When studying subjects at school, a fairly common refrain that bounces around your unkempt, alcohol-tattered student noggin is when am I ever going to use this in real life?. And while I’ve yet to find a real-world purpose for an isosceles triangle where an equilateral one wouldn’t do an equally excellent tri-pointy job, or had to describe my Saturday night at a discotheque to a Frenchman in his own romantic tongue, I can happily say that reading Professor Mary Beard’s Women & Power has fully justified the hours I slaved away, diligently copying other people’s homework for Latin and Ancient History classes.
Infantile ruminations on my own fragile self-worth aside, W&P is a brief but sturdy, and thoroughly readable, treatise on the ways that the ancient forebears of our modern Western culture, the Romans and the Greeks, still exercise influence on the way that women are treated in public life today.
The book is pulled together from two key lectures that Professor Beard recently delivered. This means that it’s designed to cover a wide scope of an argument, rather than necessarily delving into tremendous detail on any one thing. Obviously that wouldn’t work in a textbook, but in this context it’s perfect – you get to hold onto a single thread as Prof. Beard carefully drags you from the ancient world to the modern one. The fact that it was designed to be read aloud helps too – the language is unfussy, with pin-point directness and humour.
Oddly for a book whose central premise is that this has been going on for millennia, it feels very timely – she discusses the fact that the horrific abuse turned on women in public life has reached greater visibility, and possibly greater heights, since social media democratised and ubiquitised commentary. It’s not just op-eds in newspapers and magazines (and I use ‘just’ guardedly here, because in no way do I want to underestimate the devastating impact these media can have, and have had), but now everybody who has been exposed to the most toxic elements of our culture, in all different ways, can now regurgitate them in blazons of digital fury. It’s not necessarily a new call, to examine the ways in which our own culture creates discriminatory attitudes, but it is an effective one.
Prof. Beard brilliantly discusses a whole host of causes and symptoms, but one that particularly struck me was the directness of the way we’ve ingested the mechanisms of public debate and sophistry from the Romans and Greeks. Alongside superbly effective oratory techniques, we’ve also swallowed the misogyny that accompanied them, and when our politicians are being directly taught these techniques in all-male environments like Eton, is it any wonder that they sideline and silence women in the same ways as Cicero did?
She clearly states that she doesn’t have the answers, but that examination of our influences is the first step to getting them. She also discusses that nature of power itself in our culture – how it focuses on a few individuals rather than assigning itself to a large number of people, in different contexts. She considers that currently power is something that is had, and maybe we need to move towards a place where it is something that is done. It feels as good a place as any to start.
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