Title: Women & Power: A Manifesto
Author: Mary Beard
Genre: Nonfiction / Feminist
Date: 2017
Publisher: Profile Books
Pages: 128
Started: 1st January 2018
Completed: 1st January 2018
Rating: 4.5/5
Summary: Britain’s best known classicist, Mary Beard, is also a committed and vocal feminist. With wry wit she shows how history has treated powerful women. Her examples range from Medusa and Athena to Theresa May and Elizabeth Warren as she explores the cultural underpinnings of misogyny, considering the public voice of women, how we look at women who exercise power, our cultural assumptions about women’s relationship with power, and how powerful women resist being packaged into a male template.
Mary Beard is one of the UK’s most famous classicists and she is currently a Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge. She has written numerous academic books and articles but she has also written more accessible texts such as SPQR (2015) and Women & Power (2017).
She’s very active on twitter (@wmarybeard) and she has presented BBC shows such as Pompeii: New Secrets Revealed and Mary Beard’s Ultimate Rome: Empire Without Limit. She is one of my favourite historians and she’s a fantastic scholar and woman.
There’s a lot to like about Women & Power. It’s an excellent exploration of female silence in Antiquity and how that has grown and evolved throughout western history. This is a book that only talks about the western world so be aware of that. It’s not a complete guide to how women across the world have been silenced since the dawn of time and it could never be that at just 128 pages long.
Beard focuses mainly on the UK, as well as the US and parts of western Europe, and she examines how and why women are silenced in the public sphere of politics and academia. Beard gives examples of women in Greek and Roman history, and mythology, that dared to speak out in a ‘manly way’, that is in the realm of politics and she relates these examples to how major female politicians, such as Theresa May and Angela Merkel are treated today. I thought that this was a really interesting angel on the whole debate because it shows that women have been silenced since the apparent dawn of democracy.
The book is based on two lectures that Beard gave, the first in 2014 and the second in 2016, and this is reflected in the length of the book which is rather short. Many readers have complained that the book is too short, too brief, and that it doesn’t fully explore the ideas that Beard presents and this is a completely valid criticism. However, I do think that this is a great introduction to the topic and I think that the length will encourage people to read it while the content and the writing encourages them to explore the topic further. I really wish that I could have been at either of the lectures that Beard gave.
The main selling point of this book is Mary Beard’s writing style. She’s witty, concise, engaging, intelligent, and very accessible. At no point do you feel as though you’re being overwhelmed by academic jargon and you don’t feel as though you’re being patronised either which is a very difficult balance to maintain. Beard’s writing is warm and welcoming, despite the brutal topics that she writes about, and you really feel as though you’re learning something from her. She’s a magnificent writer.
Overall, I really enjoyed this book because of its interesting topic and Mary Beard’s engaging writing. One day I would like to see a full length book on the subject by Mary Beard or perhaps a collection of essays on the subject by well-known female academics from various subjects. I’d also like to see more about other cultures rather than just major western ones such as the UK, the US, and Germany.
I will be reading SPQR at some point this year and I’d highly recommend Women & Power to anyone interested in feminism and the history of female silence in the western world.
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