This Classicist Exposes the Cultural Structures That Keep Women Out of Power

"You can't just slot women into a structure already coded as male — you have to change the structure itself."

About the Author:

Mary Beard is Professor of Classics at Newnham College, University of Cambridge, and classics editor of The Times Literary Supplement. Her scholarship is recognized worldwide; she is a Fellow of the British Academy of Social Sciences and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her books include SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome and the popular Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town, which won the Wolfson History Prize.

About the Translator:

Liu Yi is a professional editor and freelance translator. Her published translations include Celtic Mythology (Democracy and Construction Press, 2018).

Book Excerpt:

The Public Voice of Women (excerpt)

My lecture begins near the source of the Western literary tradition. It holds the first recorded case in history of a man telling a woman to "shut up," forbidding her to speak in public. I mean that immortal scene near the start of Homer's Odyssey, some three thousand years ago. We tend to think of the Odyssey now as the epic of the wonders and dangers Odysseus met on his way home from the Trojan War, while for those same decades his wife, Penelope, waited faithfully and struggled to hold off her many suitors. But the Odyssey is also the story of Telemachus, the son of Odysseus and Penelope: the story of his growing up, of how he ripens from boy into man over the span of the whole poem. That process begins in Book One. Penelope comes down from her private rooms into the great hall below and finds a bard performing for her crowd of suitors, singing of the hardships the Greek heroes met on their way home. She is displeased, and in front of everyone she asks him to sing something more cheerful instead. At this point young Telemachus speaks up. "Mother," he says, "go back upstairs to your own room; spinning and weaving are your business… speech is men's business, and mine above all, for I am the master of this house and the power in it is mine." And Penelope leaves the hall and goes back upstairs.

Telemachus was then barely more than a boy, and yet he could order Penelope — a shrewd, capable, middle-aged woman — to be quiet. There is something absurd in the scene. But it shows precisely how early women's voices were shut out of the public sphere: at the very moment the first written evidence of Western culture appears. What's more, in Homer's telling, a crucial part of a man's growing up is learning to control speech in public — and to stop women from speaking. Telemachus's choice of words makes the same point. When he says "speech" is "men's business," the word he uses is muthos. We are more familiar today with the meaning its descendant, "myth," has come to carry, but that is not how he means it. In the Greek Homer wrote, the word marked authoritative speech delivered in public, not the idle talk that anyone could engage in — women included, or rather women above all.

What interests me most is the relation between this classic Homeric scene of silencing a woman and the ways our own culture and politics still keep women's voices from being heard in public — from the front bench of Parliament to the shop floor. An old cartoon from Punch neatly mocks this familiar disregard for women's opinions: "That's an excellent suggestion, Miss Triggs. Perhaps one of the men here would like to make it." I want to think about how that might connect to the abuse still heaped on women who do speak up. One question keeps returning to me: what exactly is the relation between a woman arguing in public for a female face on a banknote, the rape and beheading threats she gets on Twitter, and Telemachus's rebuke of Penelope?

What I want to do here is look across time at the awkward cultural relation between women's voices and the public domain of speech, debate and commentary — the political sphere in its widest sense, from the committee room in the office to the floor of Parliament — and trace it back into the distant past. I hope this can keep us from settling for the easy diagnosis of "misogyny," a label we slap on things far too readily out of laziness. Misogyny is, of course, one way to describe what is happening. (If you go on a television discussion program and come home to find countless tweets comparing your genitals to assorted rotting vegetables, you will be hard pressed to find a better word for the behavior than "misogyny.") But if we want to understand — and do something about — the fact that women pay a high price for speaking even when no one silences them, we need to see that the matter is more complicated, and that a long history lies behind it.

Telemachus's outburst came first; behind it stretches a long line of similar attempts, most of them successful, running through the whole of Greek and Roman history — attempts not only to shut women out of public speech but to make a display of shutting them out. In the early 4th century BCE, for instance, Aristophanes built a whole comedy on the "hilarious" fantasy of women running the state. Part of the joke is that women do not know how to speak properly in public — more precisely, that they cannot make the language of their private world (in this play, they can hardly say three sentences without mentioning sex) fit the lofty manner of male political speech. In the Roman world, Ovid's Metamorphoses — a remarkable mythological epic about people changing shape, whose influence on Western art is perhaps second only to the Bible's — returns to the theme again and again: as a woman is transformed, her voice is taken from her. Poor Io, turned into a cow by the god Jupiter, loses the power of speech and can only moo. And the chattering nymph Echo is punished so that her voice is no longer her own but a tool that mechanically repeats what others say. In Waterhouse's famous painting she gazes at the beautiful youth Narcissus, whom she loves, unable to speak to him — while Narcissus, from whose name we get the word "narcissist," falls in love with his own reflection in the pool.

In the 1st century CE, one earnest anthologist combed the whole of literature and could find only three examples of women "whose nature made it impossible for them to keep quiet in the public square." His descriptions say a great deal. The first is a woman named Maesia, who successfully defended herself in court. "Because although she had the appearance of a woman, she had by nature the spirit of a man, so people called her the 'androgyne.'" The second is Afrania, who brought lawsuits of her own accord again and again and was so "shameless" as to argue her own cases in court, until everyone had had enough of her "barking" (the narrator will not even use the word "speech," which describes human behavior, for what she did). This anthologist tells us she died in 48 BCE, because "for such an unnatural freak, recording when she died is more to the point than recording when she was born."

This steady contempt for women speaking in public had only two main exceptions in the classical world. First, when women appeared as victims and martyrs they were allowed to make themselves heard — usually as a prelude to their deaths. Texts often describe early Christian women loudly holding to their faith and then walking out to the lions. And in a widely told story from early Rome, the chaste Lucretia, raped by a cruel prince of the ruling family, is granted a speech that went down in history, in which she denounces her attacker, announces she will kill herself, and at once does so (or so the Roman historians write; what actually happened we have no way of knowing). But even this painful chance to speak could be taken away. The Metamorphoses tells the story of a young princess, Philomela, who is raped; to keep her from making a Lucretia-style accusation, her attacker simply cuts out her tongue. Shakespeare borrowed the device in his play Titus Andronicus, where the raped Lavinia likewise has her tongue cut out.

The second exception is more familiar to us. Now and then women could raise their voices in public with full justification — to defend their homes, their children, their husbands, or the interests of other women. So the third example of a woman speaking in public that the Roman anthologist discusses concerns a woman named Hortensia. She could do it without reproach because she spoke explicitly on behalf of all the women of Rome, and only the women, who were at that moment being asked to pay a special property tax to fund a rather dubious war. In other words, in extreme circumstances a woman could publicly defend the interests of her own group, but she could not speak for men, or for the community as a whole. Broadly, as one 2nd-century authority put it: "A woman should guard against her voice being heard by outsiders as carefully as she guards against taking off her clothes in front of them."

But there is more behind all this. Women's "voicelessness" does not merely reflect their general lack of rights in the classical world: no vote, no full legal or economic autonomy, and so on. That accounts for only part of it — since women in antiquity had no right to any formal political power, it is hardly surprising that they had little to say in the political sphere. The exclusion of women from public speech I am describing here is a more active thing, and it carries much richer meaning. It has shaped our traditions, our customs and many of our buried assumptions about women's voices far more than we realize. What I mean is that speaking in public and practicing the art of oratory were not simply things women in antiquity did not happen to do: they were activities and skills reserved for men, and masculinity as a gender identity was defined through them. As we saw with Telemachus, becoming a man — or at least becoming an elite man — meant claiming the right to speak. Public speech was a defining feature of male identity, if not the only one. Or, to borrow a phrase well known in Rome, a proper elite male citizen was a vir bonus dicendi peritus, "a good man, skilled in speaking." And in most cases a woman who spoke in public had, by definition, already stopped being a woman.

Across the whole of classical literature we find the same insistence: a deep, resonant male voice carries an authority a woman's voice does not. One ancient scientific treatise states plainly that a low voice is a mark of manly courage, while a high voice reflects womanish cowardice. Other classical writers insist that the pitch and timbre of women's speech were a standing threat — not only to the voices of male orators but to the health of the whole state, to its social and political stability. A teacher and intellectual of the 2nd century — who had the wonderfully blunt name Dio Chrysostom, literally "golden-mouthed" Dio — asked his listeners to imagine a scene: "The whole community suffers a strange affliction. All the men suddenly find they can speak only in women's voices, and no male, man or child, can say anything in a manly way. Would this not be a disaster harder to bear than any plague? I am certain that if it really happened, people would send envoys to the sanctuary to ask the will of the gods, and would try to appease the divinities with costly offerings." He was not joking.

This is not the quirk of some distant culture — though in time it is indeed far from us. What I want to stress is that a tradition exists of assigning gender to speech and of building theory on that assignment, and we carry it forward today, directly or, more often, indirectly. We should not overstate the case. Western culture, in speech or in anything else, did not come wholly out of Greece and Rome (thank goodness it did not; none of us would want to live in a Greco-Roman world). The influences on us are many, mixed and often in competition with each other, and our political systems have rightly overturned plenty of ancient assumptions about gender.

And yet the traditions we have inherited around debate and public speaking, with their rules and conventions, still stand largely in the shadow of the ancient world. The modern art of rhetoric and persuasion, which took shape in the Renaissance, drew explicitly on classical speeches and handbooks of oratory. The terms we use to analyze rhetoric go straight back to Aristotle and Cicero (before the age of Donald Trump, people often pointed out that Barack Obama's subtlest tricks — or his speechwriters' — were learned from Cicero).

And the 19th-century gentlemen who set or followed most of the rules and procedures of the House of Commons were schooled in exactly the classical theories, doctrines and prejudices I have described. To say it again: the point is not simply that we are victims of the classical inheritance, or its blind followers. The point is that the classical tradition handed us a powerful model for thinking about public speech, for judging whether a speech is good or bad, and for deciding whose words get a hearing — and gender is plainly an important part of that whole system.

Cover image: a still from the film Her, via Douban. Images in the text via Houlang.