determine Aspasia’s influence on the construction of the Acropolis and other municipal projects that were completed during the Golden Age of Ancient Athens, they do claim that she must have had some sort of influence over the projects and ideas that came out of this time period. As the partner to Pericles, and as the teacher to some of the leading philosophers and rhetoricians of her time, the author believes that it is fair to assume that there would have been some exchange of ideas regarding these projects and advancements.
This article is crucial in the analysis of Aspasia’s representation in popular culture, especially given the fact that it was published 1896 when the issue of women’s rights was not as prominent in the mainstream media. By publishing this article lauding the accomplishments of ancient women, the author was making a clear statement about the importance of these women’s contributions to society. The author featured Aspasia prominently in this article about influential new women, thereby enforcing the idea to the general public that her contributions were valuable and noteworthy. Throughout this piece, the author uses Aspasia to advocate for the idea of the 17 New Woman: a woman who was liberated, experienced equality, and who had her own voice to contribute to society just as much as the men around her.
The next article that I will be discussing was published in The New York Times on July 1,
1900, under the title, “Aspasia.” This article is more of a biographical description of Aspasia, without any apparent alternate agenda being promoted by the author. Although the author describes Aspasia as a courtesan, they acknowledge the contributions that she made to the intellectual community of 5th-century BCE Athens, as well as to the morale of the women who came to visit her at her salon. The author elaborated on Aspasia and the women she kept in her company.
Their personal beauty often made them the chosen models of painters and sculptors,
and the themes of licentious poets, and as we have already said, Aspasia, who was
at their head, wielded such a powerful influence over even their best and wisest
men that they resorted to her house as to a lecture room, accompanied by their
wives.24
The author of this article includes the fact that artists have portrayed Aspasia solely for her looks in the past, while in the same sentence describes the ways in which Aspasia wielded intellectual influence over the men and women who came to her salon. This is indicative of the varying perceptions of Aspasia, an idea that was enforced when the author wrote, “This remarkable woman was noted not only for her beauty, but for her talents, and for the elevation to which she had attained in learning.”25 In a society that valued women for their appearances, Aspasia was also valued for her intellect.
24 The Westminster Review, “Aspasia,” The New York Times, July 1, 1900, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1900/07/01/101061090.html?pageNumber=25. 25 Ibid. 18 The author of this article does discuss a different component of Aspasia’s salons – the inclusion of women in the discussions that she held. It is not uncommon to hear mention of
Aspasia’s salons in the context of her teaching Socrates and Pericles in the art of rhetoric, but hearing about the women she taught enforces the idea that specific women were able to receive some sort of education in 5th-century BCE Athens. The fact that certain women attended schools or were tutored in 5th-century BCE Athens is not debated, as there is primary source material from this time period that clearly depicts young women attending school and receiving an education. In the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for example, there is a red-figure terracotta kylix, or drinking cup, from c. 460-450 BCE that is attributed to the Painter of Bologna. On the interior of the kylix, the artist depicted two school-girls carrying a pair of writing tablets and a stylus.
Although it is not indicated where they are going, it is clear that they are about to engage in something academic given the items they are carrying and the clothing they are wearing. On the exterior of the kylix there is a scene of women conversing, and this again indicates that women would commune to share ideas and engage in academic practices, even though citizen women in ancient Athens did not have a significant amount of social mobility.
19
Figure 1: Kylix depicting young Athenian women on their way to academic lessons
Because of the primary source material that clearly indicates young women receiving an education, it is not unreasonable to assume that Aspasia also taught young women either on their own or with their partners when they visited her salons. The author wrote, in regard to the reasoning behind why men brought their wives to her salons, “They evidently wished the latter to profit by the learned and brilliant conversation of the gifted courtesan, who at least taught them that the life of ignorance and seclusion to which they doomed their women was that which was least calculated to develop their mental powers and render them congenial partners.”26 Although the claim that women received an education from Aspasia is framed in a way that is meant to
26 Ibid. 20 benefit the man and the quality of their relationship, the author of this biographical article still focused heavily on the role of Aspasia in educating women. Aspasia is referred to as a courtesan and mistress, with continued reference to her physical appearance, but the overall message was the promotion of Aspasia as an educator and scholar.
The next article that I will be analyzing, titled “Mary Beard Depicts World’s Debt to
Women: Makes Them Inventors of Civilizing Arts,” was written by Fanny Butcher and published in The Chicago Tribune on November 18, 1931. Butcher wrote this article as a book review of On Understanding Women by Mary R. Beard. Mary R. Beard was a women’s suffrage activist and was considered to be the twentieth century’s premiere historian on women.27
Similarly to Aspasia, she is also often forgotten or misinterpreted in the historical record, with very few of her contributions acknowledged in the field of history. Butcher wrote this article in response to Beard’s book, also published in 1931.
Butcher begins the article with a brief summary of the importance of On Understanding
Women and Beard’s study of the historical contributions of women. She wrote, “On
Understanding Women is not a recital of women’s achievement as a sex, but rather the record of her undeniable, though often misinterpreted, participation in the making of the world.”28 Butcher claims that Beard attempted to highlight the role of women in the making of the world as we know it. Butcher explains that in her book, Beard considered Aspasia to be one of these women that contributed significantly to the course of history. Beard wrote, “Whether it is Aspasia lecturing Pericles and friends, Sappho teaching Socrates, Roman women participating in
27 Bonnie G. Smith, “Seeing Mary Beard,” Feminist Studies 10, no. 3 (1984): 399. 28 Fanny Butcher, “Mary Beard Depicts World’s Debt to Women,” The Chicago Tribune, November 18, 1931, https://search.proquest.com/hnpchicagotribune/docview/181275873/9E93ADC1F0B1474BPQ/185?accountid=1315 8. 21 Senatorial conflicts and battles over the succession to the Imperial throne… or the wife of
Pythagoras interpreting and spreading a faith, the truth that women have always been in or near the center of things is illustrated.”29 By including Aspasia in this list of women who were at the
“center of things,” Beard enforces the idea that Aspasia was prominent in Athenian society and therefore, world history. In addition, with the mention of Pericles as a participant in Aspasia’s lectures, Beard indicates that Aspasia played an important role in Periclean Athens, potentially influencing his political policies that he implemented during the Golden Age.
Butcher concludes this book review with the statement, “Mrs. Beard’s volume is in no sense a history of the struggle of womankind to achieve a position equal to man’s. It is rather the historical statement of woman’s position throughout the ages beside man.” In this review,
Butcher analyzed the way in which Beard used Aspasia and other ancient women to advocate for women’s contributions to history, not just documenting the struggles that women have faced.
Beard paints Aspasia as a woman who was at the center of Athenian politics, not just as a partner to Pericles but as an intellectual contributor as well. Butcher’s review of On Understanding
Women, and her inclusion of Beard’s quotation about Aspasia and other ancient women, enforces the idea that Aspasia was being written about as a scholar and intellectual in the popular culture of the early 20th-century. Aspasia was utilized to promote women’s contributions to history both in the book by Mary R. Beard and in the review of this book by Fanny Butcher.
Another article that depicts Aspasia in a positive manner is titled “The 39 Guests Who Changed the West,” published in The Chicago Tribune and written by Anne Marie Lipinski. This article is a summary and review of “The Dinner Party,” an art installation created by Judy Chicago in
1979. “The Dinner Party” is considered to be an icon of 1970s feminist artwork and a milestone
29 Ibid. 22 of 20th-century artwork as a whole.30 “The Dinner Party” is a massive ceremonial banquet on a triangular table with thirty-nine places settings. Each of these place settings represent and commemorate important women throughout history, often women who have been overlooked in the historical record and not given a place at the table. The place settings “consist of embroidered runners, gold chalices and utensils, and china-painted porcelain plates with raised central motifs that are based on vulvar and butterfly forms and rendered in styles appropriate to the individual women being honored.”31 Within this art installation, Aspasia is given her own place setting at the table.
Figure 2: "The Dinner Party" by Judy Chicago
30 “The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago,” Brooklyn Museum: The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago, accessed March 1, 2020, https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/dinner_party. 31 Ibid. 23
Figure 3: Aspasia's Place Setting in "The Dinner Party"
Lipinski prefaces this article by writing that the women featured in the art installation are not easily recognizable figures, with a wide array of ancient and classical women featured.
Ancient women included in the thirty-nine women in the art installation are the snake goddess,
Hatshepsut, Sappho, Boudicca, and others whose contributions to their fields and to the course of history are overlooked in the modern day. Aspasia’s place setting at the table is composed of multiple elements that are characteristic of ancient Greece, including a blooming floral pattern that references her femininity, earth tones that reflect the architecture and art of the 5th-century 24 BCE, runners that are reflective of the chitons and jewelry worn during the time period, and a floral pattern that mimics the motifs found on many Greek vases and urns.32
Lipinski’s article provides brief description of the women that are featured in the 39 place settings and their accomplishments, even though there are still nine hundred and ninety-nine women who are mentioned in the art installation through gold inscriptions on the floor.33
Aspasia’s reference in Lipinski’s article, although short, describes her as “a scholar, philosopher, and live-in companion of Pericles” who “founded the first salon in Athens, which invited women to take part along with men in the intellectual dialogue of the day.”34 This article provides a feminist interpretation of Aspasia’s contributions to Athenian society, with a specific emphasis on her influence on young Athenian women. This description ignores the prominent men that
Aspasia is said to have conversed with and influenced, and instead focuses on the fact that women were included in salon culture. Although it is true that women were included in the intellectual sphere in ancient Athens, this description does not acknowledge Aspasia’s influence on the prominent Athenian leaders and instead focuses on the impact that Aspasia had on women during that period. It has also not been proven that Aspasia founded the very first salon where people would go to discuss politics, current events, and scholarship, and it is rather unlikely that she was in fact the original founder of this concept.
This is a valuable narrative that is presented by Lipinski, but it is one that ignores the whole story of Aspasia’s influence in order to suit Lipinski and Chicago’s feminist cause. It is important to consider the fact that this piece of artwork is an incredibly feminist piece, so
32 “Aspasia,” Brooklyn Museum: Aspasia, accessed March 1, 2020, https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/dinner_party/place_settings/aspasia. 33 “The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago,” Brooklyn Museum, https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/dinner_party/place_settings/aspasia. 34 Lipinski, “The 39 Guests Who Changed the West.” 25 Lipinski’s article is reflective of the second wave feminist beliefs that were culminating in the
1970s. Lipinski, in her description of Aspasia, along with her descriptions of the other women featured in the piece, utilizes the feminist narratives of the women while ignoring aspects of their narratives that do not comply with the overall feminist message. Chicago, in “The Dinner Party,” and Lipinski, in this article, use Aspasia as a figurehead of the feminist movement to promote the message of women’s equality and inclusion in the historical record.
The final article that I will be discussing in my analysis of the positive representations of
Aspasia in popular culture is titled, “The First Power Couple.” This article was written by John
Newhouse and published in The New York Times on May 1, 1994. Newhouse begins this article by claiming that he is writing to commemorate the anniversary of Pericles’s birth, in 494 BCE, because it has too long been ignored.35 The first portion of this article is Newhouse describing the accomplishments of Pericles and why he deserves further recognition.
Although he is a more distant figure than, say, Columbus, we owe him a lot more,
although we can’t measure how much, since most of the literature in which he
figured hasn’t survived. We know that probably no one has ever ruled as wisely or
as long with the consent of the governed. We know that he was the inspiration for
and patron of the richest effusion of classical art. Briefly, we know that Pericles
defined and dominated an eponymous era that was the closest thing to a golden age
that our history reveals.36
It is immediately clear that Newhouse holds Pericles in very high esteem, and that he believes that there needs to be universal recognition of the legacy that Pericles created in democratic
35 John Newhouse, “The First Power Couple,” The New York Times, May 1, 1994, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1994/05/01/issue.html. 36 Ibid. 26 society. This praise, however, is not the main theme of the article, as Newhouse transitions to discussing Aspasia, her controversial nature, and the ways in which Athenian society used
Aspasia to discredit and attack Pericles.
Newhouse begins by describing Aspasia and her character, claiming that she was a political force even given her status as a hetaira. Her social status as a “high-class, cultivated courtesan” did not deter Pericles, Newhouse claims, because he took her into his house, had a child with her, and made no effort in hiding her superior intellect from the public and his peers.37
Newhouse continues, mentioning Aspasia’s elite salons:
Neither before nor after Aspasia did an Athenian woman keep a salon in her house,
much less one to which the city’s deepest thinkers and their pupils flocked. Among
the notables with whom Aspasia discussed politics and philosophy were Socrates
and members of his cult. Socrates was known to have been deeply impressed by
Aspasia. And Plato, in his dialogue between Socrates and Menexenus, identifies
her as the real author of Pericles’s only famous utterance, the funeral oration for the
dead in the early days of the Peloponnesian war.38
Here, Newhouse not only acknowledges Aspasia’s intellect in regard to her salons, but he also acknowledges the extent of her influence on the politics and philosophy of ancient Athens. Not only did she hold spirited conversations about politics within her home, but she also influenced political orations as detailed in Plato’s Menexenus. Pericles’s funeral oration is considered to be one of the great pieces of ancient oratory, preserved by Thucydides in his book The History of the Peloponnesian War. To write about Aspasia in a newspaper article about Pericles’s legacy,
37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. 27 and to acknowledge her contributions to the Golden Age of Athenian democracy, is indicative of
Newhouse’s promotion of Aspasia as a positive influence during her time.
Although Newhouse writes about Aspasia’s contributions throughout this article, he concludes the piece by describing the ways in which the Athenian people disapproved of Pericles and Aspasia’s relationship and attempted to use their relationship to discredit Pericles. He elaborates on the work of the comic poets, and how these negative representations of Aspasia influenced public opinion of her and her relationship. By attacking Aspasia and Pericles’s tight circle of intimate friends and advisors, Newhouse argues that critics were then able to more aggressively harass Pericles.39 This judgement and harassment led to the indictment of two people close to Pericles: Aspasia and Phidias, the sculptor responsible for the chryselephantine statue of Athena in the Parthenon.40 Although Aspasia was spared in these trials, comic poets did not stop using Aspasia to critique Pericles. Newhouse wrote, “Aspasia wasn’t blamed for the plague, but a few comic poets did accuse Pericles of arranging the war to divert attention from his Aspasia-related miseries.”41 This claim was later used by Aristophanes in his play, The
Acharnians. Newhouse quickly concludes the piece after this analysis, summarizing that Aspasia and Pericles were a power couple due to their mutual respect for one another, and due to their relationship lasting through all of these difficult times.
This article, although initially framed as a discussion of Pericles and his legacy given the anniversary of his birth, became more about Aspasia as the piece progressed. This article was more biographical and did not seem to utilize Aspasia for an ulterior motive other than to advocate for her contributions to Athenian democracy and Pericles’s wellbeing. Newhouse did
39 Ibid. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 28 not blatantly use Aspasia as a figurehead for a movement or ideology, but he promoted the idea that even though Aspasia was a hetaira, she still functioned as a respected member of Pericles’s inner circle who influenced the politics and philosophy of Athens in the 5th-century BCE.
All of these articles that were published in either The New York Times or The Chicago
Tribune have one thing in common: the authors promoted the idea that Aspasia was influential in the intellectual and political environment of 5th-century BCE Athens. Through her connection to
Pericles as a respected partner, her status as a metic allowing her different advantages and disadvantages in Athenian society, and her intellectual prowess, Aspasia was interpreted in these articles as a woman who educated and conversed with the Athenian elite during her day.
However, as indicated by Newhouse throughout his article, there has been consistent debate regarding Aspasia’s character even during her own time period. From the comic poets of the 5th century BCE, to the newspaper publications of the 20th-century, Aspasia has also been portrayed in a very negative manner that discredits her relationship with Pericles, emphasizes her status as a hetaira, and negates any claim that Aspasia was an intellectual force in Athenian society. The articles discussed in this chapter represent a few examples of the positive interpretations of
Aspasia in the United States in print media, but these were not the only interpretations of Aspasia circulating in the media during the 20th-century. Much like during her own time period, negative interpretations of her character were also circulating in popular culture. In the next chapter, I will be analyzing articles that portray Aspasia in a negative manner, and the ways in which the authors of these articles use Aspasia to promote alternative ideologies. 29 Chapter II
Negative Newspaper Depictions of Aspasia of Miletus
Authors have depicted Aspasia as a role model to which women should aspire, but at the same time she has also been portrayed as the opposite. Conflicting depictions of Aspasia as both a rhetorician and as a flirt have been prevalent in Aspasia’s documentation as far back as the 5th- century BCE. In fact, the only known contemporary evidence for Aspasia’s life has been found in Attic comedy, which satirizes and documents the politics and society of ancient Athens.42 The comic references to Aspasia were incredibly sexual, and rarely mentioned any contributions that
Aspasia made to the intellectual community. Cratinus describes Aspasia as a “dog-eyed concubine,” Eupolis describes Aspasia as “Helen” in reference to her sexual impropriety, and
Aristophanes details and condemns Aspasia’s profession as a brothel-owner in Acharnians.43
These contemporary depictions of Aspasia set the foundation for later authors to depict Aspasia in a similar, hyper-sexualized manner with complete disregard of her intellectual contributions to society.
At the same time that authors were lauding her accomplishments, as discussed in the previous chapter, others critiqued her contributions to ancient Athens with claims that she was exclusively a prostitute who wielded negative influence over Pericles. One author that I will be analyzing in this chapter even claimed that Aspasia and her relationship with Pericles was the cause of the Peloponnesian War. Similarly to the depictions of Aspasia as a rhetorician and equal partner to Pericles, the authors that depict Aspasia as a courtesan used her to advocate for other ideologies. The authors of the following pieces use Aspasia to advocate for their own beliefs
42 Madelaine Henry, Prisoner of History, 19. 43 Ibid, 25. 30 regarding their desired status of women in society, regardless of the validity of using Aspasia as a figurehead for these claims. In this chapter, I will be analyzing articles from 1903 to 1994 where the authors depict Aspasia as a courtesan, flirt, and threat to Athenian democracy and utilize her for alternative narratives.
The first article that I will be analyzing was published under the initials F. I. D. in The
Chicago Tribune in 1903 and titled “The Famous Flirts of History.” Aspasia is only mentioned briefly, and the author associates her with other women that they consider to be flirts, including
Cleopatra, Queen Elizabeth, and Empress Eugenie.44 This depiction of Aspasia must be analyzed within the context of the other women who the author writes about more thoroughly, given her limited mention. In the introduction of the article where Aspasia is mentioned, the author emphasizes the ways in which women who are kind have aided the men with whom they interact.
The greatest flirts of the world – Aspasia, George Sand, Mademoiselle Recamier –
these greater because grander women than others who have fascinated – for
instance, Cleopatra, Marie Antoinette, Josephine of France, Ninon de l’Enclos, and
the catalogue – and because they were stronger in kindness than in any other
quality, and because whatever were their several defects their influence was such
as to lift the men with whom they associated.45
This description of powerful historical women does not strip them of their power, but it belittles their influence solely to the impact they had on the men in their lives. By claiming that their
44 “The Famous Flirts of History,” The Chicago Tribune, October 4, 1903, https://search-proquest- com.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/hnpchicagotribune/docview/173102226/9E93ADC1F0B1474BPQ/228?accountid=13 158. 45 Ibid. 31 strongest quality was kindness, the author is ignoring the other qualities that these women had in order to emphasize their ability to “lift the men with whom they associated.”46 Although this is not a harsh description of the negative influence of women, as some of the articles I will be analyzing detail, the author is still determining the women’s narratives in relation to the men in their lives and diminishing their characters to strictly that of a flirt.
The author mentions Aspasia again in this piece, briefly, in the section titled “Many in
List with Faustina.” This description further defines Aspasia as a flirt and compares her nature to
Cleopatra’s:
Cleopatra was the magnum opus of coquetry; her mode was divergent from
Aspasia’s, though both were equals in tact. Aspasia appealed to the ideal in man
and perfected a belief in himself – his soul. Cleopatra so tangled his body with his
soul, poor fellow, that – well, we know Mark Anthony’s experience, he whom she
deluded at his worst.47
This mention of Aspasia further emphasizes the idea that Aspasia was a flirt, and the author equates her appeal to men with that of Cleopatra’s, who they define as the most important flirt of them all. Again, Aspasia is mentioned only in relation to the way she makes men feel, with no reference to her committed relationship to Pericles or to her scholarship. By defining Aspasia in this way, the author diminishes her contributions strictly to her ability to make men believe in themselves, as they do with many other prominent historical women throughout this article.
The author ends this article with the statement, “The coquette is vain; the flirt is proud; the coquette keeps her complexion though she send him tumbling down sharp rocks to the deep
46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. 32 sea. The flirt. If there is a heart to be broken, breaks her own.”48 This final sentence once again emphasizes the author’s beliefs that a woman’s impact only comes from the influence she has on the men around her. Throughout this piece, the author uses famous historical women to promote a very specific narrative: women of influence throughout history were only influential because of their flirtatious nature. The author elevates the flirt to higher esteem than the coquette, but also claims that the flirt’s only role is to be inspired by men and to inspire men themselves. The final statement, that “if there is a heart to be broke, [she] breaks her own,” promotes the idea that women are supposed to be kind and self-sacrificing when it comes to protecting the feelings of the men in their lives. Although the author does not ignore the impact of certain women on the course of history, at one point even calling Cleopatra a great stateswoman, they certainly emphasize the role that their supposed flirtatious nature had on their success.
The second article that I will be analyzing was published in The Chicago Tribune on June
7, 1964 and titled “Protest! Behind Every Man… Baloney!” In this article, the author, Francis
Coughlin, addresses the theory that behind every strong man there is a stronger woman who helped him and directly argues against it. This article is accompanied by the pictures of Dante,
Napoleon, and Caesar with the captions, “Dante left his wife at home,” “Napoleon fought a draw
48 Ibid. 33 with Josephine,” and “Caesar conquered Gaul without the help of Mrs. C,” respectively.49 These images appear before the text, and are indicative of the content of the article that follows.
After the images, Coughlin begins the article by debunking the idea that behind every great man there is a greater woman. He writes about this idea as if it is comical and completely implausible.
Let’s lay one cherished tenet of folk nonsense to rest right now! It’s the delusion
that whole legions of famous men have been ennobled, inspired, informed, and
uplifted by the “little women” who have shared their domestic lives in the binds of
lawful matrimony. Whether the illustrious gentlemen were poets or philosophers,
artists or scientists, soldiers or statesmen, the chances are that mama didn’t have
anything important to do with papa’s getting his name in the encyclopedia.50
Coughlin uses inflammatory language and aggressive claims to shock the reader before elaborating upon his reasoning behind these beliefs. By beginning with the statement, “let’s lay one cherished tenet of folk nonsense to rest right now!” Coughlin is clearly attempting to shock the reader and engage them in his article before diving into his actual claims. He is presenting a controversial opinion, and by addressing that this tenet is cherished he characterizes himself as someone who contradicts the norms and questions the truth. Immediately following this abrasive introduction, Coughlin derogatorily refers to female partners as “little women” who he believes simply shared domestic life with their male partners and contributed nothing else. He claims that
49 Francis Coughlin, “Protest! Behind Every Man… Baloney!”, The Chicago Tribune, June 7, 1964, https://search- proquest- com.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/hnpchicagotribune/docview/179526331/9E93ADC1F0B1474BPQ/114?accountid=13 158. 50 Ibid. 34 just because they were married, it does not mean that the woman influenced her partner in any way.
The rest of the article includes examples as to why Coughlin believes women did not influence their husbands to the extent that popular culture presents, and this is where Aspasia enters the narrative. He begins by discussing the ancient Greeks and how they were “notorious for their indifference to domestic felicity,” citing the examples of Homer’s champions being unfaithful during their time in Troy away from their wives.51 By mentioning the narrative of
Homer, Coughlin is attempting to discredit the relationships between heroes and their wives, like
Odysseus and Penelope, in order to claim that the wives had no influence on the men in their lives. He continues, claiming that although these stories of gods and heroes might just be myths, there were still applications of this sentiment to the non-mythical people of the time period. He mentions how Plato “doesn’t so much as mention Mrs. Plato as the source of even one of his ideas regarding the ideal.”52 Through the mention of Plato, Coughlin transitions from the narrative of the mythical into real-life examples in an attempt to gain credibility. He also addresses Sparta, a city-state that was known for their more progressive beliefs regarding the status of women in society. He writes, “Old Spartan marriage customs, after an other-directed courtship, resembled a dormitory panty raid, and then some.”53 By equating the status of Spartan women and their relationships to that of a “panty raid,” Coughlin is intentionally ignoring the respect that Spartans showed to their women.
Coughlin transitions from discussing the Spartan women to his mention of Aspasia in the
Athenian city-state. He ends this paragraph by writing, “And the less said about Pericles and
51 Ibid. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid. 35 Aspasia, the more edifying; local gossip had that liaison [which wound up in court] on par with the Profumo Affair.”54 As mentioned previously in reference to the comic poets, Aspasia’s relationship with Pericles was highly controversial during 5th-century BCE Athens due to her status as a metic and her role as a hetaira. Enemies of Pericles attacked Aspasia as a way to simultaneously attack him. This culminated in the people of Athens bringing a charge of impiety against Aspasia, which led to the court case that Coughlin mentions in this article. By focusing entirely on this aspect of Aspasia’s history, without mentioning any other component of her relationship with Pericles or of her personal life as a rhetorician, Coughlin associates Aspasia only with the negative aspects of her relationship with Pericles.
He expands upon this idea that Aspasia was impious by equating her relationship with
Pericles to the Profumo Affair, which was a contemporary scandal when this article was published in The Chicago Tribune. This affair occurred in England in 1961, and included an affair between the British Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, and a 19-year-old British dancer named Christine Keeler.55 In 1963, Profumo lied about the affair to the Parliament, deceiving the House of the Commons, but news spread of the affair and Profumo eventually resigned.56 By comparing Aspasia’s relationship with Pericles to the Profumo Affair, Coughlin was equating their relationship to a scandal that was familiar to the people reading the magazine in 1964. These situations were very different, but because of the limited information provided by
Coughlin, the general audience reading the article might not have known how different these situations were. Aspasia was in a committed relationship with Pericles, they had a son together,
54 Ibid. 55 Robert W. Pringle, “Profumo Affair,” Encyclopedia Britannica, accessed April 16, 2020, https://www.britannica.com/event/Profumo-affair. 56 Ibid. 36 and the only reason they could not marry was because Aspasia was not a citizen. By equating this relationship to an affair such as the Profumo Affair, Coughlin is attempting to convince the audience that this was also the nature of Aspasia and Pericles’s relationship. In this framework,
Aspasia would not have been a valued and influential partner to Pericles, which is the message that Coughlin is promoting in this article.
Coughlin ends the article by once again emphasizing the idea that women are not influential on the men in their lives.
This is not to say that a good many – maybe most – distinguished men didn’t get
along well enough with the women who happened to be their wives. Some did.
Some didn’t. But the delusion that whole legions of famous men have been
ennobled and uplifted by home cooking and hearthside consultation is ridiculous.
The theory is a dangerous subversion of sense and science. Let’s have an end to it
right now!57
With this final appeal to the readership to throw away the idea that women influence the men in their lives, and therefore the contributions of these men to society, Coughlin ends the article. It is clear that Coughlin uses Aspasia in this article to promote the idea that men are not influenced by their partners, especially due to scholarly belief that Aspasia wielded significant influence over
Pericles during the 5th-century BCE. By using Aspasia in this piece, Coughlin attempts to discredit her contributions to Athenian society, as well as the contributions of other influential women throughout history, and attribute these contributions to the men instead.
The final reference to Aspasia that I will be analyzing in this chapter is actually a letter to the editor that was written in response to the article discussed in the previous chapter, “The First
57 Coughlin, “Protest! Behind Every Man… Baloney!”. 37 Power Couple” by John Newhouse. This response was written by Ian Vorres and featured in The
New York Times on May 12, 1994, eleven days after the initial article’s publication. Although he does not mention his credentials in this response, Ian Vorres was a journalist, art collector, and historian from Greece, which earns him some level of credibility greater than that of the average reader. In this letter, Vorres calls attention to errors that he found within Newhouse’s article that he believes need to be addressed. He begins the article by writing about the inaccuracies of
Newhouse’s depictions of Aspasia and Pericles’s relationship.
How unfortunate that John New house chose to resurrect from its well-earned
oblivion the bourgeois relationship of Aspasia and Pericles. By doing so, he
inevitably got himself hopelessly enmeshed in a web of historical inaccuracies and
omissions.58
In this first sentence, Vorres claims that the relationship between Aspasia and Pericles was not worth remembering in the modern day. In bringing up this relationship, Vorres believes that
Newhouse was inaccurately documenting and interpreting history and the nature of these historical figures in his article.
After detailing the shortcomings of Pericles during the plague that swept through Athens in 429 BCE, which would eventually be the cause of Pericles’s death, Vorres writes about what he believes to be the true nature of Pericles and Aspasia.
He was never the serene, self-assured “Olympian” described by Mr. Newhouse. He
was irresolute and relied heavily on strong-willed, scheming Aspasia. In fact, he
made war against Samos at her instigation. It is also doubtful Pericles ever delivered
58 Ian Vorres, “Pericles Revisited: Letters to the Editor,” The New York Times, May 12, 1994, https://www.nytimes.com/1994/05/12/opinion/IHT-pericles-revisited-letters-to-the- editor.html?searchResultPosition=15. 38 his famous funeral oration, which was mostly historic falsification by faithful
Thucydides.59
In this paragraph, Vorres claims that not only was Pericles a weak leader for the Athenian people, but that Aspasia was the reasoning behind his poor decision-making during the
Peloponnesian War. He does not claim that Aspasia was a hetaira who did not influence
Athenian politics, like previous articles, but rather that Aspasia was “strong-willed” and
“scheming” in her influence on Pericles.60 Vorres did not strip Aspasia of her agency and instead claimed that she was the mastermind behind decisions being made in the Peloponnesian War.
Another component of this paragraph that prompts further examination is Vorres’s claim that Pericles never actually gave the funeral oration that was documented by Thucydides.
Although one can never be certain that historical accounts are completely accurate in their retelling, it has long been believed that Pericles did in fact present some sort of oration to honor those who died during the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides has been cited as one of the great ancient historians, and he wrote a detailed account of the funeral procession and ceremony in the midst of the fighting that was occurring between Athens and Sparta. Thucydides wrote,
“Meanwhile these were the first that had fallen, and Pericles, son of Xanthippus, was chosen to pronounce their eulogium. When the proper time arrived, he advanced from the sepulchre to an elevated platform in order to be heard by as many of the crowd as possible…” and then proceeded to document the famous funeral oration.61 It can be difficult to discern the truth in ancient accounts of events from which very little primary source material remains. However,
59 Ibid. 60 Ibid. 61 Richard Crawley and Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (United States: Dover Publications, 2017), 82. 39 many scholars do believe that a speech was given by Pericles, even if the words of Thucydides were not the exact words spoken by Pericles. Bosworth claims that, “To some degree [the speech] corresponds to what Pericles actually said in the winter of 431/30 BC, but the degree of correspondence is a mystery.”62 Even if Thucydides account is not accurate word for word,
Pericles most likely spoke to the crowd that gathered to honor the dead in 431.
By claiming that Pericles never gave the funeral oration at all and that it was propaganda written by “faithful” Thucydides, Vorres also rejects the idea that Aspasia was the one to actually create the funeral oration. As mentioned previously, source material such as Plato’s Menexenus credits Aspasia with the creation of the funeral oration. This is one of the most significant accounts that has led scholars to believe that Aspasia influenced the rhetorical traditions of the
Golden Age of Athens. By claiming that Pericles never gave the funeral oration and that it was all a construct of Thucydides, Vorres is claiming that Aspasia had no hand in the famous utterance.
Vorres concludes the letter to the editor by emphasizing his claim that Newhouse misrepresented history in his article about Pericles and Aspasia published a few days prior.
He writes, “It has been said that history is the record of an encounter between character and circumstances. I am afraid that Mr. Newhouse has sadly misinterpreted the record.”63 Vorres’s letter to the editor mainly addressed the issues that he had with Newhouse’s accounts of Pericles, but he did address Aspasia’s role in what he viewed as Pericles’s missteps. Instead of claiming that Aspasia had no influence, he claimed that she had significant influence in the decisions that
62 A. B. Bosworth, "The Historical Context of Thucydides' Funeral Oration," The Journal of Hellenic Studies 120 (2000): 1, doi:10.2307/632478. 63 Vorres, “Pericles Revisited: Letters to the Editor.” 40 hurt Athens. Vorres uses Aspasia to underscore Pericles’s flaws in response to an article that emphasized the couple’s strengths.
All of these articles I discuss in this chapter depict Aspasia negatively, with the authors representing her as a hetaira, flirt, or threat to Athenian society without any regard for her academic contributions. I do not mean to categorize being a flirt or hetaira as a bad thing, but these authors used these character descriptions to discredit all other influence that Aspasia wielded during the 5th-century BCE. Through presenting narratives of Aspasia that emphasize or create certain traits, the authors of these articles intentionally craft an alternative Aspasia. These articles, in conjunction with the articles discussed in Chapter I, are examples of contradicting narratives that have followed Aspasia through the centuries. The authors of these 20th-century pieces utilized Aspasia to promote ideologies with which she may not have personally agreed, but that is not unique to this time period. Because of Aspasia’s work not being preserved in the historical record, who she really was is continuously subject to both positive and negative interpretations. In the next chapter, I will be discussing a visual depiction of Aspasia that provides another example of her intellectual talents being ignored in popular culture.
41 Chapter III
Aspasia of Miletus in The American Weekly
Aspasia of Miletus has a convoluted history given her multiple depictions after her death.
The question of whether she was only a courtesan or else a rhetorician in her own right is one that scholars have debated for centuries. Although often presented as exclusively a courtesan to the Athenian leader, Pericles, some scholars believe that Aspasia was actually a prominent rhetorician in her own right, known for teaching Socrates, Pericles, and other esteemed statesmen and scholars in the art of rhetoric.64 However, due to her status as a foreigner and the lack of mobility for women in ancient Greek society, she is often portrayed in a hyper-sexualized manner throughout history with disregard for her intellect. Aspasia presents a fascinating example of an ancient woman whose modern perception has been shaped by the people around her at the time of her existence, and after the time of her existence by popular culture depictions.
The depiction of Aspasia on the cover of The American Weekly is an example of a popular culture depiction that presents her as a hetaira and not a scholar in her own right. In this magazine cover, Aspasia is depicted in a hypersexualized pin-up style, with no reference to her intellect but instead to her sexuality. By analyzing this image with the methods of the antecedent genre and composition of the image, in addition to analyzing the context of the image and when it was produced, I demonstrate that The American Weekly depicted Aspasia in this style to use her as propaganda to promote women returning to the home after World War II.
64 Glenn, “Sex, Lies, and Manuscript: Refiguring Aspasia in the History of Rhetoric,” 183. 42
Figure 4: Aspasia on the cover of The American Weekly
43 To fully understand the pin-up illustration of Aspasia of Miletus that appeared on the cover of The American Weekly, one must not only understand the readership and history of the magazine itself, but the context of society at the time that this magazine cover appeared. Both of these factors played a major role in the circulation of this image and in the societal importance of this image at the time that it was produced.
The American Weekly was a magazine that was published in the United States every
Sunday from November of 1896 until 1966. This magazine reached a circulation of about
10,000,000 readers, and was read by “25 percent of the adult population in the United States.”65
The Aspasia pin-up was published in 1945, right in the middle of the magazine’s heyday.
Initially, the magazine started as a publication that was touted as telling the truth as opposed to fictional stories. William Randolph Hearst, the creator of the magazine, envisioned a magazine that would “challenge its readers, surprise them, and entertain them but also educate them – a
People’s University.”66 The author goes on to say that Hearst “felt that his magazine could offer its readers the world of reality while novelists were offering the world of fiction. And the world of reality would be more entertaining.”67 This was the initial idea for The American Weekly – a magazine that presented real news that was entertaining to the public. However, in 1944, the magazine underwent a major shift and became a tabloid magazine. The editor of the magazine,
Morrill Goddard, decided to make this switch, claiming it was because fictional stories gripped people’s attention, so why shouldn’t real stories about real people that he called “true life stories” have the same effect? This shift occurred right before the Aspasia pin-up was published in 1945, and it provides an interesting context as to why the magazine did a whole series on the women of
65 Glenn W. Peters, “The American Weekly,” Journalism Quarterly (September 1971): 467. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid. 44 antiquity. Multiple women were portrayed as pin-up girls, including Cleopatra, Messalina, and
Aspasia, and although initially this seems odd, it makes sense when considering the mission of the magazine to tell public interest stories based on real people, even if they were from ancient history.
Aside from the context of The American Weekly magazine itself, it is important to consider the societal context at the time of the publication of the Aspasia pin-up in 1945. The issue of the magazine featuring the Aspasia pin-up was published in January of 1945, several years into the U.S. involvement in World War II. World War II was experienced from a distance by the people who stayed at home in the United States, given the fact that there was no fighting occurring on American soil. Because of this distance, pictorial magazines, including a “mixture of news, human-interest stories, advertising, and pictures,” became very popular as a tool for propaganda and garnering support for the war effort, and The American Weekly was not exempt from this type of content.68 The magazine in which Aspasia is featured as the cover was filled with propaganda that advocated for women to stay in the home and fulfill traditional tasks of womanhood, such as maintaining the house and taking care of the family. This magazine was published as a sort of propaganda piece, advocating for women to return to the home when the time came for returning troops to work in the factories once again. By working in these new conditions and developing actual careers outside of the home, women were less inclined to return to their previous subservient positions, whether that be in the home or in a lesser factory position.
The statistics of women in the workforce show an increase in women laborers during this time period, with one author stating that, “over six million women joined the workforce by the end of
68 Mark Pohlad, “World War II and American Visual Culture: Digital Collections for the Classroom,” https://dcc.newberry.org/collections/_world_war_ii_and_american_visual_culture_#the-homefront. 45 the war, and by 1945, they made up almost 37 percent of the workforce, up from only 27 percent in 1940.”69 Given this context, it makes sense as to why this piece would be published with this idea of putting women in their place. The magazine reached a wide readership, and this gave the publishers a larger platform for promoting ideologies. At that point the readership would have mainly been women who had joined the workforce and whom society was trying to put back in their previous place, or non-fighting age men and children.
This cover of The American Weekly is also a relevant text to look at in the context of the image of Rosie the Riveter during World War II. The history of the message of Rosie the Riveter reveals a similar story to the Aspasia pin-up of assigning alternative narratives to female figures.
Today, Rosie the Riveter is one of the most well-recognized visuals from World War II – one that has been associated with the modern feminist movement and gained massive popularity in recent years. The image is still one of the top ten most requested images from the National
Archive, has been replicated on souvenir merchandise all around the country, and it is even considered to be the most overexposed image in the Washington D.C. market according to The
Washington Post.70 The Rosie the Riveter that has become a pop culture icon is often interpreted as an empowered woman taking her place in the workforce, but in reality, the image may have been another example of a woman being used for an alternate message than suggested by modern ideologies.
In reality, the image of Rosie the Riveter did not gain popularity until the 1980s, which is also when it became popularly associated with the message of women entering the workforce
69 Allison McNearney, “Watch Terrified Men Learn to Deal with Women in the Workforce During WWII,” https://www.history.com/news/women-workforce-wwii-training-video-1940s. 70 James J. Kimble and Lester Olson, “Visual Rhetoric Representing Rosie the Riveter: Myth and Misconception in J. Howard Miller’s ‘We Can Do It!’ Poster,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 9, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 536. 46 and asserting their place in society.71 This is a modern message that became associated with the text nearly forty years after its production, when in reality the image was not used as war and feminist propaganda at all. The Rosie the Riveter image, created by J. Howard Miller, was actually released as part of a series of posters in the Westinghouse factory, an electric and manufacturing company in Pittsburgh.72 The factory used the series of posters to motivate women who were already working in the factory to get their work done efficiently during the war.73 This image was not created to recruit stay-at-home mothers to join the workforce, but rather to encourage women already working in the factory to work effectively and for the betterment of the company itself. Another important distinction is that the image of Rosie the
Riveter was not commissioned as propaganda by the United States government, but was rather created by a private company as part of a series in order to promote a message for the
Westinghouse factory.74 Kimble and Olson argue in this article that, “When viewed as part of the
Westinghouse vernacular culture, as well as in its programmatic series, the poster emerges as less feminist in its portrayal than complicit in its level of tokenism. At the very least, these findings speak to the perils of projecting our modern sentiments back in time, seeing another era’s culture through an anachronistic visual and terministic screen.”75 In addition to the issue of projecting modern ideologies onto past texts, Kimble and Olson claim that, “The poster has come to present a past that never was.”76
71 Ibid, 536. 72 “The Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company,” The Library of Congress, accessed February 23, 2020. https://www.loc.gov/collections/films-of-westinghouse-works-1904/articles-and-essays/the-westinghouse- world/the-westinghouse-electric-and-manufacturing-company/. 73 Kimble and Olson, “Visual Rhetoric Representing Rosie the Riveter: Myth and Misconception in J. Howard Miller’s ‘We Can Do It!’ Poster,” 545. 74 Ibid. 75 Ibid, 561. 76 Ibid, 562. 47 By looking at the Aspasia cover of The American Weekly in the context of the image of
Rosie the Riveter, the ways in which The American Weekly utilized Aspasia for a different message and the way she has been assigned modern ideologies becomes more apparent.
Although Aspasia’s misrepresentation happened within the text itself and Rosie’s misrepresentation was projected onto the image decades later, Rosie the Riveter is a prime example of a woman who has been assigned different ideologies to promote a message other than was initially intended by the creator. Similarly, Aspasia has been assigned different ideologies in the centuries after her death with which she may have not agreed, as seen in her depiction on the cover of The American Weekly that promoted women returning to the home to allow men’s return to the workforce after World War II.
In order to analyze this specific magazine cover of Aspasia of Miletus in The American
Weekly, I have decided to use the methods of antecedent genre and rhetoric of the image, focusing specifically on composition. Antecedent genre is crucial in understanding why and how this magazine cover came to be, and why it takes on particular meanings within the context of the genre. The illustrator of the image, Victor Tchetchet, portrays Aspasia in pin-up form, a relatively common style for the magazine covers of The American Weekly throughout its run. But to fully understand the meaning behind portraying Aspasia in this manner, one must understand the pin-up genre in general and the multiple meanings that it has had throughout the decades.
The generic antecedent is defined as a “mode of expression established by traditional usage and that in turn may shape and give effect to any instance of textual action.”77 It is important to analyze the generic antecedent and not just the genre in general in order to gain a more thorough understanding of what pin-up meant in that specific snapshot of history. In a changing genre such
77 Jim A. Kuypers, Rhetorical Criticism: Perspectives in Action (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), 303. 48 as pin-up that has varying interpretations when analyzed, it is crucial to study the antecedent genre in order to gain an understanding of what the image would have meant in the context of
1945 versus in the context of the modern day.
Another method that I will be using to analyze the Aspasia pin-up is the method of rhetoric of the image, specifically the composition of the image. Some scholars believe that images do not hold rhetorical value, but Roland Barthes makes the argument strongly in his paper “Rhetoric of the Image,” that images are worth studying for their rhetorical qualities, and that in fact every image has some sort of rhetorical importance. To support this, Barthes wrote,
“We have seen that, in the image proper, the distinction between the literal message and the symbolic message is operational; we never – at least never in advertising – encounter a literal image in the pure state; even if an entirely naïve image were to be achieved, it would immediately join the sign of naivety and be completed by a third, symbolic message.”78
Although Barthes mainly writes about advertising images, his statements still hold true to the
Aspasia magazine cover given the propaganda component that this image includes. This image does not just stand alone as a piece of art, but rather there is a significant amount of deeper meaning that the image holds that must be analyzed rhetorically. Barthes goes on in this piece to specify a significant difference in the analysis of photographs versus drawings, claiming that,
“for, of all images, only the photograph possesses the power to transmit (literal) information without forming it with the help of discontinuous signs and rules of transformation. Hence, we must set the photograph, a message without code, in opposition to the drawing, which, even denoted, is a coded message.”79 This idea that the drawn image is inherently coded and has
78 Roland Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” in The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation (1985), 31. 79 Ibid, 32. 49 meaning deeper than just the visual itself is a concept that directly shaped my analysis of the
Aspasia pin-up in The American Weekly.
Another scholar whose work I will be relying on heavily during my analysis of the
Aspasia pin-up is Cara A. Finnegan and her ideas regarding the ways that images should be analyzed for their rhetorical qualities and significance. Finnegan argues that images should be analyzed “in terms of their production, composition, reproduction, circulation, and reception.”80 I will be using Finnegan’s research specifically when analyzing the composition of the Aspasia pin-up image. Barthes and Finnegan together provide a framework for analyzing images and their rhetorical value, specifically when the images are drawings as opposed to photographs that are being used in advertising.
I will begin with analyzing The American Weekly cover of Aspasia through the method of antecedent genre. Antecedent genre is a crucial method to consider when analyzing the pin-up image of Aspasia on the cover of The American Weekly because the image depicts Aspasia in a pin-up style that was common during the 1940s. The genre of the pin-up girl leading up to the
1940s shaped the public’s opinion of Aspasia when she was depicted in this style, so in order to understand this image one must understand the genre that came before it. The pin-up girl genre began with the creation of the Gibson Girl in 1887 by Charles Gibson. Gibson Girls were drawn depictions of women and beauty standards that were entirely unattainable by the average woman living in the United States, which became a standard in pin-up girl design as well. Gibson Girls have been defined as women that were depicted as a “romantic ideal,” presented as “neither an oversexed nor an undersexed creature, but a healthy balance of ‘natural’ passions tempered by an
80 Cara A. Finnegan, “Studying Visual Modes of Public Address,” in The Handbook of Rhetoric and Public Address, ed. by Shawn J. Parry-Giles and J. Michael Hogan (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2010), 251. 50 understanding of bourgeois manners.”81 Gibson Girls became the ideal standard for American women’s beauty. They dominated the newspapers and magazines at the turn of the century, constantly enforcing this message of women being linked with sexual desire, unattainable beauty standards, and social class.
The Gibson Girl propagated the idea of the American New Woman during the late 19th and early 20th-centuries.82 The New Woman was described as “a liminal figure between the
Victorian woman and the flapper,” which are completely contradictory ideals and unattainable when combined to make the “perfect” woman.83 The New Woman was supposed to represent the women who were a product of the early 20th century – significantly more individualistic and sexually expressive than women during the Victorian era, while not entirely as promiscuous as the flapper. Although in the early 20th-century women’s suffrage was at the forefront of national conversation, a woman who was a suffragette was considered unattractive and viewed as abrasive.84 The Gibson Girl reflected the traditional standards of women and the idea that the role of women was to be attractive, alluring, and classy, not political and outspoken. Charles
Gibson created drawings of these Gibson girls that “both sanctioned and undermined women’s desires for progressive sociopolitical change and personal freedom at the turn of the century.”85
From the beginning, these illustrations were meant to portray to the world what the ideal woman was at the time of the drawing’s creation. They were reflective of the unattainable beauty
81 Maria Elena Buszek, Pin-Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, and Popular Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006): 86. 82 Martha H. Patterson, Beyond the Gibson Girl: Reimagining the American New Woman (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005): 27. 83 Ibid, 27. 84 Ibid, 27. 85 Ibid, 30. 51 standards that were placed upon women, and which were often used to keep women in their place and critique their desire for social mobility.
The Gibson Girl, however, fell out of fashion in the 1910s with the outbreak of World
War I and the increasing need for middle and upper-class white women to take on different roles aside from just being beautiful and working in the home. The beginning of the Great War saw the rise of women being depicted in a traditional pin-up style that doubled as war propaganda.
Women were depicted in more practical and masculine clothing than ever before, but even that became increasingly sexualized in war posters and propaganda pieces.86 This was a sort of intermediary phase for the evolution of the pin-up girl, but it shifted the viewpoint of these hyper-sexualized depictions of women towards the idea that they could be used as propaganda for the war effort, not just for promoting an idealized image of women.
Once World War I ended in November of 1918, a new type of depiction of women evolved from the war propaganda pieces. This new style of pin-up girl that is the most recognizable today is known as the Petty Girl. The Petty Girl was created by George Petty, an
American illustrator who produced idealized pictures of women through an airbrush technique.87
He created images for Esquire magazine of women who became the modern idea of the classic pin-up girl, and of women who further inspired these hyper-sexualized depictions of women.
Hugh Hefner himself credited George Petty as being his inspiration for the depiction of the
Playboy bunnies. Hefner said, “Before the Varga Girl, before Playboy’s Playmate of the Month, the Petty Girl reigned supreme. Throughout the 1930s, George Petty’s streamlined, long-legged, airbrushed beauties were the most popular pin-up illustrations in America and an inspiration to
86 Tidd, “The History of the Pin-Up Girls,” https://bust.com/entertainment/194364-pinup-history.html. 87 Austin Stewart Reid, “The Petty Girl,” Step-by-Step Graphics 17, no. 5 (September 2001): 92. 52 the countless other commercial artists who came after. For me, they were the stuff that dreams were made of.”88 When one thinks of a traditional, girl next-door pin-up girl, images that were created by George Petty come to mind. What made her so popular was that she was easily able to be inserted into the reader’s everyday life, as she was depicted doing everyday tasks that were relatable to the majority of the American public. When World War II began, the Petty Girl became an international phenomenon. American troops brought the drawings overseas due to their familiarity and the fact that they reminded the troops of the comforts of home. With the beginning of World War II, the Petty Girl gained increasingly in popularity, but another depiction of the pin-up girl returned – the pin-up girl used as war propaganda as seen during
World War I.
The pin-up drawing of Aspasia of Miletus was a product of this long history of the pin-up genre that began in the late 19th century, and it continues the pattern of objectification of women in print media. In the modern day, when looking at pin-up drawings of women, some scholars read the image as empowering. In her book, Pin-Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular
Culture, Maria Buszek claims that the pin-up "may have been created as a tantalizing but unreal object for the delectation of heterosexual men, [but] the pin-up would also find ways to reject this role to reflect and encourage the erotic self-awareness and self-expression of real women."89
Today, pin-up girls have become symbols of sexual liberation and self-expression, but that was not the case at the time of the publication of The American Weekly featuring Aspasia. It is important to look at this piece within the context of the historical record and not allow for modern perceptions and interpretations to cloud the true meaning of the magazine cover. Viewed
88 Reid, “The Petty Girl,” 92. 89 Buszek, Pin-Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture, 364. 53 in the context of the antecedent genre, the illustration does not convey feminist empowerment; rather, it appears to serve the purpose of putting women in their place at the end of World War II.
When the Aspasia cover was published on the cover of The American Weekly, women were out in force in the American workforce. Although women were not necessarily recruited from being housewives to factory workers, women who already worked in factories were moved to positions that had previously been held by men in order to assist in the war effort. Many times women were actually preferred over men in certain jobs, like assembling machinery; because their hands were smaller, they were able to assemble the more intricate pieces with greater precision.90 The belief was that men needed their jobs back after the war in order to restore a sense of normalcy in society and social roles, so there was another wave of propaganda released with the intention of persuading women to return to their previous positions. The Aspasia cover of The American Weekly and the articles that accompanied it are examples of those pieces of propaganda.
The Aspasia pin-up was released, along with other images of ancient women depicted in a pin-up style on the cover of The American Weekly, in a series titled “Ladies of Empire.” As mentioned when framing the context for this magazine, The American Weekly underwent a shift in messaging from “real” educational news to tabloid news, claiming that true-life stories would grip people’s attention in the same way fictional stories had audiences sitting on the edge of their seats. This switch was made right before the Aspasia publication, and provides some explanation as to why Aspasia was featured on the cover in this context. These ancient women could be used in tabloid stories – stories that could be altered since these women lived such a long time ago. It
90 “Women at War,” Veterans Affairs Canada, last modified February 14, 2019, https://www.veterans.gc.ca/eng/remembrance/history/historical-sheets/women. 54 provided a unique opportunity for the magazine to promote certain narratives that they could not promote with real living people from their current time, all under the guise that they were promoting true stories from the past.
The narrative piece about Aspasia presented by the magazine was relatively mild compared to the other headlines that promoted women returning to the home to fulfill their gender duties. However, there is a subtle message within the storyline that women who rebel against social norms can only be saved from societal repercussions if they have a strong enough male partner. The story within the magazine claims that Aspasia was attacked cruelly by
Pericles’s conservative counterparts in politics, and that they claimed that she was a courtesan who kept a house of “ill fame” and “expressed her opinion of the way Athenians treated their wives.” Instead of saying that these were true, the author of this article claims that “today we believe she was not a courtesan,” defending her from the accusations of her promiscuity.
However, this did not seem to fit with the overall message of the magazine, historically and within this specific publication. The true meaning behind the use of Aspasia in this edition of the magazine becomes clear when the author ends by saying, “Socrates went to his death. Aspasia was accused and might have been executed if Pericles hadn’t pleaded for her, using all his influence. Her notions of women’s rights were enough to condemn her.” This could be interpreted as an empowering message about the importance of the fight for women’s rights, but within the context of this magazine, the message is clear – by advocating for women’s rights
Aspasia could have easily been killed, do you want the same to happen to you?
The antecedent genre is a crucial method to use when analyzing a text like this cover of
The American Weekly. By understanding the timeline of the pin-up genre and where within it this magazine cover appeared, it is clear that the image of Aspasia was used in order to advocate for 55 women who were recruited when the men left for war to return to their previous occupations once World War II had ended. A very powerful woman in Ancient Greece was hyper-sexualized and her narrative was diminished to the trope of the damsel in distress needing the help of her partner to get her out of trouble, thereby enforcing the idea that women need the men to be the heroes of their stories. The promotion of women remaining subservient to men after the war ended was enforced by the creation of a narrative for Aspasia that is not entirely true. Through this hyper-sexual visual depiction, and the articles featured within the magazine, it is clear that
Aspasia was used as propaganda for an anti-feminist message in 1945 at the end of the war.
Another method that is crucial in the analysis of a visual text is the rhetoric of the image.
Within the rhetoric of the image, which includes its production, reproduction, circulation, and perception, it is important to look at the composition of the image.91 The production, reproduction, and circulation of this image have already been discussed in the context section of this analysis, and reception cannot be tracked given the lack of record of any feedback given to
The American Weekly regarding this specific publication. However, the actual composition of the image itself is crucial when attempting to understand what the illustrator and creators of the magazine were attempting to do rhetorically.
On the magazine cover, Aspasia is depicted in a red and gold outfit that symbolizes wealth and promiscuity. Her dress is incredibly low-cut and inaccurate to traditional 5th-century
BCE Athenian clothing, and she has a full face of makeup that adds to her pin-up aesthetic.
Perhaps the most interesting component of this image is where she is directing her gaze. Instead of looking towards the reader, which is common in pin-up illustrations in order to draw the reader into the world of the pin-up girl, she is gazing fondly at a small statue of what appears to
91 Finnegan, “Studying Visual Modes of Public Address,” 251. 56 be Eros, the Greek god of desire, love, attraction, and affection. She stares fondly at this statue and invites the reader to also look lovingly at the statue of the small, winged god. Finnegan claims that, “analyzing image content may involve exploring how the gaze is activated. All images activate a field of looking, whether between the image and the viewer or within the image itself.”92 Even though Aspasia is not inviting the viewer into the image with her gaze, she is inviting us to engage with the small sculpture that she herself is observing. By looking at the same statue of Eros, the viewer takes on her loving gaze and is forced to question why she is so infatuated with the object of her attention.
The composition further supports the assertion that this pin-up depiction of Aspasia was created as a propaganda piece to encourage women to return to their previous societal positions at the end of the war. By making Aspasia infatuated with this figure that represents love and affection, the reader’s attention is drawn to the idea that that is the most important aspect of
Aspasia’s life. Victor Tchetchet could have easily depicted her with one of the Muses in order to promote the idea that she was heavily involved in rhetoric and argumentation, but she was instead depicted with the god of love, further supporting this message of promiscuity. In conjunction with the text that accompanies the image inside of the magazine, this idea is further enforced. Instead of being in love with her work and her activism, Aspasia is depicted as being in love with love, and also in debt to Pericles for saving her life when she strayed from her position as simply a partner to the powerful leader. The composition of the image supports this message of women returning to the home and not straying from their already prescribed positions in society, and the narrative that the magazine presents of Aspasia is crafted carefully to support this message as well.
92 Ibid, 254. 57 This text is crucial to analyze when attempting to understand the larger idea of how women are depicted throughout history, and in understanding how narratives are crafted when no work of the woman in question survives in the historical record. Aspasia is acknowledged to be either a prominent rhetorician in her own right or simply a courtesan to the Athenian leader,
Pericles. Because of these varying depictions of Aspasia, and because none of her own work remains, it is difficult to piece together the truth from the depictions of her that survive or that were crafted in the modern day based on these false depictions. This pin-up illustration of
Aspasia is a perfect example of this alternative narrative that has been presented about Aspasia for centuries. Instead of being depicted as in love with her scholarship and her activism, Aspasia is depicted as being in love with love, and also in debt to Pericles for saving her life when she strayed from her position as simply a partner. Through the methods of the antecedent genre and the composition of the image, it is clear that this image promotes the message of women returning to the home and not straying from their already prescribed positions in society. The narrative that The American Weekly presents of Aspasia is crafted carefully to support this message as well, thereby shaping society’s perception of a woman who may not have been this way at all.
58
Conclusion
The question still stands: how do we take the measure of a life when no primary source material from the person in question remains? Insights into who Aspasia was can be found in contemporary accounts of her nature from philosophers and comic poets, as well as in interpretations following her death. Although nothing can be determined definitively because no primary source material from Aspasia remains, she has been presented as both a hetaira and a rhetorician in popular culture since the 5th-century BCE.
A major outlet for these dual depictions of Aspasia were newspaper publications in the
20th-century. Through the archives of The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, and The
American Weekly, I found countless references to Aspasia that fit into two main categories: articles that depicted her as a rhetorician who positively influenced Athenian democracy, and articles that depicted her as exclusively a hetaira and negative influence on Athens. The authors of these articles, in most cases, wrote about Aspasia in order to promote their own personal ideologies and use her as a figurehead for their ideas. This was possible, in part, due to Aspasia’s personal work not being preserved in the historical record. Her voice has not survived the passage of time, and her history has been documented only by the men around her, so it is unclear what her own views would have truly been. The authors who depicted her as a rhetorician used her voice to promote causes such as gender equality and the importance of including women in the historical record. The authors who depicted her as solely a hetaira used her voice to promote the idea that women should be subservient to men, that women do not 59 influence the men in their lives, and, as seen in The American Weekly newspaper cover, that women should return to the home at the end of World War II in order to provide jobs for men. It is unclear what ideologies Aspasia would have truly supported, so authors were able to utilize her for their own personal narratives. Through these varying depictions, authors have created
Aspasia’s narrative to both liberate and control women in the 19th and 20th-centuries.
Although I believe that the evidence suggests that Aspasia truly was an influential rhetorician and equal partner to Pericles, some scholars believe that this is a dangerous assumption to make. Barbara Biesecker warns of the potential for revisionist history when attempting to incorporate women into the history of rhetoric, claiming that, “I think it is important to notice that recent attempts to render the discipline more equitable by supplementing the canon with texts spoken by women have something like a relationship with what only a few decades ago was coined as affirmative action.”93 She continues, addressing the idea of female tokenism, “I want to underscore yet another effect of attempts to insert ‘great women speakers’ into the official record we call the canon, an effect that utterly escapes our detection as we weigh only the risks of female tokenism.”94 Both of these concerns are valid and should be considered when incorporating women into the historical record, but I do not think discussing the potential influence of Aspasia constitutes revisionist history. I believe examining her influence provides a potential alternative to what could have been the reality of ancient Athens. Aspasia may have been as influential as Plato claims in Menexenus, or she may not have been, but it is important to consider both narratives when contemplating the past. Aspasia is not the only woman throughout history whose work has not been preserved and whose history is uncertain. My hope is that this
93 Barbara Biesecker, “Coming to Terms with Recent Attempts to Write Women into the History of Rhetoric,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 25, no. 2 (1992): 142. 94 Ibid. 60 research provides insight into the ways in which Aspasia has been depicted, but also to the fact that her story is indicative of a larger pattern throughout history.
Aspasia continues to be referenced in the modern day by authors and artists alike. In
2019, Armand D’Angour published a book titled Socrates in Love that includes mention of
Aspasia in relation to her tutelage of Socrates. D’Angour claims, based on little historical evidence, that Aspasia and Diotima may be the same person. In Plato’s Symposium, he connects
Diotima to the event of Athenians attempting to ward off the plague, that D’Angour claims was believed to be retribution for the Athenian invasion of Samos.95 He also claims that Aspasia was the reason that Pericles instructed the Athenian army to invade Samos, given the long rivalry between her home, Miletus, and Samos.96 He connects these two accounts, claiming that Aspasia might have felt bad about the deaths that occurred in Samos and anxiously arranged sacrifices to ward of the plague that was punishment from the gods for the battle.97 D’Angour asks, “Has
Plato, then, left a clue to Diotima’s true identity by raising the matter of the delayed plague? Is
‘Diotima’ in the Symposium a disguise for a real person, Aspasia?”98 Although D’Angour presents assumptions in Socrates in Love that he claims as fact, this is still an interesting account of Aspasia that furthers her discussion in the 21st-century. Scholars continue to debate her influence, legacy, and identity, and if the past 2,500 years are any indicator, this debate will continue as new assumptions about her are asserted in scholarship.
In the spring of 2019, I had the privilege of studying in Athens, Greece for the semester. I had already begun this research on Aspasia, and I was thrilled to be in the city where she lived
95 Armand D’Angour, Socrates in Love (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019), 40. 96 Ibid. 97 Ibid, 42. 98 Ibid. 61 centuries ago. As I was walking around the neighborhood of Monastiraki, I looked at a nearby wall covered in graffiti and noticed Aspasia’s name spray-painted in white on the metal, easily ignored by the average passerby.
Figure 5: Aspasia Graffiti in Monastiraki
If this graffiti was done by an enthusiastic student of the classics, or just by someone who knows a person by that name, I will never know. I do know that it brings me joy to think that somewhere in Greece, there is a person who cared so passionately about Aspasia of Miletus that they marked the streets where she once lived with her name. References to Aspasia in scholarship, art, even street art, will continue to evolve, and I am excited to see what new insights future interpretations hold.
62
BIBLIOGRAPHY
“Ancient and Modern New Women: Being a History of Their Strangest Moods.” The Chicago
Tribune, January 5, 1896. https://search-proquest-
com.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/hnpchicagotribune/docview/175218957/9E93ADC1F0B1
474BPQ/249?accountid=13158.
Aristophanes. “The Internet Classics Archive: The Acharnians by Aristophanes.” Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. Accessed February 21, 2020.
http://classics.mit.edu/Aristophanes/acharnians.html.
“Aspasia.” Brooklyn Museum: Aspasia. Accessed March 1, 2020.
https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/dinner_party/place_settings/aspasia.
“Aspasia and Pericles: Further Responses to the Lecture of Rev. Mr. Bartlett: Vindications of the
Character of the Two Illustrious Greeks.” The Chicago Tribune, March 15, 1874.
https://chicagotribune.newspapers.com/image/466344811/?terms=aspasia.
Barthes, Roland. “Rhetoric of the Image.” In The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on
Music, Art, and Representation, 21-40. 1985.
Biesecker, Barbara. "Coming to Terms with Recent Attempts to Write Women into the History
of Rhetoric." Philosophy & Rhetoric 25, no. 2 (1992): 140-61.
http://www.jstor.org.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/stable/40237715.
Bosworth, A. B. "The Historical Context of Thucydides' Funeral Oration." The Journal of
Hellenic Studies 120 (2000): 1-16. Accessed April 16, 2020. doi:10.2307/632478. 63 Butcher, Fanny. “Mary Beard Depicts World’s Debt to Women.” The Chicago Tribune,
November 18, 1931.
https://search.proquest.com/hnpchicagotribune/docview/181275873/9E93ADC1F0B1474
BPQ/185?accountid=13158.
Buszek, Maria Elena. Pin-Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture. Durham: Duke
University Press, 2006.
Crawley, Richard., Thucydides. History of the Peloponnesian War. United States: Dover
Publications, 2017.
Coughlin, Francis. “Protest! Behind Every Man… Baloney!”. The Chicago Tribune, June 7,
1964. https://search-proquest-
com.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/hnpchicagotribune/docview/179526331/9E93ADC1F0B1
474BPQ/114?accountid=13158.
D’Angour, Armand. Socrates in Love. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019.
Finnegan, Cara A. “Studying Visual Modes of Public Address.” In The Handbook of Rhetoric
and Public Address, edited by Shawn J. Parry-Giles and J. Michael Hogan, 250-270.
Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2010.
Geraths, Cory and Kennerly, Michele. “Painted Lady: Aspasia in Nineteenth-Century European
Art.” Rhetoric Review 35.3 (Summer 2016): 197-211.
Glenn, Cheryl. "Sex, Lies, and Manuscript: Refiguring Aspasia in the History of Rhetoric."
College Composition and Communication 45, no. 2 (1994): 180-99. doi:10.2307/359005.
Henry, Madeleine M. Prisoner of History: Aspasia of Miletus and Her Biographical Tradition.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. 64 Kennedy, Rebecca Futo. "Elite Citizen Women and the Origins of the Hetaira in Classical
Athens." Helios 42, no. 1 (2015): 61-79. doi:10.1353/hel.2015.0004.
Kimble, James J. and Olson, Lester. “Visual Rhetoric Representing Rosie the Riveter: Myth and
Misconception in J. Howard Miller’s ‘We Can Do It!’ Poster.” Rhetoric and Public
Affairs 9, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 533-569. Project MUSE.
Kuypers, Jim A. Rhetorical Criticism: Perspectives in Action. London: Rowman & Littlefield,
2016.
Lipinski, Anne Marie. “The 39 Guests Who Changed the West.” The Chicago Tribune, August
19, 1979.
https://search.proquest.com/hnpchicagotribune/docview/171953862/9E93ADC1F0B1474
BPQ/78?accountid=13158.
McNearney, Allison. “Watch Terrified Men Learn to Deal With Women in the Workforce
During WWII.” History.com. A&E Television Networks, March 2, 2018.
https://www.history.com/news/women-workforce-wwii-training-video-1940s.
Newhouse, John. “The First Power Couple.” The New York Times, May 1, 1994.
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1994/05/01/issue.html.
Pascoe, Judith. The Sarah Siddons Audio Files: Romanticism and the Lost Voice. Ann Arbor:
The University of Michigan Press, 2013.
Patterson, Martha H. Beyond the Gibson Girl: Reimagining the American New Woman. Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 2005.
Peters, Glenn W. “The American Weekly.” Journalism Quarterly (September 1971): 466-479. 65 Plato, and Jowett, Benjamin. Menexenus. Champaign, Ill: Project Gutenberg, 2013.
http://search.ebscohost.com.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk
&AN=1085304&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
Prins, Yopie. Victorian Sappho. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.
Pohlad, Mark. “World War II and American Visual Culture: Digital Collections for the
Classroom.” The Newberry. Accessed November 4, 2019.
https://dcc.newberry.org/collections/_world_war_ii_and_american_visual_culture_#the-
homefront.
Pringle, Robert W. “Profumo Affair.” Encyclopedia Britannica, accessed April 16, 2020.
https://www.britannica.com/event/Profumo-affair.
Reid, Stewart Austin. "The Petty Girl." Step-by-Step Graphics 17, no. 5 (Sep, 2001): 92-101.
http://ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/docview/213436389?accountid=13158.
Smith, Bonnie G. "Seeing Mary Beard." Feminist Studies 10, no. 3 (1984): 399-416.
doi:10.2307/3178030.
“The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago.” Brooklyn Museum: The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago.
Accessed March 1, 2020. https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/dinner_party.
“The Famous Flirts of History.” The Chicago Tribune, October 4, 1903. https://search-proquest-
com.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/hnpchicagotribune/docview/173102226/9E93ADC1F0B1
474BPQ/228?accountid=13158.
“The Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company.” The Library of Congress. Accessed
February 23, 2020. https://www.loc.gov/collections/films-of-westinghouse-works- 66 1904/articles-and-essays/the-westinghouse-world/the-westinghouse-electric-and-
manufacturing-company/.
The Westminster Review. “Aspasia.” The New York Times, July 1, 1900.
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1900/07/01/101061090.html?pageNum
ber=25.
Veterans Affairs Canada. “Women at War.” Historical Sheet - Second World War - History -
Veterans Affairs Canada, February 14, 2019.
https://www.veterans.gc.ca/eng/remembrance/history/historical-sheets/women.
Vorres, Ian. “Pericles Revisited: Letters to the Editor.” The New York Times, May 12, 1994.
https://www.nytimes.com/1994/05/12/opinion/IHT-pericles-revisited-letters-to-the-
editor.html?searchResultPosition=15.
West, B. June. "The ‘New Woman’." Twentieth Century Literature 1, no. 2 (1955): 55-68.
doi:10.2307/440970.
67 Academic Vita
Anelia G. B. Slavoff
EDUCATION The Pennsylvania State University, University Park Graduation Date: May 2020 Schreyer Honors College Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) in History; B.A. in Communication Arts & Sciences; Minor in Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies HONORS Schreyer Honors College August 2016 – May 2020 Paterno Fellows Program January 2017 – May 2020 • Participate in Liberal Arts honors program, including advanced coursework and thesis requirements • Fulfill further requirements including study abroad, ethics courses, and internships Phi Alpha Theta – History Honors Society January 2018 – May 2020 Lambda Pi Eta – Communications Honors Society January 2020 – May 2020 Dean’s List Fall 2016, Spring 2017, Fall 2017, Spring 2018, Fall 2018, Spring 2019, Fall 2019, Spring 2020
WORK EXPERIENCE The National Mall and Memorial Parks Washington, D.C. Park Ranger – Interpretation May – August 2019 • Developed and lead an hour-long tour about the influence of classical architecture on the National Mall • Lead Secretary Tours, which are requested by the Secretary of the Interior for special guests to Washington D.C. and cover the Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, WWII Memorial, Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Korean War Memorial, Jefferson Memorial, FDR Memorial, and the MLK Memorial • Worked with White House staff, Secret Service, and Park Police to coordinate the annual Fourth of July celebration Centre County Planning and Community Development Office Bellefonte, PA Historic Preservation Intern August – October 2018 • Documented Centre County’s historic buildings, structures, and sites in communities threatened by natural disasters • Researched and catalogued historic structures through wills and land grants to prove their historic status Sequoia National Park Three Rivers, CA Visitor Use Assistant May – August 2018 • Acted as the first point of contact for visitors and provided a brief introduction to the park and what it had to offer • Completed cash and credit transactions with visitors at the Ash Mountain Entrance Station • Provided crucial information to visitors about park safety, especially during fire season when there were many restrictions Harpers Ferry National Historical Park Harpers Ferry, WV Interpretation Intern (Richards Civil War Era Center) May – August 2017 • Developed a ranger-led, 90-minute interpretive historical hike for the park • Led 15-minute talks at the Civil War battlefield area of the park focused on the way the landscape shaped the historical events that transpired • Worked with visitors while staffing the information desks at the Visitor Center and Information Center, and answered any questions regarding the park and its history LEADERSHIP POSITIONS AND INVOLVEMENT Schreyer Scholar Ambassador Team The Pennsylvania State University Member, Panelist and Tour Guide May 2018 – May 2020 • Act as a representative of the Schreyer Honors College during events with alumni, donors, and students • Work with the recruitment within Schreyer Honors College to lead tours and speak on panels at prospective and accepted student days The Co.Space State College, PA Member August 2018 – May 2020 • Member of this community-based co-op with an emphasis on being a home for changemakers • Attend and cook dinners twice a week to discuss topics like personal development, community development, and activism • Work on projects that are decided on by our community members, like community gardens, community dinners, and volunteer opportunities Schreyer for Women The Pennsylvania State University Social Chair February 2018 – December 2018 • Attended weekly Executive Board and General Body meetings and discuss important, sometimes controversial, topics that women have to deal with every day with other members of the organization 68 • Ran the social media for the organization and planned community engagement events Awards Richard B. Gregg Memorial Award for Scholarly Excellence in Communication Arts and Sciences, Pechter Family Scholarship in The Department of Communication Arts & Sciences