Status Updates From Women & Power: A Manifesto

“that said, looking harder at Greece and Rome, helps us to look harder at ourselves, and to understand better how we have learned to think as we do.“

“thankfully, not everything we do or think goes back directly or indirectly to the Greeks and Romans; and I often find myself insisting that there are no simple lessons for us in the history of the ancient world.”

“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.”

“ what we need is some old-fashioned consciousness-raising about what we mean by ‘the voice of authority’ and how we’ve come to construct it.”

“it doesn’t matter what line you take as a woman, if you venture into traditional male territory, the abuse comes anyway. It is not what you say that prompts it, it is simply the fact that you’re saying it.”

“It is still the case that when listeners hear a female voice, they do not hear a voice that connotes authority; or rather, they have not learned how to hear authority in it . . . They do not tend to hear a voice of expertise either; at least, not outside the traditional spheres of women’s sectional interests.”

When calling women “whiny” as they express how they feel about something, Bard writes, “do those words matter? Of course they do, because they underpin an idiom that acts to remove the authority, the force, even the humor from what women have to say. It is an idiom that effectively repositions women back into the domestic sphere; it trivializes their words, or it re-privatizes them.”

“we are not simply the victims or dupes of our classical inheritance but classical traditions have provided us with a powerful template for thinking about public speech, and for deciding what counts as good oratory or bad, persuasive or not, and whose speech is to be given space to be heard. And gender is obviously an important part of that mix.”

“This is not the peculiar ideology of some distant culture. Distant in time it may be. But I want to underline that this is a tradition of gendered speaking – in the theorising of gendered speaking – to which we are still, directly or more often indirectly, the heirs.”

“Public speech was - if not THE - defining attribute of maleness . . . A woman speaking in public was, in most circumstances, by definition not a woman.”

“There are only two main exceptions in the classical world to the abomination of women’s public speaking. First, women are allowed to speak out as a victims and as a martyrs, usually to preface their own death.”

“if we want to understand - and do something about - the fact that women, even when they are not silenced, still have to pay a very high price for being heard, we need to recognize that it is a bit more complicated and that there is a long backstory.”