Women and Power Book Summary - Women and Power Book explained in key points

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Women and Power summary

Name: Women and Power
Rating: 4.2 (38 reviews)
Author: Mary Beard

Mary Beard

A Manifesto

4.2 (38 ratings)

23 mins

Table of Contents

Women and Power
summarized in 9 key ideas

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What’s in it for me? Learn just how deep-seated misogyny is, and what can be done about it.

In November 2016, Hillary Clinton failed in her bid to become president of the United States. When voters were asked why they didn’t vote for her, they often mentioned that she didn’t “look” like a president. Simultaneously, her opponents pushed the story that her health was poor and she wasn’t physically strong enough to take on the role.

To many, these complaints were frustrating and offensive. Sadly, as Mary Beard shows, such perceptions of women and power have been with us since antiquity.

As Beard demonstrates, the problem isn’t just that we’re not used to seeing women in power, but that our very definition of what it means to be a man or a woman, or what it means to be in power, have been defined upon the same inflexible parameters for centuries.

But this book is no lamentation, nor an attack on men. It’s an encouragement to change our understanding of power, to disassemble the structures of privilege and to advocate for the place of women in the public discourse.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

why pantsuits are favored by female politicians;
which classical Greek comedy imagined an Athens run by women; and
just what offended President Trump about an impression of his press secretary.

The idea of women successfully wielding power was risible or disturbing to Greeks and Romans.

Distant though the worlds of classical Greece and Rome may seem, there’s no doubt whatsoever that their impact on modern Western societies is pervasive. Scratch below the surface, and you’ll see the classical foundations underlying many cultural institutions and presumptions, especially when it comes to women.

Notably, Greek cultural tradition – and Athenian drama in particular – contains a wealth of powerful female characters.

However, these are hardly positive portraits. These women are characterized as monstrous hybrids, assuming male qualities and usurping power typically held by men. Moreover, the assumption of power by female characters in these stories often ends in disaster, mirroring the cultural perception of women and “justifying” their exclusion from the political sphere.

Just consider Aeschylus’s play Agamemnon from 458 BCE. It’s set during the Trojan War: King Agamemnon heads off to fight, leaving his wife, Clytemnestra behind as ruler. However, putting a woman in charge doesn’t go well. Upon Agamemnon’s return, Clytemnestra murders him while he bathes. The “natural” patriarchal order is restored only when her children overthrow and murder her.

It wasn’t just that women were seen as illegitimate rulers, but that when they held the reins of power, the Greeks depicted them as distinctly unwomanly.

Let’s return to Clytemnestra. Aeschylus deliberately uses male-oriented language when he describes her with the adjective “androboulon,” which roughly translates as something like “with manly purpose” or “thinking like a man.”

Conversely, the warrior goddess Athena, the patron deity of Athens, has often been taken as a positive example of a powerful female figure. But her depiction is also problematic. That’s because soldiering was exclusively for men in Greek culture. Additionally, Athena was traditionally a virgin, meaning she was very distinct from the role usually associated with women, which was producing new citizens.

In fact, from the Greek perspective, Athena was hardly a woman at all!

Women participating in public discourse have faced hostility since antiquity.

“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’s voices were restricted as public-speaking skills were male by definition.

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.

Women’s voices occasionally appear in classical writings, but they address only restricted topics.

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.”

In more modern times, women’s voices are heard more often, but only as exceptions to the rule.

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.

The repression and vilification of women’s voices by men on spurious grounds endure.

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.

Too often, it’s not the content of women’s speech that’s seen as offensive, but that they speak at all.

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.

We lack a go-to template for what a powerful woman looks like.

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.

If power inherently excludes women, then power itself must be redefined.

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.

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What is Women and Power about?

In Women and Power (2017), Mary Beard brings her considerable expertise and wry wit to bear on history's treatment of powerful women. Britain's best-known classicist retells stories from the ancient world and brings her analytical insight to the modern day. Beard explores the cultural roots of misogyny, the vilification of women’s voices, and asks whether it’s time for power to be redefined.

Who should read Women and Power?

History buffs
People interested in feminism
People looking for context to current discussions about sexual harassment, abuse of power and the #MeToo movement

About the Author

Mary Beard is a professor of classics at the University of Cambridge, a fellow of Newnham College and the British Academy as well as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has been classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement since 1992. She has hosted numerous television programs on the classical world including Civilizations and Julius Caesar Revealed and published best-sellers such as Pompeii and SPQR.

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