Women & Power

Britain's best known classicist, Mary Beard, is also a committed and vocal feminist. With wry wit she shows how history has treated powerful women. Her examples range from Medusa and goddess Athena to Theresa May and Elizabeth Warren, as she explores the cultural underpinnings of misogyny, considering the public voice of women, how we look at women who exercise power, our cultural assumptions about women's relationship with power, and how powerful women resist being packaged into a male template.

With personal reflections on her own experiences of sexism online and the gendered violence she has endured as a woman in the public eye, Beard asks: If women aren't perceived to be fully within the structures of power, isn't it power we need to redefine?

With Updated Afterword: "From lectures to book - and the right to be wrong", and, "From book to #MeToo - and reflections on rape".