Women & Power: A Manifesto by Mary Beard (review)

Women and Power: A Manifesto was, for me, an impulse buy, the way some people buy electronic gizmos, candy bars, or sexy new shoes. I knew I would get some immediate pleasure from it simply because it is a feminist text by a renowned author and classicist. Still, had I seen, before I hit the one-click purchase button on Amazon, that it was only 115 pages in a small format (5x7 inches), I might have decided against the purchase. But, arresting prose and important ideas certainly can come in small texts. Emma Goldman's Anarchism and Other Essays comes to mind, another small-format book. That book is a treasure, worth its weight in gold, no less relevant today than it was when it was first published in 1910, and rather more a manifesto than Beard's boldly titled book. Where Goldman tackles government, labor, marriage, prisons, capitalism, the suffrage, and more, exposing the large underpinnings of patriarchy and their influence on the day-to-day lives and aspirations of women (and men), Beard's text, despite the ambition of its title, has a narrower focus. Beard is interested in the cultural history of the silencing of women and how public speech has been constructed as an intrinsically masculine activity. To understand how public speech is masculine, she examines what happens to women who defy the seemingly natural order: they are severely penalized and demeaned as less than womanly or less than human. Emma Goldman, whose activism and speeches landed her in jail and later saw her deported, might have been one of Beard's examples.

But Goldman and Beard are not really up to the same thing, and it would be too great an irony, too damaging and counterproductive, to criticize Beard's work here too much for what it doesn't say or do. Her topic, the silencing of women and its roots in Western culture and civilization, is timely, as she makes plain, offering the examples of Hilary Clinton, Theresa May, and Angela Merkel, each of whom has been cast as a dangerous, unbearable Medusa. Beard is intent on demonstrating that the topic, like the figure of Medusa, has been around for millennia. Simply put, Beard's aim is to show us that when women in the 21st century, and especially in the past year, have spoken about the silencing of women, they are not lodging a new complaint, not whining about a transitory phenomenon or a trivial difficulty, but expressing a central feature of patriarchal power and control: Women are ousted from public discourse, pushed to the margins, sent back to the home, forced to retreat from public space.

Beard observes that women have been relegated to silence at least since Telemachus sent his mother Penelope back to her room, reprimanding her for the audacity of speaking in a way that usurped masculine prerogative and authority. What was Penelope's great offense? What in her speech was so threatening? Penelope's great temerity, as Homer presented her in the Odyssey nearly 3000 years ago, lay in asking the bard to sing a different song, an offense a bit like changing the radio station without permission. By giving the son authority over his mother, Homer's epic poem both reflected the cultural silencing of women and perpetuated it.

Beard amplifies her case, drawing on ancient Greek and Roman sources, including Aristophanes, Ovid, and Cicero. She bears witness, in an aptly interdisciplinary manner, to the silencing of women as a theme in art and literature from the Classical and Renaissance ages, noting also more recent bearers of the tradition, including Shakespeare and our own celebrated American author Henry James. In the classical tales, the means of silencing include the rape and beheading of women and the cutting out of women's tongues. Silencing occurs not just by political disenfranchisement, social exclusion, or material dependency on men, but by the threat or enactment of brutal assault on the bodies of women. The penalties await any woman who ventures into discursive spaces...