Women & Power

Women & Power develops two lectures on the long cultural history of excluding women from authoritative public speech. Mary Beard begins with classical examples, including Telemachus ordering Penelope back to her room and the threatening figures of Medusa and Clytemnestra, to show how Western traditions repeatedly represent a woman’s public voice as abnormal, dangerous or laughable. These stories matter not because antiquity mechanically determines the present, but because its images and rhetorical habits continue to structure modern expectations.

Beard connects those traditions to contemporary politics, media commentary and the gendered abuse directed at women online, including her own experience. She argues that simply inserting women into institutions designed around male models of authority does not address the deeper problem. The manifesto therefore asks how power itself might be redefined—less as possession, celebrity or command, and more as the capacity to act, collaborate and produce change.