The fine art of leaning in

Book review of 'Women & Power'

WOMEN & POWER

A Manifesto

Benjamin Reiss

Mary Beard

115 pages; $15.95

According to Aristotle, women’s voices were proof of their wickedness. Virtue expressed itself in deep, full-throated sounds — the noise of the lion, the bull and (no surprise here) the human male. Women’s speech, however, its pitch and prattle, was considered dangerous, even unsanitary. The very sound of their voices, it was believed, could sink the state.

In the ancient world, “public speech was a — if not the — defining attribute of maleness,” the Cambridge classicist Mary Beard writes in Women & Power, her sparkling and forceful manifesto. “A woman speaking in public was, in most circumstances, by definition not a woman.”

Has much changed? Ms Beard points to Margaret Thatcher taking elocution lessons to deepen her voice, and to the trusty pantsuit favoured by female politicians. Women are still regarded as interlopers in public life; when they seek power, drag is a must. Beard draws straight lines from the attitudes of the classical world to the sexism that attended Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign; the harassment women face online; the bomb threats that followed one scholar’s suggestion that Britain might feature more women on bank notes.

As if anticipating the recent outpouring of women describing their experiences of sexual harassment, she also recounts the many myths in which women are physically prevented from testifying to the violence done to them: Their tongues are torn out, they’re turned into trees or animals.

“When it comes to silencing women, Western culture has had thousands of years of practice,” Ms Beard writes.

Women and Power is a pocket-size book that comprises two of Beard’s public lectures. (In Britain she is a star, the most public of intellectuals, writing in high-profile outlets as well as tabloids and appearing regularly on TV and radio.) It arrives at a moment of heightened awareness of the silencing Ms Beard describes. “Nevertheless, she persisted” has become a rallying cry, and the spectacle of Kamala Harris being repeatedly interrupted during Senate hearings prompted passionate conversations about how men talk over and belittle female colleagues. The book is a straight shot of adrenaline, animated less by lament than impatience and quick wit: “So far as I can see from a quick Google trawl, the only other group in this country said to ‘whine’ as much as women are unpopular Premiership football managers on a losing streak.”

Ms Beard reminds us that histories of oppression are also always histories of subversion. “Ovid may have emphatically silenced his women in their transformation or mutilation, but he also suggested that communication could transcend the human voice, and that women were not that easily silenced,” she writes. She reminds us that Philomela, whose tongue was cut out after she was raped, wove a tapestry portraying the crime and her assailant. She tells the story of Fulvia, the wife of Mark Antony, who visited the corpse of Cicero, who had poisonously inveighed against her husband. She plucked the pins from her hair and stabbed them into his tongue. In both stories, the traditionally female activity (weaving) or adornment (the hairpin) is used to strike at the male monopoly over language — and in the case of Fulvia, “the very site of the production of male speech.”

It’s a tonic to encounter a book that doesn’t just describe the scale of a problem but suggests remedies — and exciting ones at that. One solution recommended by Ms Beard — enacted by her, really — is to cheerfully stand your ground. Ms Beard is active on Twitter, where she famously engages with the legion of trolls who pick apart her work, age and appearance. She refuses to quit social media despite abuse that has extended to death threats. “It feels to me like leaving the bullies in charge of the playground,” she wrote on her blog after recent attacks against her. “It’s rather too much like what women have been advised to do for centuries. Don’t answer back, and just turn away.” Ms Beard responds, sometimes with fire, sometimes with kindness, sometimes with a bawdy joke. The men back down more than you’d predict and, sometimes, unexpected friendships are struck. One of her harassers took her to lunch to apologise. She later wrote him a college reference.

We also must interrogate our notions of power, Ms Beard says, and scrutinise why they exclude women; we must examine how our conceptions of authority, mastery and even knowledge are inflected by gender. “You cannot easily fit women into a structure that is already coded as male; you have to change the structure,” she writes.

Lest this seem hopelessly utopian, she points to those doing this very work, including the founders of Black Lives Matter: Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi. In promoting decentralised leadership and emphasising the movement over personalities, these three women are recasting power, “decoupling it from public prestige,” transforming it from a possession one can seize to an attribute that can be shared.

What alternatives remain, after all? “If women are not perceived to be fully within the structures of power, surely it is power that we need to redefine rather than women?” Ms Beard points out. It’s either that — or pass around the hairpins.
 

© 2017 The New York Times News Service