Women & Power: A Manifesto

Mary Beard, a classicist, builds her manifesto from two lectures delivered for the London Review of Books in 2014 and 2017, later updated with an afterword. She argues that the mechanisms Western culture uses to silence women and exclude them from power are not recent developments but patterns embedded over thousands of years in the traditions of ancient Greece and Rome.

In the Preface, Beard grounds her inquiry in personal experience. Her mother was born before women could vote in British parliamentary elections and lived to see a female Prime Minister, yet despite heading a large primary school, she felt her views were not taken seriously and observed fewer women the higher she climbed professionally. Beard set out to understand, for her mother and for herself, how deeply these patterns run.

Chapter 1, "The Public Voice of Women," opens with what Beard identifies as the earliest recorded instance in Western literature of a man telling a woman to be silent. In Homer's Odyssey, the young Telemachus orders his mother Penelope to leave the great hall and return to her private quarters, declaring that muthos, a Greek term for authoritative public discourse, is the business of men. Beard reads this as foundational: At the very origin of Western written culture, learning to silence women is presented as part of a boy's passage into manhood.

She traces this pattern through antiquity. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, a mythological epic about transformation, women are repeatedly silenced through metamorphosis: Io is turned into a cow and can only moo, while the nymph Echo is cursed to repeat others' words. Beard identifies two narrow exceptions to this rule. Women could speak as victims and martyrs, usually just before their deaths, as when Lucretia denounced her rapist and announced her suicide. Yet even this opening could be closed: In the myth of Philomela, the rapist cut out her tongue to prevent denunciation, a motif Shakespeare later adopted in Titus Andronicus. The second exception allowed women to speak in defense of their own sectional interests, though a first-century AD Roman anthologist found only three such examples, and his descriptions were disparaging. Maesia was labeled an "androgyne," or gender anomaly, for successfully arguing her own case, while Afrania's speech was described as "barking."

Beard argues this exclusion was constitutive of masculinity itself. Public oratory defined elite manhood; the Roman ideal of the citizen was vir bonus dicendi peritus, or "a good man, skilled in speaking" (17). A woman who spoke in public was, by definition, no longer a woman. These classical templates directly shaped modern conventions. Renaissance rhetoricians drew their techniques from ancient handbooks, and the parliamentary procedures of the British House of Commons were designed by men steeped in exactly these prejudices.

The legacy persists. Queen Elizabeth I's famous speech at Tilbury, in which she supposedly declared she had "the heart and stomach of a king" (22), was almost certainly invented decades later by a male letter-writer. Women's most frequently anthologized speeches, from suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst to US political figure Hillary Clinton's address at the UN conference on women in Beijing, overwhelmingly concern women's issues, illustrating how women's public speech remains confined to a narrow domain. Even abolitionist and activist Sojourner Truth's celebrated 1851 "Ain't I a Woman?" speech is largely mythical: The famous refrain was added a decade later, and her words were rendered in a Southern dialect she never spoke.

Women who speak publicly today are called "strident" and accused of "whingeing," language that strips authority from their words. Women Members of Parliament (MPs) remain confined to portfolios like Education or Health, while no woman in the UK had yet served as Chancellor of the Exchequer, the country's finance minister. Online hostility follows the same ancient patterns: Threats to cut off heads or rip out tongues echo the mutilations of Philomela and of Lavinia, Shakespeare's version of the same figure in Titus Andronicus. The standard advice to stay quiet and block offenders ironically produces the very silence the abusers seek.

Beard argues that superficial fixes like voice training, which British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher used to lower her pitch, leave women feeling like impersonators in male rhetorical roles. She calls for a fundamental rethinking of spoken authority, pointing to classical literature itself: Ovid's Philomela, though tongueless, denounced her rapist by weaving her story into a tapestry. The chapter closes with the image of Fulvia, wife of Mark Antony, who stabbed her hairpins into the tongue of the severed head of Cicero, Rome's greatest orator, an act Beard reads as a violent reversal of the silencing of women.

Chapter 2, "Women in Power," opens with Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1915 novella Herland, which depicts a utopia of women who have lived for 2,000 years without men, reproducing through parthenogenesis, a form of asexual reproduction. When three American men—including the aggressive Terry Nicholson—discover this society, the women defer to these mediocre visitors and believe they have failed, a dynamic Beard reads as a parody of the logic that women inevitably ruin whatever power they hold.

Beard argues that the cultural template for a powerful person remains male. The trouser suits worn by leaders like Angela Merkel and Hillary Clinton function as tactics to make the female appear more male. Metaphors like "smashing the glass ceiling" position women as outsiders to power, and a 2017 Times headline described the prospect of women filling senior public roles as a "power grab."

Returning to Greek myth, Beard shows that powerful women are systematically portrayed as monstrous. In the playwright Aeschylus' Agamemnon, Clytemnestra rules her city while her husband fights the Trojan War and murders him on his return; order is restored only when her children kill her. The mythical Amazons were a Greek male invention whose message was that the only good Amazon was a dead or conquered one. Even the goddess Athena, though female, is not a woman in any Greek sense: She is a warrior, a virgin, and was born from the head of her father Zeus, representing a fantasy of dispensing with women entirely.

The myth of Medusa emerges as the book's central symbol. Medusa, a woman raped by the god Poseidon and punished by being turned into a monster, is decapitated by the hero Perseus. Beard traces this imagery into modern politics: British Prime Minister Theresa May was dubbed "the Medusa of Maidenhead," and Angela Merkel's features were superimposed on Caravaggio's painting of the severed head. Most starkly, during the 2016 US presidential election, Trump supporters produced merchandise showing Trump as Perseus and Clinton as Medusa, normalizing gendered violence as consumer culture.

Beard argues that the remedy lies not in fitting women into existing structures but in redefining power itself. She calls for decoupling power from individual prestige and thinking collaboratively about the power of followers rather than only leaders. The kind of power most women seek, Beard contends, is the ability to be effective, to make a difference, and the right to be taken seriously. She points to Black Lives Matter, founded by Alicia Garza, Patrisce Cullors, and Opal Tometi, as an example of collaborative power. The chapter closes by returning to Herland's sequel, With Her in Ourland, in which the narrator Vandyck Jennings escorts the disgraced Terry back to the outside world, bringing his Herland wife Ellador. Disillusioned, they return to Herland expecting a baby, and the novella's final words reveal it is a son. Any reader attuned to the Western tradition, Beard argues, could predict this boy would be running Herland within 50 years.

In the Afterword, Beard reflects on the double standards women face. During the 2017 UK general election, Labour MP Diane Abbott, who stumbled over policing costs, was ridiculed as a "numpty" and a "fat idiot" (95), with racist abuse added, while Conservative Boris Johnson showed comparable ignorance but was treated as someone who merely needed to try harder. Writing in September 2018, Beard addresses the #MeToo movement with cautious hope, fearing it could become a herald of change that never fully materializes. The movement fits her argument uncomfortably well: Women have historically been permitted a limited voice in denouncing abuse without altering the structures that cause it. She recounts her own rape on a night train from Milan to Rome in 1978, reflecting on how over the decades she told herself shifting narratives, from acknowledging rape to reframing it as a seduction. She concludes by arguing that women's empowerment requires not only the courage to tell their own stories but also the power to challenge the self-serving narratives men construct as alibis, ensuring those stories no longer seem plausible, even to those who tell them.