While “towering fools” collude across nations, we hope, now more than ever, for a manifesto that will provide a liberal, responsible and wildly feminist roadmap to the future. Mary Beard’s pocketable Women & Power: A Manifesto is neither prescriptive nor a manifesto in the strictest sense. But it does deal a death blow, with academic persuasion, to standards and norms of power and public speech that have been set in stone since the times of the ancient Greek and Roman empires. It shows us that templates of misogyny exist in an uninterrupted continuum and the same old strategies of exclusion are still put to work – everyday and everywhere.
The voice of authority
A New York Times bestseller, the book is a result of two lectures (one of which was titled Oh Do Shut Up Dear!) and as with all good lecture-books, it is an incendiary read. Women and Power, already being hailed as a feminist classic, asks some damning questions and in the process underlines that how we frame our questions will be key to new strategies and tools of resistance and change. What do we mean by a “voice of authority” and what is it that makes such a voice authoritative? Should not the very template of what makes for good oratorship – the low thrumming voice, the rhetoric – be felled? After all, Beard reasons cheekily, “there is no neurological reason for us to hear low-pitched voices as more authoritative than high-pitched ones.”
Beard’s primary concern here is the systemic silencing of woman that has remained intact through the millennia. This perfect chalice of male superiority has the buy-in of all social and political institutions – the superbly practiced “deafness” to a woman’s voice. A woman’s silence is not just about voice, the right to be heard, and the right to put on stage issues and concerns that exist in the margins, but to change the way power is derived and created. “If women aren’t perceived to be within the structures of power, isn’t it power that needs to be redefined?” Beard asks.
The Medusa treatment
The book’s intriguing cover is inspired by a Roman floor mosaic with the head of Medusa at its centre. Medusa, though famously reappropriated by feminist scholars like Helene Cixous as a symbol of the infinite and mobile complexity of feminine sexuality and the smashing of yokes and thresholds, is yet another template of rape, defamation for being raped and of murder thereafter. Her rage, for instance – although it turns people to stone – is not real power since it is not an act of personal will. Yet when the Greek hero Perseus murders her and mounts her head on his shield as extra ammunition, he is the wielder of power. The power of a woman is therefore horrible, unnatural, the result of her own failings or the price she pays for being perpetrated against, but never allowed to be an act of self assertion. Such musings from the classical world set the context in the book for what is happening to women of our times.
Beard analyses the horrible slander faced by Hillary Clinton during the 2016 US Presidential election campaign. Among other cheap tricks, Donald Trump’s supporters morphed Clinton as Medusa and that slapstick cliché managed to elbow aside the colossal farce of his own candidature. The Medusa head, as Beard reiterates, is a standard caricature for female political leaders in the West, including digs at German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and the dubbing of British Prime Minister Theresa May as Medusa or Maidenhead or the Maydusa. Trump’s campaign predictably took the violence of caricature to extreme levels of nastiness when they used Benvenuto Cellini’s bronze Perseus with the Head of Medusa instead of the relatively staid Medusa head by Carvaggio.
Shrewdly and succinctly, Beard slips in a reminder that prejudice of sex can never be outdone by any other prejudice, including that of colour. She points out that there were caricatures of Obama too but the most enduring image of his campaign, as we know, was a poster created by street artist Shepard Fairey – a red and blue stencilled close up of his face with the words HOPE emblazoned on them. “By contrast, this scene of Persues-Trump, brandishing the dripping, oozing head of Medusa-Hillary was very much part of the everyday, domestic American decorative world.” It was on t-shirts, coffee mugs, tote bags and laptop sleeves. So what, we could ask. A satiric stunt on TV featured Trump’s severed head! Isn’t that a grisly enough form of backlash? The difference, Beard argues doggedly, is that the news anchor in question, a woman, lost her job promptly. For “what is extraordinary is that beheading remains even now a cultural symbol of opposition to women’s power.”
A white perspective
Mary Beard, a Joan Baez amongst scholars, besides being a hugely popular classicist, is also a controversial figure. Recently she has been in the news for her tweet on Oxfam’s sexual abuse scandal in Haiti. Her comment “how hard it must be to sustain ‘civilised’ values in a disaster zone” has distinct undertones of white superiority. Beard receives bomb threats on twitter, makes mincemeat of Brexit, runs a blog called “The Don’s Life” on which she names and shames her trolls, has long flowing hair, is a shoe addict and has been called too ugly to be on TV. For Beard the historian and feminist, symbols are important – such as the handbag of Margaret Thatcher or the heels and slits in Theresa May’s skirt. These women in power, she says, share the “capacity to turn symbols that usually disempower women to their own advantage.”
The call to “handbag” symbols of femininity, however, doesn’t impress as a tool for resistance. Post-feminism, which has more or less taken the gumption out of white feminism in the Global North, is one of the more harmful side effects of this “recoding of symbols”. Real acts of imagination have begun to emanate more and more from crises of identity that criss-cross with culture, religion and conflict. In fact, the margins, though no safer than they were for Lucretia or Philomela, are a carnival today. Within that context, Beard does admit in her preface that she primarily focused on the particular stratagems of patriarchy in Western culture.
Women and public speech
What the book lacks by way of being slightly aloof and white, it more than makes up for with its thriller-like exposé of the control of public speech. Beard opens with Telemachus, son of Ulysses, asking his mother Penelope to shut up and withdraw indoors. Then there is Chatty Echo punished for being chatty, Io turned into a cow and Lucretia raped and her tongue cut off. To make her point that the classical assumption of male muthos, which in Homeric Greek would convey “authoritative public speech”, and female speech as “chatting, prattling or gossip variety” continues uninterrupted even today, Beard recounts the recent silencing of US senator Elizabeth Warren. She was stopped from reading out a letter by Coretta Scott King, wife of Martin Luther King while arguing against the nomination of Jeff Sessions as Attorney General.
The Homeric moment of Telemachus asking his mother to shut up is carried on in contemporary times with equal aplomb – in boardrooms, parliaments and in the private sphere. A woman is constantly encouraged and threatened to “re-privatise” her voice. The words used to describe the sound of a woman’s speech are part of a linguistic conspiracy. When a woman speaks, she “whines” or “whinges”. Words such as this, Beard says, “underpin an idiom that acts to remove the authority, the force, even the humour from what women say”; trivialises her speech and sends her back “into the domestic sphere,” where the sweeping elegance and strategic thinking of a public dialogue is not a required skill. In recent times, voice has earned a lofty place in the rights discourse as a symbol of entitlement. Beard breaks up that voice into its components - pitch, words, sound, context – to show how deep seated its quelling is.
The ignition for a manifesto
Beard considers Twitter, where words become weapons of trolling violence. Abuse on the Internet comes from all sorts of people. But the point to be noted here is the abuse that comes unwarranted for no other reason than as a release of frustration for the failures of the democratic access that social media promises. Beard argues that Twitter puts people directly in touch with the Pope or the Prime Minister – who never respond or even read those tweets. Some of the abuses, Beard says, are squeals of betrayal at those false promises. And the conventional target of said disappointment becomes “the gobby woman who happens to be sharing the very same democratic platform.”
If speech has been the business of men and Cicero the model orator, standards of what makes for fine oration must first of all be reclaimed. To do this, Beard offers the powerful story of Fulvia, wife of Mark Anthony. After the lynching of Cicero in Ancient Rome, Fulvia steals upon the head hung from a pole and stabs the dead man’s tongue with her hairpins. Mary Beard’s Women and Power is a series of such images and clever questions. Digging into classics to look at the timelessness of misogyny and sexual violence is a potent strategy. It is a book that sneaks in the hairpins and lets the psychedelic mosaic of Medusa constantly create an illusion of endless strife and resistance, the contrapuntal reading that has been feminism’s best weapon.
Pithy and punchy, this is not quite the book that will unseat the temples of men and misogyny, or make kingdoms turn. Nor will it trigger a re-think of human behaviour at a scale triggered by, say, Origin of Species. The irony, of course, is that even if it had the potential to do so, we would not notice. Just as Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics in 1970 ought to have been that book but instead remained the superstar of “sectional interests”. A rousing read nevertheless, this book is, if not a manifesto, certainly is a powerful ignition point for one.
Women & Power: A Manifesto, Mary Beard, Profile Books.