Women & Power by Mary Beard

Britain’s best-known classicist, Mary Beard, is also a committed and vocal feminist. In Women & Power she revisits the gender agenda and shows how history has treated powerful women, using examples ranging from the classical world to the modern day. Beard explores the cultural underpinnings of misogyny, considering the public voice of women, our cultural assumptions about women’s relationship with power, and how powerful women resist being packaged into a male template.

A year on since the advent of #MeToo, in a new Afterword, Beard reflects on the successes, and the future, of that movement, probing the narratives of rape and consent. She asks about the stories men tell themselves to justify their treatment of women. Which stories endure and who controls them? With wry wit, Beard argues, it’s time for change.

Women & Power is a short book, based on two lectures Beard gave in 2014 and 2017, with an afterword added in September 2018.

The first anecdote in the book is an episode from the Odyssey in which a queen is told to ‘shut up’ by her wet-behind-the-ears son, who tells her that “speech will be the business of men”. This sets the scene for the rest of the book. Beard cites numerous other examples from classical literature of women being silenced, drawing parallels to today’s world of politics and other powerful institutions where women are still in the minority and, at the very least, have had to battle considerable criticism to get to where they are in comparison to men in equivalent positions.

Beard demonstrates this using a variety of examples. She refers to unconscious bias as something that holds us all back. Without even realising it at first, our primal imagination assumes that an authority figure – be it a professor, a scientist or a politician – is a man.

In addition, there are subtle but consistent differences in the language used to describe women in power as opposed to men in the same positions. The idea that women have a responsibility to ‘smash the glass ceiling’ suggests that women’s natural station is beneath that ceiling amongst the other women, whilst men get to enjoy the view from above. This carries with it the suggestion that women are not in fact entitled to occupy positions of power and that they are outliers if they manage to ‘smash’ their way into the world of men (and power).

Women who do reach positions of power cannot be triumphant because they continue to face sexist criticism whilst in those positions. Beard comments that some women combat this by choosing to make themselves more man-like. For example, they might lower the pitch of their voice (eg Margaret Thatcher), wear a trouser suit (eg Angela Merkel) or explicitly compare themselves to their male counterparts – here Beard cites Queen Elizabeth I who, when making an invigorating speech to the troops heading off to fight the Spanish Armada, described herself as “a weak and feeble woman [with] the heart and stomach of a king”.

Beard observes that the press also comments on women’s appearances far more often (and more harshly) than men’s, and that various female political leaders – including Theresa May, Hillary Clinton and Angela Merkel – have even been compared to Medusa, the mythical woman with snakes instead of hair. The same is not true of male political leaders.

Women are also far more heavily criticised in the press and on social media for making errors than men are for the same kinds of errors. In this regard, Beard compares reactions to similar factual errors made in interviews by Diane Abbott (the longest-serving black MP in the House of Commons) and Boris Johnson. Abbott was subject to sexist and racist abuse, culminating in the view that she was not up to the job. Johnson’s error, on the other hand, was effectively laughed off.

On a more positive note, the preface to Women & Power acknowledges how far we have come in the last century – from being unable to vote to seeing female British Prime Ministers – and expresses optimism following the widespread #MeToo movement which drew attention to the everyday sexism women still experience. Mary Beard is one of my absolute favourite feminist icons, as well as being a brilliant classicist. May she forever continue as she is.