Women & Power (thoughts on Mary Beard’s manifesto)

Mary Beard grounds her thoughts on women and public speaking, and then women and power, in a classical framework. She traces the suppression of women’s public speech back to the Greeks (famously, Telemachus’ telling his mother Penelope to shut up and go back to her room when she tries to silence her suitors and the bard singing of the difficulties the Greeks are having returning home), and brings that into the modern era with the Miss Triggs cartoon (“That is an excellent suggestion, Miss Triggs. Perhaps one of the men here would like to make it”).  I had no idea Margaret Thatcher took lessons  to deepen her voice for public speaking (i.e., so she could speak in a more “authoritative” voice, a “manly” tone). Her lecture on women and power notes that often women who took power, or were powerful, were given an androgynous status – neither woman nor man, or else a “manly” woman. Medusa figures prominently, has do discussions of Clytemnestra and Athena.

She weaves it all skillfully, showing how 19th century reverence for the ancient Greeks and Romans – the “foundations of civilization as we know it” – informed the modern idea of women speaking publicly and women claiming power. She talks about the fact that women who speak out on social media are more likely to be verbally attacked with violent imagery, often invoking the need to suppress women’s speech – “shut up, you stupid bitch!” – and the need to deny women’s authority (i.e., presuming to lecture Mary Beard on Roman history and civilization).  I was reminded of the discomfort many (male) Star Wars fans felt with the film “The Last Jedi” – most recently, the discussion over whether an Admiral would have purple hair and wear a GOWN! –  with the incredulous response “but Admiral Akbar was a FISH-person! You didn’t have a problem with THAT?” (Of course not, he was a MALE fish.) The un-ease with centering a film around notions of power defined by women and where the female characters are the ones who most productively advance the plot has caused some “fans” to attempt to raise money to remake “The Last Jedi” in their own image.

Beard’s manifesto is altogether remarkable. Tying the phenomenon of “misogyny” back to Western cultural origins in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds gives roots to the problem that define the nature of the struggle – because it’s not just a struggle with the here and now, but a struggle with history and received culture as well. The Greek definition of “manhood” included public speaking – the definition of womanhood was private. Those women who managed to transgress those boundaries were seen as no longer women, and not men, but now androgynous beings – not quite one, nor the other. And there is a definitive relief when they stop speaking.

And when you are non-White, the ability to speak in public, to have power, becomes even more problematic. She points out that the speech we know as Sojourner Truth’s most famous speech – “Ain’t I a Woman?” – was almost assuredly not what she actually said. For one, she was Northern and spoke Dutch as well as English – so the southern dialect is completely wrong, and it was written down a decade or more after she gave her speech at Seneca Falls. She points to Black Lives Matter, founded by three Black women, as an example of how to get things done in a different way – not the way defined by a white, male construct grounded in Greco-Roman antiquity.

Because in the end, she seems to be arguing that as a civilization, we need to move beyond our roots in Greek and Roman classicism if we are to redefine who gets to speak in public and what the nature of power itself looks like.  Power itself needs to be re-defined, beyond a masculine definition of “leadership,” and to include more people. If people feel powerless, why is that? Why is power associated with only a few roles in our society? How do we broaden that out?

I read somewhere that the traditional binary response to danger – fight or flight – may be only the male response (some researchers add “freeze” to this). But it turned out that the research had been done primarily on men. When research was done on women, they found something else. The female response to danger is different: they tend their children, and gather with other women. And their brains reward them for bonding with other women.

In the USA right now, you have the very masculine Trump administration, defining itself on very old-fashioned notions of what it means to be a man and to hold a masculine power, versus the Resistance – largely defined by women claiming power, and doing so by protesting in numbers. Whether it is the women’s marches, or the demonstrations today against family separation, it is a movement personified by women, whether it is white women who have become passionate about politics for the first time, women of color who are demanding to be able to live their lives and raise their children without fear (especially fear of police), or moms everywhere who are horrified by the forcible separation of small and not-so-small children from their mothers and fathers – it is a very female response – collective organization.  Male power is defined by the “great man” theory of world history; female power may come to be defined by the collective power of organizing.

It’s also seen in the #MeToo movement, where traditionally powerful men have been brought down by the stories told by abused women, and the shock of the men that the women are now being believed. It is never just one women who speaks up, but many – and together those women are beginning to make a difference in who gets heard and believed.

So how do we define power to include people who traditionally have not had power? Is it by taking over the roles of power – the CEOs, the Prime Ministers, the Presidents and Great World Leaders? Or is it by redefining the meaning of power? And by extension, who gets to speak in public and be heard and recognized?

There is much still to digest in these essays.  Beard offers no pat answers, but a lot of brilliant questions, a bit of historical perspective and context, and a lot to absorb.