As a feminist classicist, it was only so long before th
is particular work came up! Mary Beard is perhaps the most well-known classicist in Britain, not just because she’s Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge and the Royal Academy of Arts Professor of Ancient Literature, but because of her numerous and popular television programmes, radio appearances, and column ‘A Don’s Life’ in the Times Literary Supplement. Her work is wide-ranging, though she is perhaps best-known as a historian of Rome, and her popular history book SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome appeared on numerous bestseller lists when it was released in 2015.
Beard is also known publicly as an outspoken feminist, particularly when it comes to those who criticise her appearance, attack her on twitter for daring to exist publicly as a woman, or attempt to ‘mansplain’ Roman history to her. So it is unsurprising that she would release the slim but powerful Women and Power: A Manifesto, comprising the texts of two lectures with similar themes, updated since they were first delivered. The theme is the ways that women have to exist under the patriarchal power structure: the way they are compromised, silenced, and subjugated. The book traces lines from ancient examples of misogyny through to the present day, starting with Telemachus, at the beginning of the Odyssey, telling his mother Penelope to shut up and get back to her women’s work – to let the men be the ones who talk and make decisions. Beard shows time and again that these ancient paradigms recur throughout history, right up to the present day. One example that I found most striking was the use of Perseus and Medusa imagery in the 2016 US Election, with Donald Trump as Perseus holding up the head of the gorgon Hillary Clinton. To see an image of such violence used as a meme, and to see a powerful and successful politician equated to a murderous, hideous monster, seemed to suggest a shocking lack of progress in society over the last two and half thousand years.
Despite the heavy, often disheartening, and sometimes downright upsetting subject matter, I read the short volume in an evening and felt invigorated. As the A Manifesto of the title suggests, Beard’s book is not intended simply to be a survey of misogyny through history, but a call to arms. Beard asserts that for the system to be altered, it is not women that need to change, but the nature of power. As a result, this book made an interesting non-fiction companion to Naomi Alderman’s The Power from last month’s Book Club; both works demonstrated the ways in which male-dominated power structures are deeply embedded in our culture, albeit in extremely different ways. In Beard’s conclusion, too, her note that, were she to write the book again, she would spend more time defending ‘women’s right to be wrong’ took me back to Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist, the seminal text on how there is no wrong way to be a woman (and still deserve rights). To me, this proves the place of Women and Power in the feminist canon, and cements it as one of those books that I’ll be buying multiple copies of and passing out amongst my friends.
