Tracing the roots of misogyny to ancient Greece and Rome with Mary Beard
The classicist Mary Beard opens her book “Women & Power” with a scene out of the Odyssey. Penelope leaves her room to approach the assorted suitors who more or less occupy her mansion, waiting for her to give up on long-lost Odysseus and marry one of them. When she requests they stop singing such songs, she is met with resistance from the youngest male there: Her adolescent son, Telemachus, chastises her. Return to your room, he tells her; public speaking is for men.
“I read the Odyssey for 20 or 30 years before I noticed the line,” Beard says. “At a certain moment you just say, blimey, that is a founding moment in Western civilization! And I’d read it however many times and not recognized it. And here we are in the first book of the poem and we have this moment: saying speech is male, and silencing a woman.”
Adapted from a pair of lectures Beard delivered for the London Review of Books Winter Lecture series in 2014 and 2017, the twinned essays in “Women & Power” (Liveright) take on what Beard calls, in the book’s introduction, “the culturally awkward relationship between the voice of women and the public sphere of speech-making, debate and comment: politics in its widest sense.” Speech and power are inextricably linked, and male silencing of women is present at the very core of our cultural DNA.
Beard’s voice, in person, is lively and warm; she sounds at once like the best possible coffee date and the extremely acclaimed academic she is (a longtime professor of classics at Cambridge University, Beard was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2013, one of the markers on a path to knighthood). She’s a relatable genius: Words like “bloke” and “blimey” pepper her speech.
It’s this likability, in part, that led to such a strong backlash against A.A. Gill, a television critic who in 2012 wrote in the Daily Telegraph that Beard, then hosting a BBC program on ancient Rome, was “too ugly for television.” His attack seems to have been prompted by Beard’s audacity to be a woman, then in her mid-50s, who chose not to dye her hair or have plastic surgery.
Curled in an armchair in her New York hotel room, Beard, who turns 63 on New Year’s Day, is naturally elegant and quite lovely. She wears her thick, silver-blond hair long and parted in the middle, and accents her dark tunic and leggings with golden high-tops. Her face, complete with the normal amount of laugh lines, is animated, intelligent and attractive.
Gill’s insults backfired. “He got a lot of flack,” Beard says. “In terms of British public opinion, he got it wrong.”
Beard’s spirited response to Gill’s insults — and to sexist attacks found in internet comment sections and Twitter — have made her, as the New York Times noted in 2016, a kind of folk hero for feminists of all ages (a 2014 New Yorker profile called her “Troll Slayer”).
The first person in her family to earn a university degree, Beard attended a women’s college at Cambridge, entering in 1973 just as second-wave feminism took root in both the academy and the wider world. Scholars in her field began looking for written evidence of women’s voices and found very little. “By the time I was finishing my PhD,” she says, “we were much more interested in thinking not so much about trying to find the lost women, but to think how gender mattered in the ancient world — to see that preoccupation with the standoff between men and women absolutely, fundamentally lay the wellsprings of the literature we were reading.”