white_hart | Reading: Women and Power

Mary Beard's Women and Power is a compilation of the slightly updated texts of two lectures, originally given in 2014 and 2017, tracing the classical antecedents of our current political discourse and structures of power and the exclusion of women from both, together with an afterword addressing issues which arose between the second lecture and the publication of, in my case, the paperback edition (most notably #MeToo). The first lecture, 'The Public Voice of Women', looks at the Greek tradition of public oratory and how that still colours our perception of public discourse, causing women's voices to be marginalised and ignored; the second, 'Women in Power', looks at portrayals of powerful women in ancient Greece (Clytemnestra, the Amazons, Medusa) and how these are still used to attack women who seek power.

It's a very short book - only just over 100 pages, with a lot of those given up to illustrations which were presumably included on the slides accompanying Beard's original talks - but it's well-written and doesn't pull its punches, and while I already had at least a passing familiarity with most of the classical examples Beard cites the connections to contemporary Western culture were interesting and thought-provoking.