Women & Power: A Manifesto

Mary Beard is great, and this text is quite interesting. May read it with students.

A very fast listen, read by Ms Beard herself. It's a great introduction to how things are and why. It does not go into how to make changes.

Being a female in a male dominated industry starting in the 1980s means I've been on the receiving end of the sort of bias and prejudice the author is writing about. I've even had to point out to women how their view of ‘pushy' or ‘loud' women is most likely inaccurate due to bias and that I'm most likely described the same way just for being a woman in this time and place and not sticking to the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant.

I'm looking forward to a book that talks about how to make changes.

I was especially moved by the first half of this book, on how society has treated a woman's voice since our western literature began.

It's always nice to find a reference to a book while reading another book, and that's exactly how I found this and decided to pick it up immediately. I didn't realize that it's just a short collection of lectures by the author, but it is extremely profound regardless.

I know only a couple of the more common Greek/Roman myths and haven't read the classics Iliad or the Odyssey, so it was fascinating to see the author trace the origins of women disempowerment and silencing to those myths. What's more surprising is to see how these age old beliefs rooted in misogyny still reflect in popular current thought, albeit maybe in a different form - now manifesting as twitter trolls and rape/death threats on social media. The author doesn't give us any clear solutions but asks all of us to examine the relationship between women and power, how we can try to gain it collectively (not just concentrating on individual high achievers) by not falling into the stereotypes of powerful women created by men. I particularly liked this line of hers -

We have to be more reflective about what power is, what it is for, and how it is measured. To put it another way, 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?”

To conclude, I just wanna say this was quite interesting to read. If you like Greco-Roman mythologies and would like to know how the fraught relationship of women with power has age old origins, you should pick this up. It's an illuminating experience and can make us reflect on what more we can do to rid our culture of these notions of women's inferiority. It's also very short and packs a lot of information in a few pages, so pick it up and hopefully, it'll surprise you.

Wanted more

I read this gem in one sitting at the bookstore - it is quite short, after all. I fully intend to re-read it, though, in order to better savor it. I do wish I'd heard Beard deliver these speeches. Reading them is wonderful, though!

I first became aware of Beard due to her marvelous clapbacks at Twitter trolls and other cretins who have tried to silence her. I feel a sense of connection to her due to our shared experience with misogynistic Internet abuse.

I cannot recommend Beard and her work strongly enough to anyone who has any interest at all in the treatment of women in the public eye.

This little book is subtitled “A Manifesto”, and it contains 2 speeches-made-into-essays that Beard gave in 2014 (The Public Voice of Women) and 2017 (Women in Power). Drawing on examples from Greek and Roman mythology (Beard is a classicist) she elegantly and concisely demonstrates how women's voices have continuously been oppressed and ridiculed. How the notion of power is inherently male and how women breaking into positions of power have to adopt maleness. Ending on the manifesto part, Beard calls for a redefinition of power itself.

This is a very quick and excellent read, and and at the end you're left wishing she had added on another essay with an outline for a path on how to get past these still existing culturally indoctrinated prejudices.