Women & Power: A Manifesto by Mary Beard.
Title: Women & Power: A Manifesto.
Author: Mary Beard.
Genre: Non-fiction, mythology, history, feminism.
Country: London, U.K.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2017.
Summary: In this book, the author revisits the gender agenda and shows how history has treated powerful women. Her examples range from the classical world to the modern day, exploring the cultural underpinnings of misogyny, considering the public voice of women, our cultural assumptions about women's relationship with power, and how few powerful women resist being packaged into a male template. With persona reflections on her own experiences of the sexism and gendered aggression she has endured online, Beard asks: if women aren't perceived to be within the structures of power, isn't it power that we need to redefine?
My rating: 7/10
My review:
♥ [My mother] was often in my mind when I was preparing the two lectures on which this book is based, delivered, courtesy of the London Review of Books, in 2014 and 2017. I wanted to work out how I would explain to her - as much as to myself, as well as to the millions of other women who still share some of the same frustrations - just how deeply embedded in Western culture are the mechanisms that silence women, that refuse to take them seriously, and that sever them (sometimes quite literally, as we shall see) from the centres of power. This is one place where the world of the ancient Greeks and Romans can help to throw light on our own. When it comes to silencing women, Western culture has had thousands of years of practice.
~~from Preface.
♥ But the Odyssey is just as much the story of Telemachus, the son of Odysseus and Penelope. It is the story of his growing up and how over the course of the poem he matures from boy to man. That process starts in the first book of the poem when Penelope comes down from her private quarters into the great hall of the palace, to find a bard performing to throngs of her suitors; he is singing about the difficulties the Greek heroes are having in reaching home. She isn't amused, and in front of everyone she asks him to choose another, happier number. At which point young Telemachus intervenes: "Mother," he says, "go back up into your quarters, and take up your own work, the loom and the distaff... speech will be the business of men, all men, and of me most of all; for mine is the power in this household." And off she goes, back upstairs.
There is something faintly ridiculous about this wet-behind-the-ears lad shutting up the savvy, middle-aged Penelope. But it is a nice demonstration that right where written evidence for Western culture starts, women's voices are not being heard in the public sphere. More than that, as Homer has it, an integral part of growing up, as a man, is learning to take control of public utterance and to silence the female of the species. The actual words Telemachus uses are significant too. When he says "speech" is "men's business," the word is muthos - not in the sense that it has come down to us of "myth." In Homeric Greek it signals authoritative public speech, not the kind of chatting, prattling or gossip that anyone - women included, or especially women - could do.
♥ My aim here is to take a long view, a very long view, on the culturally awkward relationship between the voice of women and the public sphere of speech-making, debate and comment: politics in its widest sense, from office committees to the floor of the House. I am hoping that the long view will help us get beyond the simple diagnosis of "misogyny" that we tend a bit lazily to fall back on. To be sure, "misogyny" is one way of describing what's going on. (If you go on a television discussion programme and then receive a load of tweets comparing your genitalia to a variety of unpleasantly rotting vegetables, it's hard to find a more apt word.) But if we want to understand - and do something about - the fact that women, even when they are not silenced, still have to pay a very high price for being heard, we need to recognise that it is a bit more complicated and that there is a long back-story.
♥ There are only two main exceptions in the classical world to this abomination of women's public speaking. First, women are allowed to speak out as victims and as martyrs, usually to preface their own death. Early Christian women were represented loudly upholding their faith as they went to the lions; and, in a well-known story from the early history of Rome, the virtuous Lucretia, raped by a brutal prince of the ruling monarchy, was given a speaking part solely to denounce the rapist and announce her own suicide (or so Roman writers presented it: what really happened, we haven't a clue). But even this rather bitter opportunity to speak could itself be removed. One story in the Metamorphoses tells of the rape of the young princess Philomela. In order to prevent any Lucretia-style denunciation, the rapist quite simply cuts her tongue out. It's a notion that's picked up in Shakespeare's Titus Adronicus, where the tongue of the raped Lavinia is also ripped out.
The second exception is more familiar. Occasionally women could legitimately rise up to speak - to defend their homes, their children, their husbands or the interests of other women. So in the third of the three examples of female oratory discussed by that Roman anthologist, the woman, Hortensia by name, gets away with it because she is acting explicitly as the spokesperson for the women of Rome (and for women only), after they have been subject to a special wealth tax to fund a dubious war effort. Women, in other words, may in extreme circumstances publicly defend their own sectional interests, but not speak for men or the community as a whole. In general, as one second-century AD guru put it, "a woman should as modestly guard against exposing her voice to outsiders as she would guard against stripping her clothes."
♥ What I mean is that public speaking and oratory were not merely things that ancient women didn't do: they were exclusive practices and skills that defined masculinity as a gender. As we saw with Telemachus, to become a man (or at least an elite man) was to claim the right to speak. Public speech was a - if not the - defining attribute of maleness. Or, to quote a well-known Roman slogan, the elite male citizen could be summed up as vir bonus dicendi peritus, "a good man, skilled in speaking". A woman speaking in public was, in most circumstances, by definition not a woman.
♥ As one ancient scientific treatise explicitly put it, a low-pitched voice indicated manly courage, a high-pitched voice female cowardice. Other classical writers insisted that the tone and timbre of women's speech always threatened to subvert not just the voice of the male orator but also the social and political stability, the health, of the whole state. One second-century AD lecturer and intellectual with the revealing name of Dio Chrysostom (it means literally Dio "the Golden Mouth") asked his audience to imagine a situation where "an entire community was struck by the following strange affliction: all the men suddenly got female voices, and no male - child or adult - could say anything in a manly way. Would not that seem terrible and harder to bear than any plague? I'm sure they would send off to a sanctuary to consult the gods and try to propitiate the divine power with many gifts." He wasn't joking.
♥ This is not the peculiar ideology of some distant culture. Distant in time it may be. But I want to underline that this is a tradition of gendered speaking - and the theorising of gendered speaking - to which we are still, directly or more often indirectly, the heirs. Let's not overstate the case. Western culture does not owe everything to the Greeks and Romans, in speaking or in anything else (thank heavens it doesn't; none of us would fancy living in a Greco-Roman world). There are all kinds of variants and competing influences on us, and our political system has happily overthrown many of the gendered certainties of antiquity. Yet it remains the fact that our own traditions of debate and public speaking, their conventions and rules, still lie very much in the shadow of the classical world. The modern techniques of rhetoric and persuasion formulated in the Renaissance were drawn explicitly from ancient speeches and handbooks. Our own terms of rhetorical analysis go back directly to Aristotle and Cicero (before the era of Donald Trump it used to be common to point out that Barack Obama, or his speech writers, had learned their best tricks from Cicero). And those nineteenth-century gentlemen who devised, or enshrined, most of the parliamentary rules and procedures in the House of Commons were brought up on exactly those classical theories, slogans and prejudices that I have been quoting. Again, we're not simply the victims or dupes of our classical inheritance but classical traditions have provided us with a powerful template for thinking about public speech, and for deciding what counts as good oratory or bad, persuasive or not, and whose speech is to be given space to be heard. And gender is obviously an important part of that mix.
♥ Looking at modern traditions of oratory more generally, we also find the same areas of license for women to talk publicly, whether in support of their own sectional interests, or to parade their victimhood. If you search out the women's contributions included in those curious compendia, called "one hundred great speeches in history" and the like, you'll find that most of the female highlights from Emmeline Pankhurst to Hillary Clinton's address to the UN conference on women in Beijing are about the lot of women. So too is probably the most popularly anthologised example of female oratory of all, the 1815 "Ain't I a Woman?" speech of Sojourner Truth, ex-slave, abolitionist and American campaigner for women's rights. "And ain't I a woman?" she is supposed to have said.
..I'm not saying that women's voices raised in support of women's causes were not, or are not, important (someone has to speak up for women); but it remains the case that women's public speech has for centuries been "nitched" into that area.
♥ But, in every way, the shared metaphors we used of female access o power - "knocking on the door", "storming the citadel", smashing the glass ceiling", or just giving them a "leg up" - underline female exteriority. Women in power are seen as breaking down barriers, or alternatively as taking something to which they are not quite entitled.
A headline in The Times in early 2017 captured this wonderfully. Above an article reporting on the possibility that women might soon gain the positions of Metropolitan Police commissioner, chair of the BBC Unitary Board and bishop of London, it read: "Women Prepare for a Power Grab in Church, Police and BBC." (Cressida Dick, the commissioner of the Met, was the only one of these predictions to come true). Of course, headline writers are paid to "grab" attention. But even so, the idea that you could present the prospect of a woman becoming bishop of London as a "power grab" - and that probably thousands upon thousands of readers didn't bat an eyelid when they read it - is a sure sign that we need to look a lot more carefully at our cultural assumptions about women's relationship with power. Workplace nurseries, family-friendly hours, mentoring schemes and all those practical things are importantly enabling, but they are only part of what we need to be doing. If we want to give women as a gender - and not just in the shape of a few determined individuals - their place inside of the structures of power, we have to think harder about how and why we think as we do. If there is a cultural template, which works to disempower women, what exactly is it and where do we get it from?
♥ There's a similar logic in the stories of that mythical race of Amazon women, said by Greek writers to exist somewhere on the northern borders of their world. A more violent and more militaristic lot than the peaceful denizens of Herland, this monstrous regiment always threatened to overrun the civilised world of Greece and Greek men. An enormous amount of modern feminist energy has been wasted on trying to prove that these Amazons did once exist, with all the seductive possibilities of a historical society that really was ruled by and for women. Dream on. The hard truth is that the Amazons were a Greek male myth. The basic message was that the only good Amazon was a dead one, or - to go back to awful Terry - one that had been mastered, in the bedroom. The underlying point was that it was the duty of men to save civilisation from the rule of women.
♥ As for Athena, it is true that in those binary charts of ancient Greek gods and goddesses that appear in modern textbooks ("Zeus, king of the gods; Hera, wife of Zeus"), she appears on the female side. But the crucial thing about her in the ancient context is that she is another of those difficult hybrids. In the Greek sense she is not a woman at all. For a start she's dressed as a warrior, when fighting was exclusively male work (that's an underlying problem with the Amazons too, of course). Then she's a virgin, when the raison d'être of the female sex was breeding new citizens. And she herself wasn't even born of a mother but directly from the head of her father, Zeus. It was almost as if Athena, woman or not, offered a glimpse of an ideal male world in which women could not only be kept their place but dispensed with entirely.
♥ If we look at some of the women who have "made it", we can see that the tactics and strategies behind their success do not merely come down to aping male idioms. One thing that many of these women share is a capacity to turn the symbols that usually disempower women to their own advantage. Margaret Thatcher seems to have done that with her handbags, so that eventually the most stereotypically female accessory became a verb of political power: as in "to handbag".
♥ There are plenty of league tables charting the proportion of women within national legislatures. At the very top comes Rwanda, where more than 60 per cent of the members of the legislature are women, while the UK is almost fifty places down, at roughly 30 per cent. Strikingly, the Saudi Arabian National Council has a higher proportion of women than the US Congress. It is hard not to lament some of these figures and applaud others, and a lot has rightly been made of the role of women in post-civil war Rwanda. But I do wonder if, in some places, the presence of large numbers of women in parliament means that parliament is where the power is not.
I also suspect that we are not being quite straight with ourselves about what we want women in parliaments for. A number of studies point to the role of women politicians in promoting legislation in women's interests (in childcare, for example, equal pay and domestic violence). A report from the Fawcett Society recently suggested a link between the 50/50 balance between women and men in the Welsh Assembly and the number of times "women's issues" were raised there. I certainly do not want to complain about childcare and the rest getting a fair airing but I am not sure that such things should continue to be perceived as "women's issues"; nor am I sure that these are the main reasons we want more women in parliaments. Those reasons are much more basic: it is flagrantly unjust to keep women out, by whatever unconscious means we do so; and we simply cannot afford to do without women's expertise, whether it is in technology, the economy or social care. If that means fewer men get into the legislature, as it must do - social change always has its losers as well as its winners - I am happy to look those men in the eye.
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♥ It instantly became "open season" on Abbott, ridiculed as a "numpty", "a fat idiot", "bone-headed stupid" and much worse, with more than a sprinkling or racism thrown in (she is Britain's longest-serving black MP). Interpreted politely, the message was that she was simply not up to the job. Johnson came in for plenty of criticism too, but in a very different style. His interview was taken more as an example of laddish waywardness: he ought to get more of a grip, stop the bluster, concentrate and be a better master of his brief. Do better next time, in other words. The aim of Abbott's attackers (undermined, as it turned out, when she was re-elected with a vastly increased majority) was to make sure that she did not get a "next time".
Whatever your views on Abbott and Johnson, interestingly different kinds of double standards were on show here.
♥ If I were starting this book again from scratch, I would find more space to defend women's right to be wrong, at least occasionally.
I am not sure that I could find a classical parallel for that. Thankfully, not everything we do or think goes back directly or indirectly to the Greeks and Romans; and I often find myself insisting that there are no simple lessons for us in the history of the ancient world. We really didn't need the unfortunate Roman precedents in the region to know that modern Western military intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq might be a bad idea. The "collapse" of the Roman Empire in the West has little to tell us about the ups-and-downs of modern geopolitics. That said, looking harder at Greece and Rome, helps us to look harder at ourselves, and to understand better how we have learned to think as we do.
There are many reasons for us still to pay attention to Homer's Odyssey, and it would be a cultural crime if we read it only to investigate the well-springs of Western misogyny; it is a poem that explores, among much else, the nature of civilisation and "barbarity", of homecoming, fidelity and belonging. But for all that - as I hope this book shows - Telemachus' rebuke to his mother Penelope when she dares to open her mouth in public is one that is still, too often, being replayed in the twenty-first century.
~~from Afterword.