Mary Beard Salon Discussion

Mary Beard’s most recent book, Women & Power: A Manifesto, is a compilation of two talks she gave, the first in 2014 and the second in 2017. Beard meditates on the relationship between Women and Power with examples from current day politics, history, the classical world, and literature. It really is a wide ranging text in all of the intellectual history it references and attempts to straddle. This text, is of course, not meant to be a work of history and opens up a lot of room to focus on alternative forms of writing and scholarship for historians and other humanist. What follows are questions for discussion focusing on, and drawing from, Mary Beard’s book Women & Power.

1. Women & Power began its life as lectures. How does the form effect Beard’s argument? What are the challenges of this form?
2. Beard spends much of the first essay focusing on voice and its relationship to women and power. Is this reflected in the academy? In what ways?
3. Beard is fairly well known for the ways in which she responds to online critics and trolls. In her book, she argues that online attacks on women are manifestations of historical ways in which women’s power has been questioned. Do you agree?
4. What is the role of the androgynous for Beard? How does this factor into the academy?
5.  Does Beard’s book have particular resonance in light of #metoo?
6. Would you teach this book? To what end? How would you frame it!

Please please discuss the book in the comments and in your own posts!