Women and the construction of authority in public discourse

For the political book club we decided on Mary Beard’s Women & Power: A Manifesto, a short work consisting of two speeches that Beard has given. 

 

I was a little apprehensive going into this, mostly because Beard is a British feminist and British feminism is definitely on the shit list these days as types of feminism go. 

 

Overall the book was fine for what it was, although what it wasn’t isn’t quite as lofty as the title would suggest. Beard is a classicist, so both speeches come from that perspective, looking at the continuity of misogyny from classical Greek and Roman cultures until today. This is interesting and seems to hold up. However, overall, the book is about women and representations of power, which is not quite the same thing as being about women and actual material power itself, which to me, as a cranky socialist type, is a pretty big thing to get conflated. The first speech is an interesting historical view on gender and public speech--particularly the sort of public speech that gets taken as authoritative--and the second one is also largely about gender and the imagery of power. While Beard eventually does raise the issue of reimagining what we actually mean by power, rather than just trying to reach gender parity in the handful of unaccountable twerps at the top, this question is only raised, not really dealt with, and is only raised at the very end of the book, which in my opinion means the target audience here is people who have never thought about feminism before. It is absolutely a first-day-of-class level analysis.

 

For a 100-page light, introductory read full of entertaining pictures of classical art, I’m more or less willing to forgive its one-dimensionality, in most respects, but I would be remiss if I did not point out one line where Beard is just whopping wrong on a factual level, which is her contention that Barack Obama got more public respect than Hillary Clinton did, and that you somehow had to venture into deeper, darker corners of the internet to find the level of bloodthirsty, bigoted vitriol targeted at him than you’d find for Clinton in mainstream discourse. This is just flatly untrue, and cannot be entirely explained by Beard living in the UK, because we’re all on the same Internet. 

 

Other than that, the book is a very interesting look at traditions of rhetoric and public discourse as they relate to notions of authoritativeness.