Women and Power summary

“Shut up!” Whether it’s in public or in private, that rude command always cuts through the air like a knife.

And it has a long history as a means of putting women in their place.

Women in the Greco-Roman world simply didn’t have the rights that many men enjoyed, such as voting. This meant they were less incentivized to participate in public discourse. But this exclusion went further: oratory itself was a defining aspect of what it meant to be a man.

For instance, the ideal Roman citizen was supposed to be a vir bonus dicendi peritus, that's to say, “a good man, skilled in speaking.” On top of this, male – as opposed to female – voices were strongly associated with authority in writings of the period.

There’s no question that women’s voices were rarely tolerated in public discourse in antiquity. There were exceptions, but these only proved the rule. Oratory remained an exclusively male domain.

In fact, the first-century Roman anthologist Valerius Maximus even went so far as to find three women to name in his collection Memorable Deeds and Sayings. They were, he claims, women “whose natural condition did not manage to keep them silent in the forum.”

It might seem a stretch to suggest that Greece and Rome are still important in Western culture. After all, many influences from many other societies have shaped the West. But public speaking remains one sphere that cannot escape classical thinking.

Just consider the moving speeches of Barack Obama. There’s little doubt that his speech writers were borrowing some of their rhetorical tricks from legendary Roman orators like Cicero.

You would think that by now we’d be used to allowing women to speak on a variety of topics. But you’d be wrong. This is illustrated nicely by US Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren.

In 2017, Warren tried to recite a letter written by activist Coretta Scott King on the floor of the Senate in reference to the debate. However, she was repeatedly silenced and shut down by Republicans, supposedly because she was contravening Senate rules.

In 2017, venomous attacks on the internet took many forms and plumbed new depths. The author herself was targeted and abused online every time she spoke on radio or TV.

There’s no doubt that it’s mostly women who are attacked, and that men are the main perpetrators. The aggression follows a well-established pattern: women who deign to speak in the domain of “men’s speech” are brutally silenced.

In some ways, the current situation is clearly better for women: they hold more positions of power than ever before. For example, the percentage of female British MPs has risen from 4 percent in the 1970s to 30 percent at the time of publication.

But there remain large disparities between men and women. Women have fewer opportunities to move up the ladder.

So we’ve seen there’s been a little improvement in women’s place in the public sphere. But that’s no reason to get complacent. Don’t wait for glacial change to occur. Instead, we should start thinking differently about power itself.

For starters, we need to stop falling back on celebrities, CEOs or political leaders for our standard models. We're essentially limiting the scope of the discussion if we define power within these parameters.