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Mary Beard on Women and Power, with Miriam González and Laurie Penny

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Mary Beard is Britain’s best known classicist. Widely admired for her scholarship and popular television programmes about the ancient world, she is also one of this country’s most prominent feminists.

Mary Beard is Britain’s best known classicist. Widely admired for her scholarship and popular television programmes about the ancient world, she is also one of this country’s most prominent feminists. By refusing to be cowed by the misogynistic trolls who have abused her on Twitter, she has become a heroine for our times.

In 2018 Beard came to the Intelligence Squared stage to talk about the themes of her No. 1 bestselling book Women and Power: A Manifesto. Examining misogyny’s deep cultural roots, she explored the ways in which women have been excluded from power for thousands of years. Take the decapitated, snake-haired head of Medusa in Greek mythology – seen by Freud as a castrator figure. It has been used recently to demonise Theresa May, Angela Merkel, and in the 2016 presidential campaign Hillary Clinton, who appeared in a meme as Medusa, with Trump holding her severed head aloft. The message? That the ultimate way to silence a woman is to kill her. Beard also highlighted a passage in Homer’s Odyssey, some 3,000 years old, where Penelope’s son tells her to shut up and go back to her spinning and weaving because speech is ‘the business of men.’ Muted women, men as aggressors: the injustices that the #MeToo movement is addressing are millennia old.

So how do we combat misogyny in all its forms? Is the kind of collective action we have seen recently in the Women’s March and #MeToo going to effect the change longed for by so many? Should women who seek political power simply accept the status quo and follow the male template, or do we need a radical rethink of the entire nature of power and spoken authority?

Beard explored these urgent questions, in conversation with lawyer and campaigner Miriam González and radical commentator Laurie Penny, with writer and broadcaster Afua Hirsch in the chair.

Featuring

  • Mary Beard

    Classicist, author and broadcaster, whose new book is Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World

  • Miriam González

    Co-chair of law firm Dechert LLP’s International Trade and Government Regulation practice

  • Laurie Penny

    Journalist, author and screenwriter

Chair

  • Afua Hirsch

    Writer and broadcaster

Speakers

Chair

Afua Hirsch

Writer and broadcaster

Writer, broadcaster and author of the bestselling book, Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging, which reveals the uncomfortable truth about race and identity in Britain today. She is a columnist at The Guardian, Chair of Journalism at the University of Southern California and was a judge for the 2019 Booker Prize.
Featuring

Mary Beard

Classicist, author and broadcaster, whose new book is Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World

One of the most original and best-known classicists working today. She was Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge until 2022, is a fellow of Newnham College, and the Classics editor of the TLS. She is a fellow of the British Academy and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her books include the Wolfson Prize-winning Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town (2008), the best-selling SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (2015) and Women & Power: A Manifesto (2017). She has written and presented several television documentaries, including ‘Meet the Romans’ and ‘Forbidden Art’.  Her new book is Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World.

Miriam González

Co-chair of law firm Dechert LLP’s International Trade and Government Regulation practice

Co-chair of law firm Dechert LLP’s International Trade and Government Regulation practice, where she advises clients on Brexit and EU trade law policy. She is also the founder and chair of Inspiring Girls, a charity dedicated to raising the aspirations of young girls around the world by connecting schoolgirls with female role models. The campaign has been launched so far in Serbia, Spain, Italy, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Colombia with several more countries in the pipeline for 2018 and beyond.

Laurie Penny

Journalist, author and screenwriter

Journalist and screenwriter. She is the author of eight books, including Unspeakable Things, Bitch Doctrine, and Sexual Revolution, which will be published next year. She was the youngest person to be shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for political writing on her blog Penny Red. She has reported on radical politics, protest, digital culture and feminism from around the world, working with activists from the Occupy movement and the European youth uprisings. She was the recipient of the Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University and currently lives in Los Angeles.