“Women and Power” by Mary Beard

Mary Beard, a Cambridge professor, is known as the author of the remarkable SPQR book and a leading program about Ancient Rome on Discovery TV channel. At home, in England, Mary Beard is known primarily as a bright, almost scandalous publicist and civil activist. The current little book, which includes two public lectures, revised in the essay, is the product of this particular, the second, its hypostasis.

Mary Beard cannot completely eliminate his antiquarian experience; therefore, he opens the book with an episode from Homer's Odyssey. Penelope is trying to criticize the singer, performing at the feast too sad song, but Telemachus decisively silences her mouth, strongly recommending the mother to return to his chambers, to more appropriate for the woman activities. According to the author, this scene exhaustively illustrates the centuries-old male monopoly on public expression, which in turn underlies all power in today's world. Since antiquity, the right to a public speech is recognized for a woman only in two cases: if she speaks from the perspective of the victim (such as Roman Lucretia, raped by depraved prince Tarquinius) or when she speaks on behalf of women in general (like Lysistrata from the eponymous comedy Aristophanes, on behalf of all the Athenians demanding an end to the war).

As a result, according to Mary Beard, any woman claiming for something more - the right to represent all of humanity, her country or at least a professional group, in fact, invades the holy male territory. In order to succeed in this unfriendly space, women have to adopt men's habits and generally mimic everything. Thus, the most famous women politicians of the last decades, Margaret Thatcher and Angela Merkel, were forced to artificially “lower” the timbre of their own voice, since “squeaky” and “shrill” female speech, sounding from the podium, is still perceived as a violation of unspoken taboos. If a woman who claims to this or that segment of power happens to make a mistake, she will be criticized much harder and rougher than a man would have been criticized in a similar situation.

Mary Beard sees two ways out of this situation. The first - and the most obvious - to wait: time obviously works for women, and already today it is noticeable that social conventions are changing. The second - much more interesting (and the one for which, in essence, the whole book was written) - is the need to dismantle the very understanding of power. In its current form, this concept is labeled as male, and it is difficult, if not impossible, to mechanically integrate a woman into it. This means that women need not fight for a place within what is in principle not suitable for them, but instead deconstruct and rethink the idea of ​​power as such, gradually depriving it of its sacredness, and with it specifically masculine features.

The book Mary Beard does not accidentally have the subheading “manifesto”: in addition to a certain style of snootiness, this means that many important thoughts in it are marked rather than revealed, and the argumentation looks fragmentary and intermittent. In other words, it is not worth looking for an exhaustive analysis of the phenomenon in the title of the phenomenon in “Women and Power”. Nevertheless, many of the ideas formulated in the book look very promising and allow you to look at the struggle of women for their rights (first of all, for the right to power and publicity) from a new - and very unusual - angle.