Book Summary
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You cannot easily fit women into a structure that is already coded as male; you have to change the structure.
Women & Power
Finally, Mary Beard tackles the misogynists and trolls that relentlessly harass and denigrate women all across the world, including, all too often, Mary herself, in one daring book. She examines the traps of gender and the ways that history has abused powerful women since time immemorial in her book Women & Power, which traces the beginnings of sexism to its primordial roots. Women have been barred from leading roles in civic life since Homer's Odyssey, as Beard demonstrates, with public speaking being characterized as intrinsically male.
Beard draws illuminating parallels between our cultural assumptions about women's relationship to power—and how powerful women provide a necessary example for all women who must resist being vacuumed into a male template—from Medusa to Philomela (whose tongue was cut out), from Hillary Clinton to Elizabeth Warren (who was told to sit down). Beard argues, "If women aren't viewed to be within the framework of power, isn't it power itself that we need to redefine?" with personal observations on her own online encounters with sexism. How many more centuries should we anticipate to have to wait?
You cannot easily fit women into a structure that is already coded as male; you have to change the structure.
