Women and Power – a critical review

Mary Beard is a Professor of Classics at Cambridge and a popular academic whose many books and great documentaries, chiefly about the Roman Empire, has made her affable face a familiar one across the globe.

Her pamphlet, entitled Women & Power, A Manifesto, based on two lectures she had given, aims to outline the historic roots of what she terms the ‘masculine structure of power’, tracing the lineage back to the fount of Western Civilization, that of the Ancient Greek and Romans. She draws parallels from the recent past and indeed the present to argue that current power structures retain the DNA of a sexist antiquity and require a remodelling.

Beard writes in a clear and approachable way that makes her prose a pleasure to read and her references to ancient and perhaps unfamiliar history accessible and animated. However, perhaps partly because of the terseness of the format, her allusions appear to be conveniently selective. Her main thesis also suffers curiously for someone as learned as her, from the lack of some - and I choose the word carefully - subtlety.

While much of what she describes is true regarding women’s rocky ascent to parity in many areas of public life, it strikes me that Beard’s diagnosis is incorrect in an important way. Beard argues that the misogyny experienced today is a vestige of a masculine power structure built with the intent of silencing women. Indeed, she wrote that “when it comes to silencing women, Western culture has had thousands of years of practice.” But she fails to identify any current misogynistic laws or regulations that back up her thesis. One might argue she is pointing to certain customs and expectations, of which there undoubtedly are. But is it masculine and is it intentionally anti-woman? Did men maliciously and purposefully stop women for thousands of years from taking up certain roles, claiming certain rights and to having their voices silenced? I would argue not.

Great Women of Antiquity by Frederick Dudley Walenn

Sexism is engrained in all cultures. Aside from the mythical Amazons of Scythia, the vast majority of recorded civilizations, from Egypt to China, have been ‘patriarchal’. Or to say that men and women largely took on different sets of roles in society. History is copious with examples of unfair treatment of women, such as exclusion of females from professions, positions, or rights. The history of female emancipation is filled with tragedies and triumphs, from Hypatia to Mary Wollstonecraft.

However, in analysing the source or reason for such imbalances, it is vitally important to cast one’s mind back in history and ponder it in the context of the times. When one does so, one comes across evidence that suggests sexism is not necessarily due to a systemic disdain for women. This isn’t to say that sexists and misogyny do not exist, they self-evidently do. But to ascertain if historic malice is involved, as Beard implies, in the foundation of a power structure of the ancient and hence the modern world, would dictate the way society understands and responds to current issues, which are causing much what I would argue to be unnecessary friction and heat.

We might remember that for the majority of human experience, life was - and still is for many in less fortunate places - extremely harsh. The division of roles between the sexes therefore reflects an adaptation of necessity. Life did not give most men and women who have existed the luxury to ponder about liberties or fairness – their chief worry was to structure the sharing of responsibilities so to stave off death, which stalks from all sides. The Black Death pandemic in the 14^th century killed almost half of the entire European population. The Great Plague of London in 1665 killed a quarter of the city in just over a year. As recent as 1950, more than one in five children in 59 countries died before the age of five. Dying in child birth for women was common, with studies showing a death toll of between 20-80/1,000 births only 200 years ago. Astoundingly, the majority of the world's population lived in extreme poverty (living off less than $1.90 international dollars a day) as late as the 1960's. It is only since the year 2000 that the number of people living in extreme poverty has declined substantially. 

Life expectancy and child mortality rates since 1950, by country

To survive, an optimal partnership between men and women was necessitated. Women, for the chief reason of child bearing and rearing, especially before the advent of contraception, were quite naturally cast in the domestic scene while men predominantly performed the physical labour, and are almost exclusively the sex that went to war and died either for defense or conquest. This is a natural evolution based on competence – men are on average stronger than women and hence more suited for labour (and die more as a result - the male dominance of dangerous physical jobs still persists, with the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau reporting that men make up 93% and 92% of workplace deaths in the US in 2015-2016 and 2012 respectively, a statistic that might give pause to the idea that society is misogynistic).

Women on the other hand can do things men simply cannot do, such as bearing children and breast feeding. Women are also on average more empathetic and compassionate, arguably making them better carers, a phenomenon replicated in other animal species, suggesting that sex differences in empathy have ontological roots in biology and not merely products of cultural practices. Hence the bifurcation of roles between the sexes in society is at least in a large part stemmed in a natural process based on differences in evolutionary roles. This is not to argue for any sort of biological determinism. However, it is to point out that until very recently, people had little choice. And hence the establishment of certain roles occupied chiefly by either sex is mutually advantageous and not due to sexism. 

William Bouguereau - Charity

The advances in technology no doubt played an unparalleled role in alleviating the species - both men and women - from much of the harshness of life. For women, it was also a major contributor to female emancipation by giving women more mastery over the unique biological hindrances such as menstruation and pregnancy. However, it is worth remembering how recent some of these advances are. Female sanitation products and proper plumbing only happened in the last 100 years, and birth control such as the pill was only available since the 1960’s and had tremendous impact on women's lives. The maternal mortality rate for developed countries now is a thousand times less than just a few generations ago. Machinery, white goods and open markets with specialisation also meant a lot of the time that was taken up to produce basic things for both men and women is freed up for other things. My favourite example is the American man who decided to make a chicken sandwich from scratch – it took him 6 months and $1,500. Now someone on minimal wage can buy a sandwich for a small fraction of their daily wage, as well as fresh fruits and vegetables and pretty anything you can think of.

 

The insistence and enforcement of the ‘correct station’ for women in society throughout history is partly a result of habit and often bodyguarded by custom and dogma. It is unfortunate and wrong, especially when many of the necessities that stood in the way of emancipation have been removed. But societies throughout history do not question the status quo, even awful ones, until the lax and conventional ways of thinking are overturned by some seismic event. Like the view in Europe on races, which shifted dramatically when, forced by World War II, the British fought and died alongside Indian, black American and Chinese soldiers. Similarly, women’s traditional ‘place’ was turned upside down by the experience of World War I, when, again out of necessity, women were required to expand their traditional roles and worked in the factories making armaments and assembling vehicles as well as working near the frontline in hospitals saving countless thousands of lives. It is not surprising that the Suffragette movement succeeded right after World War I. It should be noted that all men over the age of 21 were only given the vote in 1918 in the UK, with the Representation of the People Act, as a consequence of the Great War. Before this, only about 60% of male householders had the vote. The same Act gave vote to about 40% of women. The act enlarged the male voting population from 7.7 million to 12.9 million. It also gave the vote to 8.5 million women the vote. One need to further bear in mind that only a generation before, and only as a result of the Representation of the People Act in 1884, did 40% of men acquire the right to vote. Suffrage is a very recent thing for both men and women.

These historic reasons do not support the idea that a malicious male dominated power structure is designed to keep women down. But rather, that the gradual emancipation of women, often from unfair prejudice, is part of an ongoing evolution of some societies that have only recently dragged themselves out of the mire of merely surviving. This misreading of history is also evident from some of the examples Beard gives, and especially in how she interprets them.

Starting with Homer’s Odyssey, written some 3,000 years ago, Beard points to an episode involving Telemachus, son of Odysseus and Penelope, to illustrate her point that misogyny is deep-seated in the Western cultural fabric. At the beginning of Book I, Phemius, a bard, was playing a song to entertain Penelope’s suitors. The song is one about Achaean’s bitter homecoming and a sad one. Penelope, upon hearing the song, comes out of her room in tears to ask that Phemius play another song as this song reminds her of her husband Odysseus, missing after the Trojan War. Telemachus rebukes his mother:

But go back into the house, and take up your own work,

The loom and the distaff, and bid your handmaidens

To ply their work also; but speech will be a concern for men,

All men, and for me most of all; for mine is the power in this household.

Sounds undoubtedly misogynistic. But Beard omits that just before this episode, the young Telemachus, whose age usually would not allow him to be the head of a house, was visited by the Goddess Athena (arguably the most flawless of the Olympian Gods) and told that he should not cling onto his childhood. Furthermore, there are legitimate reasons to question the veracity of this passage as firstly, the passage is missing from several ancient versions of the Odyssey; secondly, the Odyssey presents Telemachus, a protagonist, as likeable to the audience, which this episode, at least in the way Beard interprets it, does not; and thirdly, evidenced from Homer’s writings, women were allowed to speak (in the formal sense, or ‘muthos’ in Greek), as Helen of Sparta and others did in public and in private. Indeed, Beard neglects to mention the independence, wit, and fidelity Penelope displayed in the Odyssey while waiting 20 years for the return of her husband and fending off 108 eager suitors.

Suitors of Penelope by Waterhouse

Beard quotes other stories where women are silenced as examples of misogyny. For example the Oread Echo, who was cursed to only being able to repeat the last words spoken to her. Beard leaves out the detail, however, that the one who cursed her was Hera, the goddess and wife of Zeus. Likewise, Beard mentioned that Zeus turned Io into a heifer. However, she neglects to say that this was not so that she may be silenced, but instead, Zeus did so to hide his lover from his jealous wife Hera. In some versions of the story, Hera was the one who transformed Io into a cow. Later, in Egypt, Zeus turned Io back to human form, and she became the ancestor of many Greek heroes including Heracles and Perseus. In both stories, Zeus, the King of Gods, was reduced to a squirrely male terrified of the feminine fury of his rightly upset wife, the Goddess of women, marriage, child birth and family. 

Echo and Narcissus by Waterhouse
Echo was unable to tell Narcissus of her love due to her curse

Another whom Beard cites is Philomela, a princess of Athens who was raped by her sister’s husband Tereus, who then cut out her tongue as she defiantly threatened to expose his crime. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, her speech was moving:

My self, abandon’d, and devoid of shame,

Thro’ the wide world your actions will proclaim;

Or tho’ I’m prison’d in this lonely den,

Obscur’d, and bury’d from the sight of men,

My mournful voice the pitying rocks shall move,

And my complainings echo thro’ the grove.

Deprived of speech, Philomela wove a tapestry of her story and avenged herself with the help of her sister (in a gruesome way, by killing Tereus’s son and cooking and feeding him to Tereus). When Tereus realised and chased them, the sisters prayed to the gods to transform them into birds to escape his fury, and Philomela was turned into a Nightingale. While she was deprived of words, she achieved her revenge and was cast in a sympathetic light as a heroine throughout history and literature. Such as in Eliot’s perhaps most celebrated poem, The Waste Land:

The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king

So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale

Filled all the desert with inviolable voice

And still she cried, and still the world pursues,

“Jug Jug” to dirty ears.

Beard also lightly skips over notable women in literature such as Antigone, Clytemnestra and Medea, which is slightly ironic for they were symbols of rebellion in the face of oppression or injustice whose tales have echoed thousands of years to the present. She even underplays Lysistrata in Aristophanes’ 5^th century BC play, whose leadership of women in a witty and peaceful protest of abstinence ended a war. Beard might have mentioned other historic women of antiquity who have made tremendous influence to how society thought about women’s roles:

Antigone burying his brother on pains of death

Telesilla of Argos (6^th century BC) – a poet and leader of Argos through a war with Sparta.

Arete of Cyrene (4^th century BC) – who wrote 40 books, was a single mother to Aristippus the Younger, an important Cyrenaic philosopher, whose nickname is Metrodidaktos or ‘mother-taught’.

Hipparchia of Maroneia (4^th century BC) – a Cynic philosopher, author, and was listed with Socrates and Plato in Diogenes Laertius’ work The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers.

Agnodice of Athens (4^th century BC) – the first female doctor, who disguised herself as a man to practice in a then male-only occupation. She was very popular with women patients, who know her true sex, and was accused of seduction by male doctors. She revealed herself as a woman in court and the city’s women came to her support, which led to a change of law, allowing female doctors.

Beard does not mention that many of the earliest ‘feminist’ ideas were espoused by men. It is often argued that the Hellenistic schools of Epicureanism, Cynicism and Stoicism were the first to contend for female rights. Plato, whose mother was a philosopher, argued for state funded child-care and education for women in his Republic. 

The modern first wave feminist movement was also propelled by many men in addition to the likes of Mary Wollstonecraft and later Emmeline Pankhurst and Millicent Fawcett. John Stuart Mill, in his On the Subjection of Women wrote: “What is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing—the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others.” Others such as Montesquieu, Marquis de Condorcet and Jeremy Bentham all argued for female emancipation across Europe. Brigham Young in America famously said: “You educate a man; you educate a man. You educate a woman; you educate a generation”. Marx wrote in a letter that “Anybody who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without the feminine ferment. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex (the ugly ones included).” Women and men have always worked together to shift the public discourse to make life better. It is not one sex against another - there were many prominent women who were against women's suffrage - but an eternal partnership in a world that is often unforgiving.

Besides the obvious goddesses, the Muses representing all the arts (including rhetoric and history, contra Beard's thesis) and science are female

Even today, in first world countries such as the US, Britain, Canada and Australia, the notion of patriarchy that some radical feminists like to espouse is a-historic and exaggerated. The examples of wealthy men, male CEOs or politicians make up a tiny percentage of the population. Contrary to this, most homeless people are male, most homicide victims are male and most suicides are male. On the flip side, in the UK and US, women are a third more likely than men to be accepted into tertiary education. 

Beard herself acknowledges from the preface that great progress has been made, that her mother was born before women had the vote, and lived to see a female Prime Minister. She doesn't realise that this point goes against her thesis - the pace of change favouring women has actually been amazingly rapid, given the proper context. Her counter examples on the other hand are poorly chosen. She excuses Hillary Clinton's loss to Trump in the 2016 election to the 'masculine power structure', and at the same time unintentionally compares Trump to the demi-god Perseus. Clinton lost for many good reasons and in fact had she not been a woman, her loss would have probably been much more decisive. Beard also cites the three young female founders of Black Lives Matter as an example of positive progress. It should matter that the premise underlying the movement is largely unsubstantiated by facts and that the BLM movement has been degenerating before everyone's eyes into an often violent mob lacking in purpose. 

It is a shame that she did not choose more worthy candidates such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali writer who endured genital mutilation, escaped a forced marriage and has been fighting for women's rights under Islam for most of her adult life, at the risk of her life, and against a properly sexist culture that actually resembles Margaret Atwood's overpraised Handmaid's Tale. But it wouldn't have fit Beard's narrative, as Ali had to flee to the US as a refugee from violence for upholding her Classic Liberal views. Or the Nobelist Malala Yousafzai, who as a child was shot in the head in Pakistan for wanting education for girls. She now lives in the UK. It might strike Beard as ironic how women like these (one might add Azar Nafisi from Iran, Brigitte Gabriel from Lebanon and Park Yeon-Mi from North Korea, who all fled to Westernized, democratic countries) flock to the inheritors of the 'masculine power structure' to be able to simply voice their views let alone not be treated as chattel.

Indeed Asia Bibi, a Christian farm worker convicted falsely of blasphemy in Pakistan and who has been in jail for almost a decade, is seeking refuge in the West. Ironically - and this is an area that most self-proclaimed feminists have completely ignored - the UK has refused asylum to her for fear of backlash from the Muslim community, while turning a blind eye to Sharia courts that rob British Muslim women of their legal rights.

Given the length of recorded history, one might feel that female emancipation, such as gaining the vote (just over 100 years ago for the pioneering countries, like Britain, US, New Zealand, Australia and Scandinavia), occurred too late. But what must be taken into account is that many of the technological and philosophical alterations that fomented female liberation only occurred within the last 200 years. As with any rapid social changes due to technological or philosophical advances (often hand in hand), there is push back. People used to protest against the advent of automobiles and the saboteurs famously broke machines by throwing their wooden shoes or sabot into them, in a protest against the industrial revolution. Inertia against social change is by no means exclusively towards women. Indeed, in Saudi Arabia, a rich country, women were only recently allowed to get driver's licenses. But they are still banned from things such as swimming in public or making major decisions without their male 'guardians'. In Indonesia, child marriage is still common. In China, girl orphans and late-term abortions are rife. In Algeria, women are killed for refusing a man's advances. 

Beard also does not discuss the fact that much of the differences in male and female representation in jobs naturally stems from differences in the type of occupation they choose to take up. A recent paper looking at more than 400,000 people found somewhat counterintuitively that the more gender equality there is in a society, the fewer women are in STEM, despite similar or even better aptitudes shown by women. This may be due to the fact that women have been shown on average to prefer working with people, while men prefer to work with objects. Women also show greater altruism and choose with greater propensity to work in jobs that help the community. This flies against the idea that the West is structured against women achieving certain goals – many simply choose freely not to, unless you will argue that females have more freedom in Algeria, where female graduates in STEM is 41% whereas in the US, Australia, Switzerland, Sweden and Denmark it is under 25%.

A scatterplot of countries based on their number of female STEM graduates and their Global Gender Gap Index (y-axis), a measure of opportunities for women (Psychological Science)

Hence, it strikes me that Beard is wrong in the way her argument is constructed. She oversimplifies the radix malorum as one of male cynicism. She also underappreciates the self-evident truth that there is no place for a woman to be freer and to pursue her desires than in the West, the countries founded on the traditions of Athens, Rome and Jerusalem and refined by the fires of the Magna Carta, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. It is no accident that the 24 states currently with female elected heads of states are mostly in the West.

Beard makes the alluring mistake of making the best enemy of the good. Just because there is room for improvement regarding female equality in the West, it does not mean that the West is a nest of misogyny. In fact, it is the culture most allied to female liberty. Beard’s thesis, in presuming that guilt of inequality is primarily at the door of men’s malignity, is not only untrue, but also causes needless friction between the sexes in a dangerous identitarian movement that has increasingly taken hold of an extreme sect of the left. As Thomas Paine said of Edmund Burke, Beard pities the plumage but forgets the dying bird.

Beard’s thesis would be more accurate had she argued that, despite imperfections, the Western tradition is the one tradition that most facilitated female empowerment in the world. The Greeks, not the Persians or the Egyptians, were the ones who were aware of the imbalances and frictions between the sexes and expressed them in plays and books. Hence, it is the inheritors of this tradition that are now places where women are most free. While surely criticism should be given where it is due, people today lucky enough to live in such a society should feel grateful instead of resentful, fortunate instead of indignant. While together, irrespective of sex, men and women should work together to further the unique achievements of the Western traditions, making it better for ourselves as well as try to make it better for millions of unfortunate women around the world.

La Valse by Camille Claudel