8: Women & Power: A Manifesto

A book by Mary Beard

On June 20, 2018, Portugal beat Morocco 1-0 at the 2018 World Cup in Russia, with the only goal scored, inevitably, by Cristiano Ronaldo. It was a fairly pedestrian affair early on in the tournament which few are likely to be able to remember two years later. Up in the gantry of Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium, though, history was being made as the BBC's Vicki Sparks became the first woman to commentate live on a televised World Cup match in the UK. It was a landmark to be celebrated.

Inevitably, it prompted a slew of responses across social media of the I-bet-she-doesn’t-even-understand-the-offside-rule genre. These kinds of responses are depressingly familiar and have been aimed at every woman who has ever had the audacity to take a high-profile media role in men’s sport (and there aren’t that many).

As well as having their qualifications and abilities questioned, female commentators face another more insidious criticism that goes a bit like this: “I just don’t think it sounds right. It’s too shrill. I just prefer a man’s voice on the commentary. That doesn’t make me sexist.” Like clockwork, after Sparks made history at the mic, former Chelsea defender and talkSPORT presenter Jason Cundy chimed in thusly: “I prefer to hear a male voice when watching football. For 90 minutes of hearing a high-pitched tone isn’t really what I would like to hear. And when there is a moment of drama, as there often is in football, that moment actually I think needs to be done with a slightly lower voice.”

According to Women & Power: A Manifesto, Mary Beard’s slim but illuminating assessment of female oppression, ’twas ever thus. A choice passage relates Henry James’ attempts to suppress female public speech in America in the late 1800s by complaining of women’s “thin nasal tones” as well as their “twangs, whiffles, snuffles, whines and whinnies”. If James had lived to see Gabby Logan present Match of the Day or Jacqui Oatley head Sunday Supplement, you can bet he’d have thrown numerous toys out his pram on Twitter.

As would Telemachus, son of Odysseus, who tells his mother, Penelope, near the start of Homer’s Odyssey, that “speech will be the business of men” and she would do better to “go back up into your quarters, and take up your own work, the loom and the distaff”. Basically the classical version of: “Get back in the kitchen.” As Beard notes: “When it comes to silencing women, Western culture has had thousands of years of practice.”

The result is a society in which we barely have a concept of what a woman in power looks and sounds like, other than that she looks and sounds quite like a man. Beard’s examples include Clytemnestra, who “ceases to be a woman” in Aeschylus's Agamemnon when she effectively becomes ruler of her city; Elizabeth I, whose (apocryphal) address to her troops at Tilbury in 1588 included the lines: “I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king”; Margaret Thatcher, who took voice training to lower her voice and “add the tone of authority that her advisers thought her high pitch lacked”; and Angela Merkel and Hilary Clinton, who sport the “female politicians’ uniform” of trouser suits, a “simple tactic to make the female appear more male, to fit the part of power”.

Early on in Women & Power, which combines two lectures Beard gave in 2014 and 2017, the Cambridge don references a classic Punch cartoon from 1988 depicting a business meeting involving five men and one woman. It is captioned: “That’s an excellent suggestion, Miss Triggs. Perhaps one of the men here would like to make it.” As relevant now as it was more than 30 years ago, Beard’s convincing, and compellingly expressed, argument in Women & Power is that Miss Triggs, like Penelope, will continue to be silenced until we fundamentally redefine the nature of power and authority.