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