Cambridge classicist Professor Mary Beard explores the facts surrounding women in power and the depiction of them in the media past and present in her latest London Review of Books lecture.
The Newnham Fellow’s London Review of Books (LRB) Winter Lecture on Women in Power will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 tonight (March 6) at 8pm.
She covers everything from Clytemnaestra in the tragedies of Aeschylus to Hillary Clinton on social media and asks: is there a cultural template which works to disempower women?
The lecture was delivered to a sold-out audience at the British Museum on March 3.
Professor Beard said: “If we want to give women as a gender – and not just in the shape of a few determined individuals – their place on the inside of the structures of power, we have to think harder about how and why we think as we do. If there is a cultural template, which works to disempower women, what exactly is it and where do we get it from?”
As with the Newnham Fellow’s first LRB lecture (Oh Do Shut Up, Dear: The Public Voice of Women), Beard’s starting point is her profound knowledge of the ancient world and moves onto discuss what breaking the glass ceiling really means.
She continued: “This gives a very narrow version of what power is, largely correlating it with public prestige (or in some cases public notoriety). It’s very ‘high end’ in a very traditional sense, and bound up with the ‘glass ceiling’ image of power, which not only effectively positions women on the outside of power, but also imagines the female pioneer as the already successful superwoman with just a few last vestiges of male prejudice keeping her from the top.”
Beard looks at whether the model of success is something that alienates women.
She added: “I don’t think this model speaks to most women, who even if they aren’t aiming to be president of the US or a company boss, still rightly feel that they want a stake in power.”
Listen to the lecture on BBC Radio 4 tonight or on the London Review of Book’s website