The 2016 presidential race brings our culture's conflicted relationship with women and power, in the form of Hillary Clinton, back into sharp relief. This paper examines Western culture's ambivalence to the powerful Feminine in the context of the 2008 and 2010 elections.

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PCA/ACA National Conference. San Antonio, April 22, 2011
Medusa and The Mama Grizzly
By Cathy Diorio, Ph.D.
Sarah Palin has shrewdly or haphazardly stumbled onto a powerful archetypal,
and socially sanctioned, symbol of the powerful female and the dark feminine in her
appropriation of the Mama Grizzly.
Why is female strength in the realm of motherhood – defending one’s children
with ferocity, preferably in the animal kingdom – valorized and admired, while female
strength and ferocity in intellectual, political or other traditionally masculine arenas still
so threatening, something to be attacked, condemned or feared, like Medusa?
In the 21st
century, why is motherhood still the only culturally sanctioned
manifestation of the powerful feminine? The word “sanction,” like the feminine, holds
the paradox of our culture’s relationship to women and power. To sanction can mean
either “official approval or permission” or “condemnation or punishment for not
conforming with socially agreed-upon norms.” Implicit in both definitions is the
judgmental role of the culture.
Exploring the relationship between Athena, the most powerful woman in the
Greek pantheon, and Medusa, the archetypal monster, while tracking the grizzly and
taking snapshots of several powerful women from the 2008 presidential campaign –
Sarah Palin, Hillary Clinton, and Michelle Obama – this presentation examines the
painfully ambivalent relationship our culture has with powerful women and, in particular,
the dark feminine.

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Last July, Sarah Palin’s Political Action Committee, SarahPAC, released a 2-
minute video, titled “Mama Grizzlies,” ostensibly aimed at promoting female Republican
candidates for the midterm election. This video went viral and triggered a heated national
conversation. In the video she likened angered and empowered female Republican
candidates to mama grizzlies standing on their hind legs when they sense their cubs are in
danger and said, “you don’t want to mess with the mama grizzlies.” While she evoked the
ferocity and danger of an enraged 1000-pound grizzly bear, she firmly anchored this
imagery in the symbol of the Mother. Palin called her movement a “mom awakening,”
noting that “moms kinda just know when something’s wrong” and defined a mama
grizzly politically as “someone who is watching what is going on that is adversely
affecting our cubs, our children, the future of America.”
On a subsequent episode of The Daily Show, “senior women’s issues
correspondent” Kristen Schaal honed in on Palin’s canny political and symbolic
positioning. When Jon Stewart asked her why Palin would equate female candidates with
“killing machines,” Schaal corrected him emphasizing that mama grizzlies are not killing
machines, but rather “protecting machines.” She noted that in Palin’s hands, the “mama
grizzly’s real power doesn’t come from being a bear, it comes from being a mama.”
The shrewdness of Palin’s political positioning is taken up by Judith Warner in an
article she wrote in the October 10, 2010 New York Times Magazine titled, The New
Momism. In it she writes about the positive emphasis on the symbol of the Mother in the
political arena this season. She compares and contrasts two very different women with
very different backgrounds, Sarah Palin and Michelle Obama, writing:

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“The former beauty pageant flutist dead set on undoing health care reform
and the working-class Harvard law grad intent on consolidating her
husband’s legislative triumphs couldn’t be further apart in their political
goals or in their personal histories. But each is doing the mom thing – big
time – tapping a vein of sentiment and belief, practicing a special form of
political sympathetic magic, hoping that by invoking the image,
inveighing the glorious beloved power of all that’s maternal, they will
warm and rally the hearts of voters enough to get them to the polls and
determine the outcome of the midterm elections.”
Warner contrasts this new valorization of “all things mom” in the political arena
with the not-too-distant past when being a mother was not considered a qualification for
elected office. She emphasizes that in today’s anti-elitist, anti-intellectual political
environment, “being a mom is synonymous with being one of the people.” She goes on to
note that “You don’t even have to be a mother to find a place in the new momism, which
is, after all, at base about a certain idea of womanhood; woman as earthy, concrete, with
her view of the world bound by personal experience […] and not by professional
experience or abstract learning.”
But while Warner notes that “Momism is a clever strategy in a season of populist
rage,” the emphasis of her article is on how to make power palatable in strong women
and here she is speaking explicitly about Palin’s adoption of the symbol of the Mama
Grizzly. “The whole mom-shtick is clearly meant, in part, to domesticate those whose
very real power or wealth or celebrity […] might be a turnoff for men and women alike.”
The fierce mother protecting her young becomes a positive feminine symbol that distracts
potential voters from other more ambivalent signs of female strength, such as
intelligence, power, and financial accomplishment.
Arianna Huffington, publisher of the Huffington Post, looks at Palin’s use of the
mama grizzly through an archetypal and Jungian lens and notes that its power comes

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from tapping into the collective unconscious. Huffington argues that it is Palin’s use of
symbols, or archetypal images – in this case, the mama grizzly – that is allowing her to
connect so deeply, albeit unconsciously, with a large segment of the public. Carl Jung
describes archetypal images as “universal images that have existed since the remotest
times.” They are “inborn forms…of perception and apprehension,” the “deposits of the
constantly repeated experiences of humanity” (Huffington). Palin, in this case, is using
the archetypal symbol of the Great Mother and she has stumbled upon one of the only (if
not the only) positive, socially-sanctioned symbols of the powerful feminine in our
culture, a mother fighting for her young. And this is what intrigues me.
I’m not here to denigrate mothers, motherhood or the maternal – it’s high time
that social, domestic and foreign policy and the well-being of not only our children, but
also the planet and civilization in general, benefit from the incorporation of the feminine
into politics. I’m not calling that into question. I’m asking ‘why are there no other
culturally sanctioned symbols of the powerful feminine and, in particular, the dark
feminine (e.g. the body, sexuality, darker emotions)?’ Why are powerful women in the
social, political and economic arenas such a threat? Why are most symbols of the
powerful feminine demonized and marginalized?
To examine this question, I turn back to the Greek pantheon and look at the gods
through an archetypal lens for possible answers because ambivalence to the powerful
feminine has been a constant theme in Western culture since Classical times. My focus is
on Athena – arguably the strongest female in the Olympic pantheon and the epitome of
the powerful woman – and her shadow, the archetypal monster, Medusa.

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Who is Athena? Athena is the “appropriate” female face of the Olympian gods,
and, as a result, the accepted female voice of the patriarchy. Of all the Olympians, she is
most closely associated with and championed by Zeus, the archetypal Father. She is his
more than obedient daughter. She emerges from his head already powerful, formidably
armed, and gifted with a considered, rational intelligence, strategic insight, and
eloquence. She is a consistent champion of the male order, a tireless friend to the hero,
and, often, barely hides her disdain (and/or competitiveness) for other women, especially
those who use their sexuality to influence men, like Aphrodite. She represents a strong
mythological image of the powerful woman, especially one engaged in the more
“masculine” world of business or politics, the world of the polis: of institutions,
hierarchy, and power.
It is no mistake or coincidence that Athena is born from the head of the
masculine. She is valorized for her logos, her mind, not her body—physical strength or
sexuality—which she either cloaks in armor or disguises by assuming other forms. She is
the virginal goddess—friend, not lover, to the hero. Complete in and of herself. Self-
contained and self-restrained. Although she is patroness of the creative arts, she operates
most comfortably and authoritatively in the masculine world. She is disciplined,
controlled, and corseted. She is an over-achiever; in her identification with the father she
competes for his attention and approval by being most like him, or as Christine Downing
notes, by almost “out-Zeusing Zeus” (The Goddess 113). She has fully absorbed the
lessons of the father and consciously embraces them as a way to survive and thrive in the
primarily masculine, Western culture.

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To summarize then, Athena is the female voice of the patriarchy. The brilliant and
fiercely defended daughter of Zeus, she strides confidently across the world stage, a
mighty defender of the cultural norms and institutions of the polis. By adopting the
primarily masculine attributes valorized in the culture (valorization of the mind, intellect,
discipline, abstract thinking, hierarchy) and shunning much of the feminine (body, the
link between head and heart, instincts, intuition, emotion and libido), she remains a
formidable power to contend with and carries within herself the ambivalence toward the
powerful feminine we still see reflected in society today. On the one hand, her
identification with the masculine rewards her in our culture – a culture that maintains an
uncomfortable relationship to the feminine – while on the other hand, her ability to
compete with men by embracing primarily masculine attributes makes her a threatening
rival. Think of Athena’s relationship with Poseidon or her brother, Ares.
So even Athena hits the glass ceiling. It’s a Catch-22: she is embraced by the
culture and succeeds within it by identifying, and being identified, primarily with the
“culturally sanctioned” masculine values, but this very identification makes her a threat.
Why? Before I hazard an answer, let’s turn to Medusa to shed further light on this
paradox.
Who is Medusa? Medusa is one of the most archaic and enduring images in
Greek mythology and Western culture. Her story is familiar, yet brief. Medusa, once a
beautiful woman, is cursed by Athena and turned into a Gorgon, a petrifying monster
with snakes for hair. Her gaze turns people to stone. Perseus, aided by Athena and
Hermes, slays the Gorgon by deflecting her image in his shield. Medusa’s severed head is
eventually returned to Athena who wears it facing outward on her aegis or breastplate,

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where it serves as a powerful weapon against her opponents. Ironically, much as she
petrifies, Medusa has been petrified in the Western imagination as the terrifying monster,
par excellence.
But in every recounting, in every aspect of her story, even as the monstrous
Medusa, she is passive, she is the object. She is raped by Poseidon, she is cursed by
Athena. She cannot interact with anyone save her sisters because all who look upon her
turn to stone. Importantly, it is not her gaze that turns others to stone, it is the act of being
gazed upon, the act of being seen – that is, if you look upon Medusa, you will be frozen.
In other words, it is not what she projects, but rather what is projected upon her that
paralyzes. And what is projected upon her are the darker, split-off attributes of the
powerful feminine, the messier, less controllable emotions – in particular anger and rage–
and the body.
Psychologically, Medusa represents the shadow—those unlived, severed aspects
of self that are projected outward and on to another. Specifically, Medusa represents
Athena’s shadow. Pierre Brunel writes that “Athena and Medusa are two indissociable
aspects of the same sacred power” (781) – Athena representing the light and Medusa
representing the darker attributes of the feminine. Although Athena is most often
identified with the masculine, by wearing Medusa’s severed head on her aegis, she
actually carries the whole of the powerful feminine, even as she consciously shuns its
darker powers. Facing outward on Athena’s aegis, it is Medusa who has borne centuries
of negative projections about the feminine.

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The Cost: The Silenced Feminine and the Loss of Authentic Voice
What is it about Medusa that triggers such a strong, vengeful reaction from
Athena? In the myth, Athena drives all the action: she punishes Medusa turning her into a
monster, she teaches Perseus how to behead her, and she ultimately wears Medusa’s
severed head on her breastplate. Why is she so threatening? I believe it is because
Medusa represents not only the dark feminine, but the silenced feminine and the loss of
authentic voice that ensues when we deny the shadow – this darker energy that is messy,
unruly, uncontainable and uncontrollable—that is so threatening to a defended, masculine
consciousness like Athena’s and the culture in general, a consciousness that valorizes
logos, the rational, certainty, and—above all—the mind over the body, eros, instinct and
emotion. Yet it is precisely this energy that needs to be embraced by the culture; a culture
all too good at neatly categorizing and splitting ideas, emotions and ideologies as good or
bad, black or white—“you’re either with us or against us.” I believe that women (and
men) need both Athenian and Medusean energy to operate successfully in the world, but
while the Athenian traits have been embraced by the culture, the darker Medusean
powers have been cleanly and violently severed and discarded.
One of the costs of this split is the paradox of voicelessness – or lack of authentic
voice – that afflicts Athena and the powerful woman. While many might argue that
Athena has a strong voice, I argue that Athena adopts the voice of the father in order to
be heard in the culture. And while she has a voice, indeed a quite powerful, authoritative
voice, it is not complete, or whole. She uses it to great advantage, but in this mimicry or
identification with the masculine, something vital has been lost—her connection with the

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feminine, with the body, with instinct, with the more unruly emotions, with her authentic
voice and with her full power.
So Medusa’s severed head is Athena’s wound – the severed and silenced
feminine. And much as Athena sacrifices and silences Medusa, who is really an aspect of
herself, silencing the powerful feminine is a form of self-sacrifice as women are
frequently complicit in the silencing, or marginalizing, of their own power.
Back to the Present
Going back to the beginning of this talk, I believe there is a move afoot in the
culture to reclaim the silenced feminine, but at present, the powerful feminine is only
acceptable to the culture in the form of the Mother, in everything maternal. Ironically,
Sarah Palin has hit upon the one symbol of the powerful feminine where physical
strength, the female body, anger and power are sanctioned in the guise of a mother
protecting her young. This is the one place where a woman’s femaleness, her human-
ness, her strength, her vulnerability and her ferocity are acceptable to the culture.
Thus Sarah Palin, Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton have all embraced the
voice of the Mother to deflect or distract from their full power and to make themselves
more palatable to an ambivalent culture.
This is why Michelle Obama, a highly educated and accomplished professional
woman in her own right is styled as “Mom in Chief” and focuses her energy on two
issues, childhood obesity and military families. Family and Children are two arenas
where women are given credence as knowing something. During the presidential
campaign, Michelle Obama’s ratings were very negative – you may recall that she was

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deemed a terrorist, fist-bumping, hater of white people – until she gave her speech at the
Democratic Convention. Her popular perception began to tick upward from there on.
In her national introduction to the American people, how did she frame herself? In
the first 5 minutes of her speech, she introduced herself as ‘my brother’s sister, my
husband’s wife, my father’s daughter and a mom,’ burying, or swallowing, her
credentials as an intelligent, educated, accomplished and powerful woman in her own
right. Again, there’s nothing wrong with any of these descriptors or roles, it’s just that
they do not present a full and accurate portrait of her power.
Hillary Clinton has always been a polarizing figure with both men and women,
Republicans and Democrats. In her NYT article, Judith Warner writes: “A generation’s
worth of lessons have been learned since 1992, when Hillary Clinton, as candidate for
first lady, scorned – and earned the scorn of – non-working mothers with her ‘I suppose I
could have stayed home and baked cookies’ comment.”
In 2008, Clinton got off to a rough start in the primaries, losing to Obama in Iowa,
but then had a renaissance in New Hampshire after she was perceived as “crying” in a
meeting with a group of women in a diner. The media wrote that she attracted the
women’s vote because she broke down, but I think people connected to her authenticity
and saw the human side of a woman who has learned to be very guarded publicly and
more frequently leads with her masculine energy in the public and political arenas, like
Athena. Whenever Hillary leads with her intellect, her policies and her strength, she is
attacked and vilified. Her popularity rises when she is viewed as vulnerable rather than
strong, then she is approachable and relatable: for example, when her husband’s infidelity
was revealed or when she “cried” in New Hampshire. Warner notes that this past

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summer, Clinton “made sure to take time out from a high-pressure Pakistan visit to sit
down with Andrea Mitchell and discuss the joys of being mother of the bride.” Lately
Bill Clinton, in response to questions of whether Hillary will run for president in 2016,
replies that she would rather be Grandmother-in-Chief. So Hillary too has learned to
balance or deflect her more masculine power with only those “sanctioned” feminine
attributes.
I look forward to the day when women and men can bring both the masculine and
the feminine aspects of themselves to the table. When we can speak with a fullness and
authenticity born of integrity, in the sense of wholeness, without having to sacrifice or
silence a part of the self. This is an evolution that will benefit not just women, but also
the culture, because the denigration and severing of the feminine negatively affects
everyone.
To do this, the reclaiming and the re-integration of the feminine, both its dark and
light aspects, becomes critical. In this regard, Medusa’s severed head serves as Athena
and the powerful woman’s call to action. Athena must re-member Medusa, reconnect
mind with body, head with heart, in order to reclaim her authentic self and speak in a full-
throated voice as opposed to just the full-throated roar of the grizzly.
Cathy Diorio recently completed a PhD in Mythological Studies with an Emphasis in
Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. Her background, however, is in
international finance where she was an executive at a Fortune 50 company for many
years. She is now interested in bringing these two fields together. Her dissertation, The
Silent Scream of Medusa, examines voicelessness – or the sacrifice of authentic voice –
in powerful women, based on her experience in Corporate America. She can be contacted
at cathydiorio@mac.com.