Jan-Maat's Reviews > Women & Power: A Manifesto

So short, I had not quite intended to read it, when I did, but having in idleness picked it up and read a few pages nonchalantly, I found I was near enough half way through. There are two lectures padded out with illustrations (perhaps Beard had slides for her lectures) in the book, I felt these talks were her in conversation with Virginia Woolf's A Room of one's Own. Both naturally very revealing about their authors. Woolf the novelist deals in pictures: Woman excluded from public places, woman inherits money and removes herself from public - with inherited money she can afford not to worry and to have a private space to retreat into where she can lock the door and write. Who she will write for or who to is unclear, maybe just for her own satisfaction, since her husband was a publisher getting into print wasn't to be an issue.

Beard, scholar that she is takes a different approach, less interested in the particular pictures of women excluded from the library or chased off the lawn she looks at the structures and tradition of power and the silencing of women.

On structure she points out that our notions of power itself are a problem. It is not collaborative, it is a thing to be possessed by a person on their own, by definition most are excluded from it, it is not something we conceive of arising from people working together. Therefore there will be exclusion and participation will be policed.

She discusses the shutting up in public of women from Penelope by her son Telemachus onwards, I don't disagree with anything she says but I do notice that not all the world's cultures have adopted Greece and Rome as their cultural ancestors yet one finds that this doesn't limit the public belittling of women even though as she points out the specific forms of silencing in 'European' cultures have a long heritage.

It might be dispiriting, the pace of change is very slow, but Beard amused me by teaching me that the famous speech of Queen Elizabeth I in which she declaims that she had the heart and stomach of a man etc etc may well be a pure invention,in any case it was first recorded forty years afterwards (once she was dead) by a man and more that the well known speech 'ain't I a woman' by Sojourner Truth, certainly was not what she said but a translation into a Southern drawl - she herself a Northerner who had grown up speaking Dutch as her first language, mind you it serves to illustrate Beard's point that for women who are allowed to speak in certain permitted contexts there is no guarantee that her words will stand and not be 'translated' into something considered more appropriate.

Post script some more hours after reading. One thing that Beard does is illustrate Keynes' belief that we are often surprisingly under the influence of long dead thinkers - in this case Beard shows that typical terms of abuse to silence women, describing women's voices as whining, whinging, animal noises, also the threats of rape and ripping out of tongues, are already there in ancient Greek and Roman writings which are quite explicit that public speech is the domain of the adult man. Ok, so Beard demonstrates that apparently emotional outbursts from the free will of some aggrieved man or other are in fact programmed and automatic responses, but what do we do with this information? And in a book which is called 'a manifesto' where does it lead us towards? Is awareness alone transformative? If I were to be critical I might say that Beard's book draws back the curtain, or points out the Emperor's nakedness but isn't a manifesto in that it doesn't suggest a path leading from the present state to something different other than her suggestion that we rethink ideas of power (admittedly that though a very big suggestion).