Of all the visuals contained in Mary Beard’s monograph Women & Power: A Manifesto, it is Medusa’s disembodied head that remains in the mind long after you have finished reading. The figure from Greek mythology frequently represented as grotesque and monstrous is the figure of a woman subjected to hatred by male gods, and stripped of her power in unimaginably violent ways. She is remembered as a lesson to be taught to women who dare to question, of the consequences of ‘crossing the lines’ laid down by the male world. Predictably, in more recent times, the visages of Angela Merkel and Hillary Clinton were transposed on Medusa’s head.
The continuity of the treatment of women’s power, as also of women in power, over millennia is the primary theme of Professor Beard’s lectures that have been published in book form. She brings to bear, upon questions feminists are still asking, her knowledge of the western classics. The first chapter, ‘The Public Voice of Women’, corresponds with the lecture delivered in 2014 and the second, ‘Women in Power’, with one delivered in 2017. The former deals with women’s voices; the author addresses issues of whether at all and how women’s voices are heard, or as is more frequently the case, not heard. Telemachus was coolly able to shut down his own mother, Penelope; Jupiter turned lo into a cow for fear that she will report his sexual advances to his wife Juno; and Echo is punished with never having her own voice, only someone else’s.
These are experiences that resonate in the twenty-first century. Women are deterred from having a voice in public. If they do, they are either punished for it, or their voice and words are moderated to suit the structure already laid down by patriarchy. Their voices too are privatized—if they must speak vociferously, it must be on matters pertaining to the private domain earmarked for them. Most definitely, women must not dare to complain of physical, emotional and sexual abominations visited upon them. So it must be that it is far less significant what a woman is saying, because she must first be made to jump through burning hoops for saying anything at all. This is a classic strategy of deflection, designed to keep women outside the sites of power.