The Public Voice of Women

• Very early example of women being silenced from the Odyssey, when Telemachus basically tells Penelope to shut up and go to her room
• Public speech wasn’t just something women didn’t do, but a defining attribute of maleness
  • Women who claim a public voice → treated as freaks, androgynes
• Few cases of female oratory confined to speaking on women’s rights
• These prejudices, assumptions, attitudes hardwired not into our brains, but into our culture, language, millennia of history
• Abuse (esp. online) in response to the fact that women are saying anything, rather than what they are saying
  • Often advised to “ignore it,” don’t give it attention— but then how are we to be heard?

Women in Power

• Key questions...
  • How have we learned to look at women who exercise power, or try to?
  • What are the cultural underpinnings of misogyny in politics and the workplace?
  • How and why do our conventional definitions of power (and knowledge, expertise, authority...) exclude women?
• In classical myths, women with power are generally monstrous, portrayed as abusing power rather than rightfully using it, logic of the stories is that they must be disempowered and put back in their places
• What to do about this? If women are not perceived to be on the structure of power, why not redefine power instead of women?
  • Not just electing more women so that “women’s issues” are better represented, but because it’s right
  • Redefine power as an attribute and verb, not just something to have— the power of followers, not just leaders
  • Power as the ability to be effective, to make a difference in the world, to be taken seriously