On Finding Women and Redefining Power: Part of the Salon on Mary Beard

“[I]f women are not perceived to be fully within the structures of power, surely it is power that we need to redefine rather than women?” So writes Mary Beard in the second part of Women and Power (83). The idea she is formulating can be easily misunderstood, so I want to spend the first part of this post unpacking what she means, but then I want to turn and apply her meaning to the craft of history, particularly to archival research.

I grabbed the quote in the previous paragraph from a remarkably fluid and intricate chain of thought—Beard’s marvelously conversational tone is warm and engaging—so let’s separate it into three parts: redefining women, redefining power, and perceiving women.

Redefining women—or trying to—is what Beard argues we try to do when we think about the problem of how to “empower” women or to achieve a greater measure of equality between men and women. We try to find women who occupy those positions which men have always deemed powerful: leaders of nations or corporations, shapers of opinion or mores.

This offers a very narrow version of what power is, largely correlating it with public prestige (or in some cases public notoriety). It is 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. (83-84)

The glass ceiling metaphor is, of course, the notion that at a certain point, men have to respect a woman’s achievement, an idea that has its coordinate terms across race—there is a current show which comes to mind with the title “White Famous,” meaning the point when a Black actor or singer has “broken through” to reach widespread recognition among white people (a status often euphemized as “mainstream appeal”). Beard is arguing that thinking of either achievement as a “breakthrough” requires that we constantly redefine women or Black people as necessarily oriented toward the approval of white men: it is not merely observing that they are often obligated to compete on white men’s terms, but that they must be seen as trying to achieve a kind of status as honorary white guys.

The problems with this act of redefinition are two-fold. First, the goals it enshrines cannot, as Beard notes, “speak to most women, who, even if they are not aiming to be president of the United States or a company boss, still rightly feel that they want a stake in power” (84, emphasis added). Our discussion of power has no traction for these women if it begins and ends with the glass ceiling. Secondly, while Beard does not hold an essentialist idea of womanhood, she does object strenuously to the requirement that women must always change themselves—no matter what they are like to start with—in order to challenge that glass ceiling. The point is not that there is some kind of ur-femininity which ought to be appreciated for itself and left alone, but that women are never allowed to decide for themselves what elements of femininity (or of masculinity or of neither) they wish to claim for their own.

How, then, might we redefine power instead of expecting women to redefine themselves to earn a chance to be “powerful?” Beard’s answer is brief and a bit elliptical. We should not, she states, think of power “as an object of possession that only the few—mostly men—can own or wield.” We ought to “decoupl[e] power from public prestige,” and instead think “about the power of followers not just of leaders.”

It means, above all, thinking about power as an attribute or even a verb (‘to power’), not as a possession. What I have in mind is the ability to be effective, to make a difference in the world, and the right to be taken seriously, together as much as individually. It is power in that sense that many women feel they don’t have—and that they want. (87)

In Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, the protagonist points out the conceptual ramifications of two sets of metaphors for power—one that is vertical in orientation, with power either coded as the highest rung or as the lowest (in the sense of most fundamental or underlying position); and another set of metaphors that instead imagines power as centrality—to be powerful is to be in the midst of things, at the heart of things. Something similar, I think, is going on here in Beard’s program for reimagining power: we must shift even the grammatical categories we reach for when thinking about what power is and where it can be found.

And that brings us to the third piece of the sentence I quoted initially: perceiving women, or maybe I should say, looking for women. When trying to recover the history of women or trying to recover women in history, where do we look? And here when I say “we,” I really mean men. While there certainly are some men whose histories are tremendously creative in locating women in the archive and orienting their stories around where women are actually found, many of us—and here I am definitely including myself—tend to scan the archive for women in precisely the same way we scan it for men, assuming that if we cannot find women, they must either be invisible (and therefore “lost” to history) or off doing something else that is orthogonal to our project. It is easier to say, “well, I guess women were just shut out of this organization or this intellectual circle” than to ask what women were actually doing and how we can tell the story in a way that doesn’t duplicate that act of exclusion.

Take, for instance, the work of the woman who fed her husband as he was working on some daring new economic treatise. Rather than throw up our hands at the invisibility of this labor or the loss of this woman’s voice to history, is it possible to put together an account of intellectual production that not only “recovers” her labor as historically significant but slides the scale of our historical interest and scholarly investment toward a median point between his writing and her cooking?

I use the wife-as-cook figure as a deliberately extreme example; in many cases, there’s a lot more bubbling in those marital arrangements than a pot of soup. But the fuller point is that a creativity is required that goes beyond an ostensibly good faith effort to scour the usual positions of power for women and, not finding them, move on with a whimper about patriarchy. I am not being cavalier about patriarchy, but I am—I hope—being cutting about the lack of imagination that sustains the kind of history that has only a token woman or two in it. Nor am I speaking from a position of success—I am in the thick of the effort to be more creative about how I shape the history I am writing.

Whether or not I end up being as successful as I’d like to be, however, the questions which Mary Beard’s Women and Power have prompted have been indispensable. It is, in a number of ways, a powerful book.