Women and Power: A Manifesto

Mary Beard has written a powerful and beautiful book. A book that you can carry in your bag, read it and then re-read it, and read it once more (I have already read it twice).

We live in an era that women, around the world, have more power than ever before. But women are less represented in the sectors and positions with the most power - men still dominate decision-making and our cultural and mental template for a powerful person remains absolutely male.

Mary Beard’s subject is the ways women get silenced in public discourse. From Ancient Greece to Angela Merkel and Hillary Clinton. From Penelope in Homer’s Odyssey, 3000 year ago, when Telemachus effectively told her to “shut up” to Senator Elizabeth Warren which, on February 2017, was silenced for reading at the Senate, a 30-year-old letter written by Coretta Scott King criticizing attorney general nominee Jeff Sessions. But Senate Republicans notably didn’t object when Sanders and three other male senators later read portions of the same letter on the Senate floor.

But the book is not only about women in the highest echelons of power in international politics. It is about all of us, all women that work and participate in public life. Women that are often subject to sexism and prejudice. Yes, there is misogyny, and misogyny is a good place to start in understanding the general phenomenon, but what is going on today is a bit more complicated. It has to do with authority, male authority to be precise.

Women pay a very high price for being heard. Many women, including Mary Beard, have been the targets of misogynistic abuse via social media. Such hateful and hostile reactions are frequently directed at women who challenge men’s power and authority and they are liable to be written off as nasty, greedy, selfish and domineering. Misogyny and abuse is corrosive of women’s participation in public life, but this is something entirely different, it is about demeaning, trivialising, even threatening, it is an enforced silencing of women.

Medusa has been used for centuries to criticize powerful women. In Western culture, strong women have historically been imagined as threats that need to be controlled and, for centuries, Medusa, a symbol of seduction and power, feminist and castration threat, has been used to criticise and demonize female authority. It is no surprise then, that Medusa has cropped up repeatedly to depict influential female figures as the mythological snake-haired monster. A few minutes on google search shows that it is a trend, to photoshop women in power as Medusas. Nancy Pelosi, Angela Merkel, Teresa May, Hillary Clinton, all are presented with snaky hair.

At the end of the 19th Susan B. Anthony identified the lack of women on newspapers,

"If the men own the paper- that is, if the men control the management of the paper- then the women who write for these papers must echo the sentiment of these men. And if they do not do that, their heads are cut off."

But this is the 21st century. We have been silenced for too long. Not anymore.