Women & Power: A Manifesto

Downloadable audio file

An updated edition of the Sunday Times Bestseller

Britain's best-known classicist Mary Beard, is also a committed and vocal feminist. in Women & Power she revisits the gender agenda and shows how history has treated powerful women, using examples ranging from the classical world to the modern day. Beard explores the cultural underpinnings of misogyny, considering the public voice of women, our cultural assumptions about women's relationship with power, and how powerful women resist being packaged into a male template.

A year on since the advent of #MeToo, in a new Afterword, Beard reflects on the successes, and the future, of that movement, probing the narratives of rape and consent. She asks about the stories men tell themselves to justify their treatment of women. Which stories endure and who controls them? With wry wit, Beard argues, it's time for change.

From the author of international bestseller SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome.