Women & Power: A Manifesto

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Perseus holds the head of Medusa … the image of Donald Trump as Perseus holding the decapitated head of Hillary Clinton did the rounds in the 2016 presidential election campaign. Photograph: Franco Fojanini/Getty Images Mary Ritter, born in 1876, married Charles Austin Beard in 1900. They became a powerhouse Progressive Era couple. He was one of the most famous American historians of the first half of the century, revolutionizing the interpretation of the American Revolution. She was a suffragist, a historian in her own right, and a pioneering archivist instrumental in gathering the records of women’s history.

We have a voice. And we will use it. And we have had time since Antiquity to get used to the abuse following a woman's voice speaking up for humanity!Mary Beard: UC3M". UC3M. 4 September 2017 . Retrieved 14 October 2017. Mary Beard [...] will be invested as Honorary Doctor of Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) for her important academic and professional merits...

The second exception is more familiar. Occasionally women could legitimately rise up to speak – to defend their homes, their children, their husbands or the interests of other women. So in the third of the three examples of female oratory discussed by that Roman anthologist, the woman – Hortensia by name – gets away with it because she is acting explicitly as the spokesperson for the women of Rome, after they have been subject to a special wealth tax to fund a dubious war effort. 9Women, in other words, may in extreme circumstances publicly defend their own sectional interests, but not speak for men or the community as a whole. In general, as one second-century AD guru put it, ‘a woman should as modestly guard against exposing her voice to outsiders as she would guard against stripping off her clothes.’ This book was based on two lectures delivered in 2014 and 2017 for the London Review of Books. In these lectures Mary Beard argues that the sets of assumptions, attitudes and behaviours that are used to exclude women from positions of power and influence have their origins in the Classical World. The right to be heard is crucially important. But I want to think more generally about how we have learned to look at women who exercise power, or try to; I want to explore the cultural underpinnings of misogyny in politics or the workplace, and its forms (what kind of misogyny, aimed at what or whom, using what words or images, and with what effects); and I want to think harder about how and why the conventional definitions of ‘power’ (or for that matter of ‘knowledge’, ‘expertise’ and ‘authority’) that we carry round in our heads have tended to exclude women.Beard explores what it means to be a woman in power, and why that is such a threat to cultural norms. As she puts it: Mary Beard is a fearless writer with the gift of writing the right book at the right moment, and I’ve been emboldened by her brilliant analysis of women’s voice and role in society since antiquity, Women & Power.—Diana Athill, The Guardian

Beard begins by examining the historical record and the ways in which women have been excluded from it. She argues that the traditional narrative of women’s history is based on a flawed understanding of gender roles and power dynamics. By examining the ways in which women have been marginalized in history, Beard sets the stage for a more nuanced and inclusive understanding of women’s relationship with power. Chapter 2: The Classical World Civilisations: How Do We Look / The Eye of Faith (Profile Books, 2018 / Liveright Publishing, 2018, published in the U.S. as How Do We Look: The Body, the Divine, and the Question of Civilization; ISBN 978-1781259993 Yale awards honorary degrees to 11 individuals for their achievements". YaleNews. 21 May 2019 . Retrieved 1 August 2021. Bley Griffiths, Eleanor (2 October 2018). "Classicist Mary Beard makes unlikely cameo in The Grand Tour series three". Radio Times . Retrieved 1 August 2021. In 2007–2008, Beard gave the Sigmund H. Danziger Jr. Memorial Lecture in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. [23]

Bomb threat tweet sent to classicist Mary Beard". BBC News. 4 August 2013 . Retrieved 29 January 2017. Perfect for a trivia night or a long trip, #TrainTeasers will both test your knowledge of this country`s rail system and enlighten you on the most colourful aspects of its long history. Meet trunk murderers, trainspotters, haters of railways, railway writers, Ministers for Transport good and bad, railway cats, dogs and a railway penguin. This is NOT a book for number-crunching nerds. Many of the answers are guessable by the intelligent reader. It is a quiz, yes, but also a cavalcade of historical incident and colour relating to a system that was the making of modern Britain. From Florence Nightingale on, we female professionals in nursing and midwifery have slowly raised our status by being nice girls. We burnish our lamps and keep smiling as we obey the doctors and managers. We play the game while trying to change the rules, and where that isn’t possible, to subvert them. We hate patronising politicians and Carry On stereotypes. Investment in high-quality nursing and midwifery is a neglected solution to the NHS crisis, but to empower nurses and midwives further goes against the cultural grain. The higher up the hierarchy one rises in the health system, the fewer women one meets, though the majority of health workers are women. We continue to be excluded from many top tables, and find when we get there that our talk of birth, death and caring makes the chaps uncomfortable.

Dowell, Ben (21 January 2013). "Mary Beard suffers 'truly vile' online abuse after Question Time". The Guardian . Retrieved 7 August 2013. In 1994 she made an early television appearance on an Open Media discussion for the BBC, Weird Thoughts, [35] alongside Jenny Randles among others. This was characterised in an article in 2021 as follows:

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a b Mead, Rebecca (25 August 2014). "The Troll Slayer". The New Yorker . Retrieved 3 December 2017. Since the author is a lot of experience in greek roman history and usually that is the historic origin for most of European traditions and norms. I question the intelligence and moral integrity of any man who does not consider himself a feminist, and I also question the fact that I am the only male in my friend’s list to read this book. Books like this are so vitally important, important for both men and women. So go read it! I’m not trying to shame my male friends, but merely point out the imbalance in the readers of this book, at least, here on goodreads. Beard graduated from Cambridge with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree. As per tradition, her BA was later promoted to a Master of Arts (MA Cantab) degree. [15] [16] She remained at Cambridge for her Doctor of Philosophy ( PhD) degree, completing it in 1982 with a doctoral thesis titled The State Religion in the Late Roman Republic: A Study Based on the Works of Cicero. [8] [17] Academic career [ edit ] A pithy exploration of misogyny’s tangled cultural roots. Based on a series of lectures, this slim volume draws on Beard’s deep knowledge of the classical world and her personal experience as a target of online sexist abuse. She reflects on the gendered structures of power, from voiceless women in Ovid’s Metamorphoses to feminists “reclaiming” Medusa. With clearsightedness and wry humour, this self-described “gobby woman” proves public speech is no longer the preserve of maleness. More power to her.—Financial Times