Ep 53 / Chatting with Marisa Cerdeño about the vision of women in history
A few months ago my father gave me a powerpoint that his friend Marisa Cerdeño had given him, and we immediately wanted to bring her to our podcast to talk about the work of her colleague María Angeles Querol on the image of women in museums and Archeology with capital letters.
We have a great connection with archeology in our family, since our great-grandfather Francisco Alvarez Osorio was director of the Archaeological Museum of Madrid, and every time we went as children we thought we were going to a relative's house.
We have talked with her about Neanderthals, caves, the Iron Age, and scientific dissemination in the current era, which has opened many eyes and the desire to talk about these topics in non-professional environments. The interest in knowing our origins is inherent to human beings, and we must learn from the past to avoid repeating the mistakes of antiquity.
We have been surprised to realize that the image of women that is perpetuated is that of the bourgeois Western woman, giving importance to male roles focused on going out, hunting, and being outside, taking away the importance of people who stay at home, who raise children or who simply help in the rear. It is not an issue of feminism, it is an issue of stereotypes and clichés, of what we have always seen and have not questioned, such as the image of women in museums that is unfair and not true. This brings us to the current era in which we have to stop incorporating women into the workforce and start changing that world for everyone.
Knowing our past has opened our eyes to who we are and what we should do for the future, and we truly believe it is worth sharing.
Links to topics we have talked about:
Museums and Women: inequality in Archeology
The representation of women in the new National Archaeological Museum: starting with Prehistory
The Maragata Sphinx – Concha Espina
