Women & Power: A Manifesto

It's always nice to find a reference to a book while reading another book, and that's exactly how I found this and decided to pick it up immediately. I didn't realize that it's just a short collection of lectures by the author, but it is extremely profound regardless.

I know only a couple of the more common Greek/Roman myths and haven't read the classics Iliad or the Odyssey, so it was fascinating to see the author trace the origins of women disempowerment and silencing to those myths. What's more surprising is to see how these age old beliefs rooted in misogyny still reflect in popular current thought, albeit maybe in a different form - now manifesting as twitter trolls and rape/death threats on social media. The author doesn't give us any clear solutions but asks all of us to examine the relationship between women and power, how we can try to gain it collectively (not just concentrating on individual high achievers) by not falling into the stereotypes of powerful women created by men. I particularly liked this line of hers -

We have to be more reflective about what power is, what it is for, and how it is measured. To put it another way, if women are not perceived to be fully within the structures of power, surely it is power that we need to redefine rather than women?”

To conclude, I just wanna say this was quite interesting to read. If you like Greco-Roman mythologies and would like to know how the fraught relationship of women with power has age old origins, you should pick this up. It's an illuminating experience and can make us reflect on what more we can do to rid our culture of these notions of women's inferiority. It's also very short and packs a lot of information in a few pages, so pick it up and hopefully, it'll surprise you.