2020/048: Women and Power -- Mary Beard

Medea, Clytemnestra and Antigone ... are not, however, role models -- far from it. For the most part, they are portrayed as abusers rather than users of power. They take it illegitimately, in a way that leads to chaos, to the fracture of the state, to death and destruction. They are monstrous hybrids who are not, in the Greek sense, women at all. [p. 59]

Read for the 'A Nonfiction Title by a Woman Historian' rubric of the Reading Women Challenge 2020: read, also, because on my last outing before lockdown I went into a bookshop and this was gleaming up at me, beautiful geometric blue / gold / black cover. And read because I am a woman and a feminist and have an interest in classical history and literature.

Mary Beard starts with Telemachus telling his mother Penelope to shut up ("speech will be the business of men"), and she goes on to discuss the many and varied ways in which women have been silenced, and deprived of power, through the centuries. I was particularly struck by the discussion of Medea, Clytemnestra and Antigone: characters from classical Greek drama who are typically presented, these days, as heroines who rebel against injustice, but who were originally intended as illustrations of the wrongness of women seizing power.

I was also repulsed by the ways in which Perseus' murder of Medusa has been repurposed in modern-day politics, most notably an image of Trump as Perseus with Hillary Clinton's face replacing Medusa's. "It is also true that one satiric stunt on US television featured a fake severed head of Trump himself," notes Beard [p. 76], "but in that case the (female) comedian concerned lost her job as a result."

This book, comprising two talks given in 2014 and 2017, already feels a little dated: but there is an interesting observation on Theresa May having been set up to fail, which seems entirely credible.

An interesting and thoughtful book, with an afterword from Mary Beard about how we define and redefine our own experiences of sexual abuse -- 'self-empowering narratives' -- which made me think hard about some incidents in my past.