4. What is power to women?

In this episode we explore the following questions:

How do we recognize female power? And what are the sometimes funny, frightening stories we tell ourselves about it?
What are the cultural underpinnings of misogyny in politics or the workplace, and its forms? How and why do conventional definitions of “power” (or for that matter of knowledge, expertise and authority) that we carry round in our heads exclude women? What about metaphors we use regularly?
How do we judge women’s success? By what metrics?
We discuss this quote from pg 89 of the book: “But this is still treating power as something elite…this is treating power very narrowly, as an object of possession that only the few – mostly men – can own or wield…On those terms, women are excluded from it. You cannot easily fit women into a structure that is already coded as male; you have to change the structure. That means thinking about power differently. It means decoupling it from public prestige. It means thinking collaboratively, about the power of followers not just of leaders. It means, above all, thinking about power as an attribute or even a verb (“to power”), not as a possession.”
Why the popular resonance of “mansplaining”? It hits home for us because it points straight to what it feels like not be taken seriously, like someone lecturing you on your expertise in policy over a dinner date!

Our key take-ways we valued from our discussion are the following:

Questioning the use of our own use of metaphors like “shattering the glass ceiling”.
Questioning the definition of “power”.
Gratitude for the previous generations who opened the doors for others to go through.

Here’s the link to the Woman & Power book by Mary Beard on Amazon.

Ways to reach us:

emilyfcanny@gmail.com (Emma)

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leatherboundgremlin (Emma)

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