Women get very short shrift in Greek Myth. Doomed before creation.
Pandora was the first woman according to the Greek origin story. The Gods and Titans made men, and then became angry after Prometheus helped them gain fire and they became uppity. So to punish men, they created a woman, the first mortal woman, Pandora.
WTF!
So before we get to her box, which as it turns out was a sealed jar, probably an amphora and not a box, the lies start. This should be our first clue that the whole story is bogus, but then you already knew that right?
So how was Pandora to punish men? She was created by Hephaestos and Athena on Zeus’s orders. He was the craftsman, the blacksmith, potter, and stonemason of the Gods. As a master crafter and with Athena’s help Pandora was lovely and skilled, she could weave, and was beguiling with her beauty and sexuality. Other Gods added their two cents worth with Aphrodite giving Pandora beauty, desire, self-aware vanity, and grace. Hermes gave her a bold and shameless mind, a duplicitous nature, and language. Other Gods decorated her with gold and flowers.
I am far from the first to notice her similarity with Eve. First woman. Created for man. Temptress responsible for downfall of man per the apple. As a weaver Pandora has elements of Eve leading to the awareness of nakedness. The gold and flowers are not part of Eve’s story and probably related to early economics and the commercialization of sex or the definition of women as property.
Pandora certainly has all the patriarchal branding upon which our modern western world is built. There is potential linkage to an earlier story when you bring in the covered jar rather than a box which Pandora opens. There is an All Souls Day ritual that involved the opening of wine jars which also released the souls of the dead to the world while the drinking fest lasted over the course of a couple days.
After the harvest most proto European cultures have a festival where the worlds of living and dead come together as Winter descends. There is usually a female deity or supernatural being associated with Winter such as Cailleach. These late Autumn or early Winter associations may well trace back to a proto-European mythology which is fairly well evidenced by early three dimensional representational carvings of women.
In any case, the dispersal of all of life’s misfortune’s such as pestilence, illness, suffering and death are blamed on Pandora and the curiosity that sparked her opening of a sealed jar that Zeus gave her and then told her not to open. This sounds like Eve too, with the tree of knowledge and the snake representing human understanding and knowledge. Blaming women for death and the understanding of our mortality makes sense only if you understand that the cycle of life and death are obviously under women’s control because of gestation and birth in early cultures.
The Sheela na gig or witch on the wall obviously, to most researchers, connect this life/death cycle in Western Celtic cultures, and when you include Pandora and Southern European mythologies you see this cycle attributed to women. Patriarchal cultures often see this linkage as negative. More egalitarian or women-honoring cultures see this element of humanity as part of the mystery and wonder of the life cycle.
The shackling of women and blaming of them for all of society’s ills is clear example of bullying and psychologically-enforced servitude that is not a balanced nor productive structure for organizing society in the most beneficial way for all members.
Pandora, the first women of Greek myth, and all the women in society derived from that time on have been scapegoats of a negatively framed worldview.