| Feminism. |
| Women -- Social conditions. |
| Sexism. |
| Power (Social sciences). |
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Summary
Summary
At long last, Mary Beard addresses in one brave book the misogynists and trolls who mercilessly attack and demean women the world over, including, very often, Mary herself. In Women & Power, she traces the origins of this misogyny to its ancient roots, examining the pitfalls of gender and the ways that history has mistreated strong women since time immemorial. As far back as Homer's Odyssey, Beard shows, women have been prohibited from leadership roles in civic life, public speech being defined as inherently male. From Medusa to Philomela (whose tongue was cut out), from Hillary Clinton to Elizabeth Warren (who was told to sit down), Beard draws illuminating parallels between our cultural assumptions about women's relationship to power--and how powerful women provide a necessary example for all women who must resist being vacuumed into a male template. With personal reflections on her own online experiences with sexism, Beard asks: If women aren't perceived to be within the structure of power, isn't it power itself we need to redefine? And how many more centuries should we be expected to wait?
Reviews: (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Based on a lecture from the London Review of Books lecture series, this essay from Beard (SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome) uses examples from literature to show deep roots of misogyny in Western culture. Beard uses clear and elegant prose to explore the ways in which men have silenced women and excluded them from the public sphere throughout history. She traces the phenomenon from Homer's Odyssey, which Beard cites as the "first recorded example of a man telling a woman to 'shut up,'" to the hostile treatment of women politicians today, which Beard sees as exemplified by U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell stopping Sen. Elizabeth Warren from speaking on the Senate floor in early 2017. Beard argues that there is still no clear concept of what a powerful woman looks like, except "that she looks rather like a man," this being why numerous Western political leaders wear "regulation trouser suits." Beard ends on an open note that questions the nature of power itself: "If women are not perceived to be fully within the structures of power, surely it is power that we need to redefine rather than women?" This slim and timely volume leaves readers to contemplate how women can reconfigure society's current perceptions of power. (Dec.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
In this brilliant book, the classicist charts misogyny from ancient Greece and Rome to today, and issues a clarion call that it is not women but power that must change At the end of Mary Beard ¿s SPQR ¿ A History of Ancient Rome of 2015, she describes taking her kids to the Colosseum in Rome, where she agrees to pay for them to be photographed with ¿chancers¿ dressed up as gladiators, buys them helmets and, ¿turning a blind eye to the cruelties of the modern world¿, reassures them that ¿we do not do anything as cruel as that now¿. Given the relentless, vicious misogyny to which Beard has been exposed, it is not surprising that, in her books on classical life and history, such personal moments are rare. But this one speaks volumes. Beard is our most famous classicist, with a gift for bringing ancient Greece and Rome alive on the page like no one else. She is a writer of exceptional erudition and biting wit, and reading her is always a pleasure. This latest manifesto, Women and Power, originally delivered as two lectures, in 2014 and 2017, under the auspices of the British Museum and the London Review of Books, is no exception. Beard is consistently asking the same question: what is the relationship between the ancient past and today? In the Colosseum, she falters, finding it unbearable, as any mother might, to admit to her children that killing and torture are not long-lost memories ripe for play-acting, but rather the hallmark of the world they will inherit. Beard opens Women and Power by acknowledging the huge advances for women in the west over the last 100 years (her mother was born before women had the vote). But, in view of what follows, this feels a bit like a concession. Her argument is one of continuity. When Telemachus tells Penelope to shut up, or Philomena has her tongue ripped out so she cannot speak of her rape, they are the templates for the active, loaded silencing of women today in public life. This treatment of women¿s public speech as an ¿abomination¿ has re-emerged in different ways, from the rape and death threats hurled on Twitter at journalist Caroline Criado Perez for daring to suggest that a woman¿s image should grace our currency to the abused and raped women around the world who simply dare not speak. Beard could hardly have known of the daily exposures of sexual harassment, from Hollywood to Westminster and beyond, that were to come. Likewise, when Athena is stripped of her femininity at the very moment she becomes founder and patron of the Greek city state, she is the prototype for Hillary Clinton and Angela Merkel greeting each other in identical trouser suits (though whether androgyny is always oppressive for women might be a moot point). One of the most graphic, repellent moments in the book is the depiction of Donald Trump as a triumphant Perseus raising aloft the head of the decapitated Medusa with Clinton¿s features etched on her face. The image did the rounds across the United States during the 2016 election campaign, just one early sign of the hatred and abuse of women that has become the sickening hallmark of his presidency. These classical examples are the deep strata, the ugly undertow of undying prejudice. They are telling us just how much ¿ ¿as far back as we can see in western history¿ and for all the talk of progress ¿ women are up against. ¿This is not,¿ Beard insists, ¿the peculiar ideology of some distant culture,¿ however ¿distant in time it may be¿. It is an irony of the book that Beard can only make her depressing point by shoving it in our face. This was even more the case in the lecture version of the second essay, where we were treated to image after image of the head of Clinton with her crazed and impotent, flailing, locks. Somehow Beard always manages to sound breezy, to recount the tales she is telling, however horrendous, with relish (a talent I admit to having mixed feelings about). In fact, Women and Power is deadly serious. It is describing the poison of patriarchy as it drips into the body politic of what parades under the banner of civilisation. This is another reason why the book is so timely, appearing just when university students are demanding, not for the first time, that the curriculum be decolonised to make it reflect more than the historically deluded self-affirmation and imperial project of the west (an important, serious, demand even if it is being treated in some quarters like a dangerous insurrection). Beard has written an indictment, perhaps her most uncompromising to date, of an ancient past that she is hardly asking us ¿ has never unequivocally asked us ¿ to celebrate. As far as women are concerned, in relation to this ancestral legacy, there is very little to be proud about. Perhaps it is for this reason ¿ the fact that her examples are so persuasively graphic and foul ¿ that I wanted to look up classics and ancient history scholars who tell a somewhat different tale. From Edith Hall¿s writing about Thucydides, for example, I take the image of women throwing tiles on the heads of oligarchs during the revolution in Kerkyra (today¿s Corfu) in the fifth century BC, and Esther Eidinow gives voice to women on trial as witches, seizing their moment even if they cannot finally defy their fate. In Beard¿s account, Medea, Clytemnestra and Antigone are proffered as a triad of ¿unforgettable women¿, who are salutary examples of ¿the unquestionable mess¿, the ¿chaos, the fracture of the state, death and destruction¿ that women bring to power in Greek myth. I am no classicist, but this is not why or how I remember them. Surely it is for the outspoken challenge she issues to inhuman state power that Antigone¿s voice so strongly resonates, even after her horrid, lingering death? And it is only when Medea is excluded from a power she feels is rightfully hers that she wreaks havoc. Before disappearing off the map following her inhuman crime, in Euripides¿ version she is permitted a proto-feminist speech in which she rails against the destiny of women ¿ ¿the most beset by trials of any species that has breath and power and thought¿. As for Clytemnestra, her catastrophic reign, including her murder of her husband, Agamemnon, is given its rationale by his killing their daughter Iphigenia, which sets off the whole cycle of violence but barely gets a mention here. It is true that, in the final court scene, Athena as presiding judge betrays her kind and takes the side of men when she pardons Orestes, Clytemnestra¿s son, for killing his mother in turn. But not before the Furies have vowed to harry matricides to hell, and argued that the visceral, bodily tie to the mother makes her murder by her son by far the most heinous crime. It must make a difference ¿ if not, feminism is done for ¿ that such truths are spoken, that there is, always has been and will be, such calling out of injustice on the part of the oppressed. Beard does acknowledge the ¿fault lines and fractures¿, ¿the conflicts and paradoxes¿, and gives examples of resistance: Philomena weaving the name of her rapist into a tapestry, Flavia sticking her hairpins in the tongue of the dead Cicero who had abused her. Meanwhile, the Sabine women she describes in SPQR were not simply passive victims, but marched on to the battlefield to persuade their fathers and husbands to bring their war to an end. Times do change. Compared with women in most parts of ancient Greece and the near east, Roman women, we are told, enjoyed relative freedom ¿ they could own property, buy and sell, inherit and free slaves and were not expected to be publicly invisible. But in Women and Power this is not the main tune. For the most part, Beard is offering a worst-case reading, showing us that this has gone on for ever. She is issuing a clarion call ¿ hence the ¿Manifesto¿ of the title ¿ which at moments left me gasping for air. Of course Beard herself could be said to have defied the odds so brutally stacked against women. She is the exception to her own rule: ¿It is still hard for me to imagine someone like me in my role.¿ As she also pointed out when delivering the first essay as a lecture, by talking publicly of women¿s exclusion from public speech, she was fitting herself into something of a women¿s niche (while also both making and contradicting her own point). It is not women, Beard concludes, but power that must change. She takes as her model the unsung mothers of Black Lives Matter who turn ¿sorrow into strategy¿ ¿ the words of Gwen Carr, mother of Eric Garner, killed by police on Staten Island in 2014: ¿We have to save the unborn.¿ ¿If I was starting this book again from scratch,¿ Beard writes at the end, ¿I would find more space to defend women¿s right to be wrong.¿ Today more than ever, we need a politics that makes space and time for human fallibility (and not just for women). The question I finally take from this brilliant book is: what would such power ¿ no rape, no guns, no shutting up of women ¿ look like? - Jacqueline Rose.
Kirkus Review
Noted classicist and essayist Beard (S.P.Q.R.: A History of Ancient Rome, 2015, etc.) looks deep into the past and hard at the present to examine the power of womenand more often, their powerlessnessin a world of impatient men.Sen. Elizabeth Warren was far from the first woman to be silenced, publicly, by a man who did not want to hear what she had to say. As the author chronicles in the first of two lectures in this slim but potent volume, Telemachus, the son of Odysseus, hushed his mother, Penelope, saying, "speech will be the business of men, all men, and of me most of all." Penelope retreats to her quarters, although in fact she does have something important to say. Women who managed to make themselves heard in the ancient world usually did so with asterisks attached, as when Maesia, who defended herself in a Roman court, was successful because, a contemporary recorded, "she really had a man's nature behind the appearance of a woman." The classical inheritance has provided a template that holds to this dayand when not silenced, women are threatened and trolled, as Beard is every time she writes an essay for nonacademic readers. Silence links to power or the lack thereof; in this regard, argues the author, women do not recognize their achievements and the possibilities of self-governanceor, perhaps more to the point, "have no template for what a powerful woman looks like, except that she looks rather like a man." In closing her provocative, thoughtful, and elegantly but lightly worn literary argument, Beard observes that were she writing her lectures afresh, she would "find more space to defend women's right to be wrong," since they have to be unimpeachably correct in order to be taken seriouslyif then.An urgent feminist cri de coeur, spot-on in its utterly reasonable plea that a woman "who dares to open her mouth in public" actually be given a hearing. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Originally delivered for the London Review of Books winter lectures series, in 2014 and 2017 respectively, the two essays that make up this slim volume are timely and trenchant additions to our public conversations about women and political authority. Beard (classics, Cambridge Univ.; SPQR) ranges across 3,000 years of Western history and literature to reflect on how and why women are so persistently excluded, as a class, from the public halls of power. "The Public Voice of Women" asks readers to consider the many ways we have of not listening to women; "Women in Power" suggests that leadership remains a fundamentally masculine space. An afterword briefly discusses the context in which these pieces were written and the work still ahead. References provide avenues for further reading, and illustrations from both classical and contemporary culture provide visual evidence for the enduring sexism Beard describes. VERDICT Although many readers might have already encountered earlier editions of these pieces, this volume remains a fresh presentation of thoughtful political commentary from a historical and feminist perspective.-Anna J. Clutterbuck-Cook, Massachusetts Historical Soc. © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.