Welcome to August, dear readers! If you are like me, you are probably wondering where exactly that summer, which seemed so long at the end of June, has gone. This summer I had a chance to recharge, reflect, and to travel. One of the things that I thought about a lot, as I wandered the steps of churches in Siena and piazzas in Florence, was historical framing. Everywhere I walked, I saw women in statues and paintings and I thought a lot about the way that these women are presented in history.

I’ve been teaching Latin for more than 10 years, but long before that, when I was just a teenager, I started studying Roman history in school. Classics, as some of you may know, has been a discipline that is slow to change. It also has a reputation for being full of misogyny across the millenia. When I was young and started studying, I learned about some of the strong women of the Roman world. But, of course, they were rarely presented like that. Instead, they were presented as manipulative, cruel, or, in some very pronounced examples, whorish. Women like Livia or Clodia Metelli, or others who bucked the patriarchy thousands of years ago were depicted by many of my teachers as being, well, for lack of a better phrase, genuinely bad ladies.

Fast forward to the internal reckoning that classics has had in the last few years. We’ve definitely had to confront some of our issues and we haven’t done a great job at it. But we continue to fight. And I continue to think about how I can create change in my classroom, so that I don’t send my students off to college thinking that Clodia was nothing but a floozy or that Livia poisoned everyone she met. The problem we often run into is the sensationalism and the entertainment factor of the misogynist tropes. The students love to hear about Livia poisoning figs or Clodia’s multiple affairs.

So how does this relate to my time in Italy? As I looked at the statues, I thought about these women. The women of ancient Rome and the young women sitting in my classroom. I owe it to them to do my part. And my part is to start teaching the bias. Instead of going for the entertainment value, I will always push myself to present the women of the ancient world in the same way that I present the men, as people. I will name and explain the bias around Livia just as I unpack the bias around the exile of Ovid. I will teach students to evaluate the ancients as flawed narrators, whose voices we must look at more critically. And, in doing that, I will find ways to help them learn how to name and unpack modern biases as well. In that way, I will honor both the women of the past, whose voices we must strain to hear, and the women of the future, whose voices we must honor and elevate now, so that no one ever has to strain to hear them.

- Amy