Women and Power

Very good—but the best part was at the end, where Beard speaks about her own experiences in relation to the #MeToo movement. A lot of the rest of the book is sort of feminism-through-the-lens-of-classics-lite: simple examples of instances where women have been sidelined, dismissed, and silenced in Greek and Roman traditions, and examples of instances where ditto but in the modern day. I think it felt a little underdeveloped, but that's probably more a function of the book having been constructed from a pair of talks, than because Beard doesn't have enough to say. The point, amply made, is that women are shut out of avenues of power, and they will continue to be until they are reconfigured more equitably.

You cannot easily fit women into a structure that is already coded as male; you have to change the structure. That means thinking about power differently.