I’ve had this book on my TBR list for almost a year, ever since I saw Norwich Linguist’s review of it. And even though I enjoyed Confronting the Classics by Beard, I held off reading this because the topic just hit too close to home.

Women and Power is a collection of two lectures given by Beard on the subject of women and power and they are still devastatingly relevant today. The first lecture, The Public Voice of Women, looks at the public voice of women and Beard takes us back to the ancient Greeks and Romans to show how public speaking (i.e. speaking with authority) has always been coded as male and because of that, women have been pushed out of the public sphere unless necessary. As Beard writes:

“Women, in other words, may in extreme circumstances publicly defend their own sectional interests, but not speak for men or the community as a whole.”

The Public Voice of Women by Mary Beard

If women wanted to speak effectively about topics that were not exclusive to their sex, well, then they had to lower their woman-ess and either “get treated as freakish androgynes, like Maesia who defended herself in the Forum – or they apparently treat themselves as such“. As an example, Beard points us to the famous speech by Elizabeth I as she addresses the troops at Tilbury. This speech may have been made up, but as Beard points out, it makes the point even stronger because”the nice twist is that the male letter-writer puts the boast (or confession) of androgyny into Elizabeth’s own mouth“.

This theme of women having to strip away cultural practices associated with our sex continues in the second lecture, Women & Power. Beard starts with the story of Herland with Charlotte Perkins Gilman to launch into a discussion of how we think of the relationship between power and the female sex. She argues that we have always seen power as male, and therefore women are perceived as belonging outside power (why else would The Times headline an article ‘Women Prepare for a Power Grab in Church, Police and BBC’ – do we see this ‘Men Prepare for a Power Grab’ being used?).

Towards the end of the lecture, Beard writes that “I also suspect that we are not being quite straight with ourselves about what we want women in parliaments for” and honestly, the paragraph that followed hit home. When I was in university, I opted to do a research paper on women managers in Japan, only to be met with the feedback that sure, this was a viable topic, but everyone knows that the most efficient managers are male (because they don’t have to take care of the house/children). Perhaps it should not have been a surprise that for the companies I studied, a larger proportion of women managers did not actually translate into measurable improvements for the business – after all, what I experienced implied that even if women were promoted to managerial positions, they were unlikely to be listened to or lead in a meaningful way.

“You cannot easily fit women into a structure that is already coded as male, you have to change the structure. That means thinking about power differently. It means decoupling it from public prestige. It means thinking collaboratively, about the power of followers not just of leaders. It means, above all, thinking about power as an attribute or even a verb (‘to power’), not as a possession.”

Women & Power, Mary Beard

Although Women & Power focuses on women in the Western world, I do see some similarities with East Asian (specifically Chinese and Japanese) culture. Apart from my experience in university, Hanfugirl’s post on the Impossible Definition of the Traditional Chinese Dress contains this passage:

“In the adoption of the Cheongsam (literally translated to mean long robe, in Cantonese), which was based on the Manchurian one-piece robe, it was an organic adoption as well with the liberation of the Chinese people from their ancient feudal system. Women were exposed to western culture, and there was a rise in feminism which propelled them to abandon their traditional Han Chinese two-piece wear, and wore the one-piece Manchurian robe which Han Chinese men were wearing at that time. At least that was how it started.”

The Impossible Definition of the Traditional Chinese Dress, Hanfugirl

To me, the fact that women put on the men’s dress as a way to claim liberation implies that power was also associated with men.

Overall, Women & Power is a short but hard-hitting book that examines the ways that women have been removed from power and the public sphere.