Women & Power: A Manifesto by Mary Beard

New York Times Bestseller One of the Guardian's "100 Best Books of the 21st Century" — "A modern feminist classic." From the internationally acclaimed classicist and New York Times best-selling author comes this timely manifesto on women and power. 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?

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.

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.

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.