Book Review: Mary Beard's "Women & Power"

{In a belated, yet continuing celebration of Women's History Month, this week's entry will feature a book review of Cambridge literary professor Mary Beard's 2017 nonfictional novella Women & Power: A Manifesto.}

Professor Mary Beard of SPQR fame (2015) continues her examination of classical times and literature this time focusing on the latter's intersection with gender politics in her 2017 work Women & Power: A Manifesto, a collection of two essays transcribed from lectures she delivered in 2014 and 2017. This intriguing and powerful work examines the origin of society's suspicion, even antipathy, of powerful women by examining classical literature's fierce exclusion of women from the public circle and traces its continued influence in contemporary times, up through the tumultuous 2016 election campaign.

Not afraid to be provocative, in her preface, Beard bluntly states that "Western culture has had thousands of years of practice" in developing various mechanisms involved in the silencing of women as she begins her brief survey of Western history (Beard, 2017, p. xi). She begins in the classical era by taking a critical look at Homer's treatment of women in Odysseus, a tale of a soldier's (Odysseus) long journey home from fighting in the Trojan War and his wife Penelope's steadfast devotion to her husband in her dodging of various suitors vying for her hand in marriage.

Now, in having studied this literary work at various points from high school to college literature classes, I have always been bothered by various aspects of Odysseus, such as how its female characters were portrayed. They seemed like ornaments to the story at best, never to be heard from except in the bedroom and in other private spaces, often where they saw to the hero's (apparently well-deserved) reward of mainly sexual comfort. Beard confirms my intuitions by chastising Odysseus's son Telemachus's treatment of Penelope, who often tells her not to interrupt the adults in the room discussing current affairs (i.e. the men, including himself), including the matter of her potential spouse. In declaring public speech and action to be "the business of men," with "business" serving to qualify and make distinct the separation of serious "authoritative...speech" from the superficial and ditsy "kind of chatting, prattling or gossip that anyone-women included, or especially women-could do," Beard underlines how Telemachus serves as a continuing metaphor for how culture marks the achievement of masculine maturity in his asserting the prerogative of public functions over the passive, submissive female (Beard, 2017, p. 6).

Unfortunately, this pattern of silencing women who dare to speak out and punishing continually assertive women (who dared go outside the acceptable realms of public speech in defense of other women-not part of the public sphere traditionally-or the domestic sphere) with social ostracization and the label of a freak or "androgyne," because the authority of public speech is ultimately entwined with masculinity rather than femininity, continues to this day (Beard, 2017, p. 11). While it permeates practically every interaction in society, it is most visible in politics, where women hoping to move further up the power ladder from a baseline of basic voting rights rely on a strategy of highlighting their masculine appearances (from deepening their voices to get further from the "shrillness" of female speech to adapting the "regulation" pant-suits and otherwise adopting "tough" language) and aspects (Beard, 2017, p. 11, 54). Even the ways in which we describe women seeking power, from our metaphors of "smashing a glass ceiling" and "knocking on the door," Beard highlights the fact that there is an underlying sense of women's taking power illegitimately or otherwise upsetting the natural sociopolitical order (Beard, 2017, p. 59).

Enter in the infamous 2016 campaign. This illegitimacy of feminine power-seeking (whether we view it as such overtly or subconsciously) can translate into things like photo-shopping Hillary Clinton's head onto Medusa's, the Greek mythological figure whose hair was made of snakes and whose looks turned anyone who looked at her into stone. This was paired with Trump, photoshopped onto the statue of the Greek hero Perseus who holds Medusa's decapitated head in the air triumphantly. Very Freudian, I might add. Gotta love the dark recesses of the Internet (not).

Anyways, maybe it's time that we rethink power and who's allowed to inhabit that coveted, hallowed domain, instead of trying to force women to adapt to the near-impossible conditions of achieving a position of power in society. While Beard is not very optimistic about the chances of this redefinition happening any time soon, the question concerning the nature of power she leaves the reader with in her conclusion nonetheless is one of the most important aspects of Women & Power and worthy of further study (and application).

Works Cited:

Beard, Mary. (2017). Women & Power: A Manifesto. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.