Women & Power: A Manifesto Hardcover – Illustrated, December 12, 2017

After reading some positive remarks made by Hillary Clinton about this book, I impulsively ordered it & I am so glad that I did! The book is short, powerful & incredibly interesting. Beard is an incredible teacher & her exploration of the cultural underpinnings of misogyny in modern society is riveting. The concept of a person's voice, who is allowed to have a voice & how society reacts to women using their voice vs. how they react to a man using his voice was central to the book. Beard starts off by exploring gendered voices in Greco-Roman societies, showing how oppressive ideas and norms from these classical cultures continue to influence society in the present day.The book itself has wide margins, which is great if you like to annotate text like me. There's also a number of historic artifacts and illustrations included in the book which had an enriching, positive effect on the text as a whole.Beard's writing style is magnetic & her story-telling abilities are profound. You won't want to stop turning the pages! I definitely recommend this book to men and women alike!

Mary Beard is a proven resource: classicist, feminist, and very clear, engaging writer. In deceptively simple easygoing language she teases out complex notions, places them in a historical timeline and context, and on the whole simplifies a discussion that really IS simple but has been made complicated by being fragmented and politicized. Beard is also humane and has a wry sense of humor. So if you are looking for a quick review of the basis for much confusion and rage around "the woman question," this book is easy to hold, easy to read, easy to absorb. The 4 instead of 5 stars I gave (I'd give it 4.8 stars if I could) reflect a wish at the end of the book that she would look into the present and future with wise advice and, I guess, some comfort for the reader. Classics light? Perhaps. But she does that better than anyone else.

Mary Beard is a Professor at Cambridge in the UK, specializing in the study of the Greek and Roman classics. One of her most famous works is “SPQR – A History of Ancient Rome,” which has been on the Best Seller Lists. Regrettably, I have yet to read it, but hope to soon. Beard provides some perspective from the ancient world to reflect on the on-going issue of women’s access to power, which would hopefully include power over their own bodies. This work is a collection of two separate lectures that she has given: “The Public Voice of Women” and “Women in Power.”Of late, I’ve found myself referencing “The Odyssey” a lot, with the portrayal of the bad homecoming Odysseus experienced when he returned from Troy. Beard, in her first lecture, also draws a lesson from this work, specifically when the son of Odysseus and Penelope, Telemachus, essentially tells his mom to shut up, get back to the loom, ‘cause the men are speaking. And things have not changed much in two and a half millenniums, a point Beard underscores with a cartoon from “Punch,” in which Mrs. Triggs makes a point in a Board meeting, and the Chairman asks if another male would be willing to make the same point (with the idea that then it would be “heard.”) Beard goes on to ruminate on exactly what must occur for women to be “heard,” particularly in public, besides speech lessons to emulate a deep gravelly voice.In the second essay, Beard introduced me to “Herland,” by Charlotte Gilman, first published in 1915, about a land that contained only women, a marvelous utopia that was tidy and peaceful, and “even the cats had stopped killing the birds!” I had to chuckle, regrettably, as she documents the negative reactions, seemingly unconsciously, in the main steam media when a woman assumes a position of power, noting that it was called a “power grab.” Yes, women are making substantial progress in acquiring elective offices, and perhaps a better, and maybe fairer world will result. Yet there is definitely a backlash. I had not seen it before, but there was a cartoon of Trump as Perseus, who had decapitated Hillary Clinton, who was portrayed at Medusa. Wow!I’ve read my share of “feminist classics,” starting with Betty Frieden’s “The Feminine Mystique” in the ‘60’s, followed thereafter in 1970, by Simone de Beauvoir’s seminal work, “The Second Sex.” As with some other issues from back then (like no more war!), I really thought we’d be much further along in developing fair and equitable relations between men and women, involving power, and yes, changing the diapers. Two steps forward, and one step back, or is it the other way around, as Susan Faludi has argued in “Backlash”.Beard presents not a hint of what I would consider the next level of evolution: once one has power, and one is conscientious in its use, one finds it an utter relief to give it up and let someone else do it and concentrate on “smelling the roses” instead! Nonetheless, for Beard’s ability to use the classics to provide perspective on the on-going contemporary dilemmas involving women’s efforts to obtain fairer and more equitable relations (coupled with some male allies), she deserves 5-stars.

As a speaking coach, I use this book in every single workshop that I teach. It is a fundamentally important book that helps us understand that it’s actually not just all in our heads, and in fact, there are centuries of bias against women speakers, whether the bias is apparent or not. This book will help you realize what you’re up against, and where we can’t unravel patriarchy in one sitting, we can finally know for certain that bias exists, and move through it anyway.

Beard clarifies why so few women 'take the risk' to try to reach higher positions in politics and claims that power (and our view of women in power) must change if we really want more of them as presidents and congresspeople. Excellent reading!

El libro recoge dos discursos de Mary Beard sobre cómo la historia ha apartado reiteradamente a la mujer del discurso público y cómo esos esquemas persisten en nuestros dias. Es un libro breve y divertido, ni dogmático ni populista. Mary Beard es una historiadora de primera cuyos documentales sobre Roma y el mundo antiguo, producidos por BBC han dado la vuelta al mundo. En España se pueden encontrar en Movistar+.

This book is simply written but the content is very witty and educative. We still have a lot to learn on women's condition and it is always useful to go back to the roots of the problem to understand its consequences in modern times

Thought-provoking, humorous, engaging, fewer than 100 pages with fascinating illustrations, based on two lectures the author gave in 2014 and 2017. Her thesis (developed with reference to Western culture starting with the ancient Greeks and Romans, and, among other things, to the virulent sexist abuse she receives on social media each time she speaks on the telly) is that, while some women (including herself) may smash some glass ceilings, and even if gradually there is better childcare provision, equal wages, etc, women in general won’t achieve equal power and respect until we all (men and women) disentangle and discard maleness from our understanding of what ‘power’ is.Here’s a quote from her peroration: “What I have in mind is the ability to be effective, to make a difference in the world, and the right to be taken seriously... It is power in that sense that many women feel they don’t have – and that they want. Why the popular resonance of ‘mansplaining’ (despite the intense dislike of the term felt by many men)? It hits home for us because it points straight to what it feels like not to be taken seriously...” She deals among many topics with the way that some women, famously Margaret Thatcher, have lowered their voices. This had me wondering – is the increasingly common habit of “vocal fry” (see Wikipedia article) among women on the radio, particularly American women, a bid for “masculine” authority? Are they damaging their vocal chords (and paining my ear) in order to be taken seriously? I (a woman) find it so hard to listen, I press the off button.