Oh Do Shut Up Dear! Mary Beard on the Public Voice of Women

APPLAUSE

I want to start tonight very near the beginning

of the whole tradition of Western literature,

and with its first recorded example, and there must be many unrecorded,

the first recorded example of a man telling a woman to shut up.

LAUGHTER

That her voice is not to be heard in public.

I'm thinking of a particular moment,

immortalised at the start of Homer's Odyssey, one of the founding epics

of the Western literary tradition, almost 3,000 years old.

Now we tend to think of the Odyssey

as the story of the Greek hero Odysseus

and the adventures and scrapes

he had returning home after the Trojan War,

while for decades his wife, Penelope,

here sitting by her loom,

loyally waited for him, fending off the suitors pressing to marry her.

But the Odyssey is just as much a story of Telemachus,

the son of Odysseus, seen here facing her.

It's the story of his growing up,

how, over the course of this long poem, he matures from boy to man.

It's a process that starts in the very first book like this.

One day, in the family palace,

Penelope comes down from her private quarters into the great hall,

to find a bard performing to throngs of her suitors

and he is singing about the awful difficulties the Greek heroes

are having in their attempts to get back home after the war.

Penelope is not amused and, in front of everybody,

she asks him to choose another happier number.

At which point, young Telemachus intervenes.

"Mother," he says,

"Go back up to your quarters and take up your own work,

"the loom and the distaff.

"Speech will be the business of men, all men and me most of all,

"for mine is the power in this household."

And off she goes, back upstairs.

Now, there is, I have to say,

something faintly ridiculous

about this sort of wet-behind-the-ears teenager

actually managing to shut up the savvy, middle-aged Penelope.

But he does that,

and it's a nice demonstration that, right at the very beginning,

where the Western literary tradition starts,

women's voices are not being heard in the public sphere

and, more than that, as Homer has it,

an integral part of growing up to be a man is learning to take

control of public utterance and to silence the female of the species.

Actually, the very words Telemachus uses are significant, too.

When he says, "Speech is men's business,"

the word he uses for speech is "muthos".

Now, that's not actually

in the sense that it has come down to us as "myth".

In Homeric Greek, it signals authoritative public speech,

not the kind of chatting and prattling and gossip

that anyone, women included or especially women, could do.

The line is, Mum can chat, but woe betide her

if she tries to command muthos, the voice of authority.

But what I want to do this evening is to reflect

on the relationship between that classic Homeric moment

of silencing a woman

and some of the ways in which women's voices are not

publicly heard in our own contemporary culture

and in our own politics, from the front bench to the shop floor.

It is a well-known deafness which is nicely captured

in this Punch cartoon,

drawn, needless to say, by a woman.

You've seen this many times in many areas.

There are five blokes around the table,

one nice lady called Miss Triggs, and the Chair is saying,

in case you can't quite read it,

"That's an excellent suggestion, Miss Triggs.

"Perhaps one of the men here would like to make it."

We will be coming back to this cartoon later.

But I also want to look briefly at how, again, this Homeric moment

might also relate to

the abuse that many women who do speak out

get subjected to even now.

Now, I want to underline

that I am trying to concentrate much more on voice tonight

than on writing or on physical appearance.

One of the questions at the back of my mind,

to put it very simply,

is what's the connection between, say, publicly speaking out

in support of a female logo on a banknote,

Twitter threats of rape and decapitation,

and Telemachus's put-down of Penelope?

Now, I have to be the first to acknowledge that it might

seem a bit paradoxical, maybe even slightly self-defeating,

for me here to be speaking publicly in front of this great audience

about the obstacles confronting women

in finding a public voice or a public ear.

There will be some people who are saying,

"She's got a bit of a nerve to try that."

I'm going to come back again to that question, too,

but let me say now,

this is not intended to be an hour-long complaint.

Nor am I wanting to suggest

any blanket rules about women's silence,

if that is how we should see it.

I want to say it is much more complicated than that.

My aim, rather, is to try to take a long view,

a very long view on what I see as the culturally awkward relationship

between the voice of women and the public sphere

of speech-making, debate and comment,

politics in its widest sense,

whether it is in the office or the floor of the House of Commons.

I am hoping that a long view will help us get beyond

the simple diagnosis of misogyny that I think

we tend to fall back on a bit lazily, to be honest.

I mean, to be sure, misogyny is one of the things that is going on here.

Speaking personally, if you go on a television discussion programme

and then you receive a load of tweets

comparing your genitalia to a variety of rotting vegetables,

it's hard not to think misogyny is an apt term for what's going on.

But if we want to, I think, understand better

and even more do something about the fact that women,

even when they are not actually silenced, yet still tend to pay

a very high price in our culture to have their voices heard,

we have, I think, to recognise that it's all a bit more complicated

than that and that there is a long back story.

And I'm starting with the back story.

Because you won't be surprised to learn that Telemachus's outburst

is just the first in a long line of largely successful attempts

stretching throughout Greco-Roman antiquity,

not just to exclude women from public speech,

but also to boast that they have been excluded.

To give you just a very quick flavour,

in the early fourth century BC,

the Greek playwright Aristophanes devoted a whole comedy

to the "hilarious" fantasy

that women might actually take over running the state.

Part of the joke was that women just couldn't speak properly in public,

or rather they couldn't adapt their private speech,

which in this case turns out to be all about sex,

they couldn't adapt their private speech to the lofty idiom

of male Athenian politics.

In the Roman world, Ovid's wonderful Metamorphoses,

that extraordinary mythological epic poem about people changing shape,

probably the most influential work of literature on Western art

after the Bible ever,

the Metamorphoses repeatedly returns to the idea of the silencing

of women in the process of their transformation.

Here is a 17th-century version of poor Io,

who's been turned into a cow by Jupiter,

so she cannot talk but only moo.

While the chatty nymph, Echo, is punished by being condemned

only to be able to repeat the words of others.

Waterhouse here, in this famous picture,

has her gazing at Narcissus,

but unable to initiate conversation with him, while he,

the original narcissist,

has fallen in love with his own image in the pond.

In the realm of history rather than myth,

one earnest Roman anthologist of the first century AD

managed to rake up just three examples of

"women whose natural condition

"did not manage to keep them silent in the forum."

His descriptions are quite revealing.

The first, a woman called Maesia,

successfully defended herself in the courts

and "because she really had a man's nature,

"under the appearance of a woman,

"was called the Androgyne, the man-woman."

The second, Afrania, used to initiate legal cases herself

and was "impudent enough" to plead in person,

so that people became tired out with her barking or yapping.

See how, in this account, she still doesn't have a human voice.

She's turned into a dog already.

We're told that she died in 48 BC because,

and I'm quoting again, "with unnatural freaks like this,

"it's more important to record when they died,

"not when they were born."

Now, there are just two main exceptions in the classical world

to this abomination of women's public speaking.

First, women are allowed to speak out

as victims and as martyrs,

usually to announce their own forthcoming death.

Early Christian women, for example, are regularly represented,

loudly upholding their faith as they go to be eaten by the lions.

And in a famous story from the early history of Rome,

the virtuous Lucretia,

raped by a brutal prince of the ruling house,

was given a speaking part

solely to denounce the rapist and announce her own suicide.

Or so Roman writers presented it.

We haven't a clue what really happened.

Here you have a 16th-century image of the rape at the top

and there, Lucretia underneath, announcing what she's going to do.

But even this rather bitter opportunity to speak

could also itself be removed from women.

One memorable story, in Ovid's Metamorphoses again,

tells, I'm afraid, of yet another rape,

this time of the young Princess Philomela.

In order to prevent any Lucretia-style denunciation here,

the rapist, as you see, quite simply cuts her tongue out.

It's a theme that you probably know gets picked up again

in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus,

where the raped Lavinia there

has her tongue removed.

The second exception to women's silences,

perhaps a more familiar one,

occasionally a woman could legitimately rise up to speak

to defend her home, her kids,

her husband or the interests of other women.

So, in the third of the three examples of female oratory

discussed by the Roman anthologist,

the woman, Hortensia by name, gets away with it

because she is acting explicitly as the spokesperson

of the other women of Rome, the women only,

after they had been subject to a special wealth tax

to fund a rather dubious war effort.

Women, in other words, may, in extreme circumstances,

publicly defend their own sectional interests,

but they can't speak for men

and they can't speak for the community as a whole.

And here's a 15th-century attempt to recapture Hortensia in full flow.

In general, as one ancient Roman guru rather aptly put it,

"a woman should as modestly guard against

"exposing her voice to outsiders

"as she would guard against stripping off her clothes."

Right?

That's the limit of female silence.

There is, I think, more to this than meets the eye.

The muteness that I've been trying to evoke is not simply a reflection

of a general disempowerment of women in the classical world -

no voting rights, limited legal and economic powers and so on.

Of course, it's partly that.

Ancient women were obviously not likely to raise their voices

in a political sphere in which they had no formal stake.

But the point seems to me

is that we're dealing with a much more active

and loaded exclusion of women from public speech in the ancient world.

And, importantly, it's one with a much greater impact than

we usually acknowledge on our own traditions, conventions

and assumptions about the voice of women.

What I mean is that public speaking

and oratory wasn't something that ancient women just simply didn't do.

It was an exclusive practice, an exclusive skill,

that positively defined masculinity as a gender.

As we saw with Telemachus, to become a man,

and, of course, we're talking an elite man,

to become a man was to claim the right to speak.

Public speech was a, if not THE,

defining attribute of maleness.

So, a woman speaking in public was, in most circumstances,

by definition, not a woman.

So, beyond the kind of examples that I've quoted to you,

we find repeated stress throughout ancient literature

on the authority of the deep male voice.

As one ancient scientific treatise explicitly put it,

"A low-pitched voice indicated manly courage,

"a high-pitched voice indicated female cowardice."

Or, as other classical writers insisted,

"The turn and the timbre of women's speech always threatened to

"subvert, not just the voice of the male orator, but the social

"and political stability and the health of the state as a whole."

Another 2nd-century lecturer and guru, Dio Chrysostum...

His name is a bit of a mouthful, but it actually means,

significantly enough, Dio The Golden Mouth.

Dio had this to say - I think it captures it nicely.

"Imagine this," he asked.

"Suppose an entire community was struck

"by the following strange affliction -

"all the men suddenly got female voices and no male,

"child or adult, could say anything in a manly way.

"Would not that seem terrible and harder to bear than any plague?

"I'm sure they would send off to a sanctuary to consult the gods

"and try to propitiate the divine power with many gifts."

It would be nice to think that Dio was joking, but he wasn't,

I don't think.

What I want to underline here, and it's really my second point,

is that this is not just

the peculiar ideology of some distant culture.

Distant in time, it may be.

But actually, this is the tradition of gendered speaking

and the theorizing of gendered speaking to which we are still,

directly, or more often indirectly, the heirs.

I don't want to overstate the case.

Western culture does not owe everything to the Greeks and Romans,

in speech or in anything else.

And, to be honest, thank heavens it doesn't. You know?

Even a classicist, or perhaps especially a classicist,

would not fancy living in a Greco-Roman world.

There are all kinds of variants and competing influences on us

and our political system has happily overthrown

many of the gendered certainties of antiquity,

most obviously in giving women, formally at least,

and relatively recently, equal political rights.

And yet it remains the fact that our own traditions of debate

and public speaking, their conventions and their rules,

still lie very much in the shadow of the classical world.

The modern techniques

of rhetoric and persuasion, formulated in the Renaissance,

were drawn explicitly from ancient speeches and handbooks.

Our own terms of rhetorical analysis

go back directly to Aristotle and Cicero.

In fact, it's common to point out that Barack Obama

or his speech writers have learnt all their best tricks from Cicero.

And so far as the House of Commons is concerned,

those 19th-century gents who devised or enshrined

most of our parliamentary rules and procedures,

they were brought up on exactly those classical theories

and slogans and prejudices that I have been quoting to you.

Again, I'm not meaning we're simply

the victim of the classical inheritance here,

but those classical traditions have provided us with

and continue to provide us with

a template for thinking about public speech,

for defining and deciding what counts as good oratory, or bad,

what counts as good persuasion or not

and whose speech has a right to be heard,

and gender is obviously an important part of that mix.

And it only takes a really casual glance

at the modern Western traditions of speech-making and debate,

at least up to the 20th century, to see many of those classical themes

being replayed and re-emerging all over the place.

Women who claim a public voice get treated as freakish androgynies,

like Maesia defending herself in the Forum.

Now, the obvious case here is Elizabeth I's belligerent address

to the troops at Tilbury in 1588 in the face of the Spanish Armada,

where, in those famous words that I certainly learnt at school,

and I'm sure many of you did too,

she seems positively to avow her own androgyny.

You'll remember it. "I know I have the body of a weak, feeble woman,

"but I have the heart and stomach of a king and a king of England, too."

It's a slogan that I discovered this week that you can still buy

emblazoned on gifts,

from babygrows to skateboards.

I have to say, why you'd want that on a babygrow rather beats me,

but I tell you, you can get it.

The truth is, actually, I have to tell you,

that Good Queen Bess may never have said anything of the sort.

There is absolutely no script from Elizabeth or from her speech writer,

there's no eyewitness account

and the canonical version that I was made to learn...

Again, as I was reflecting this week,

a funny thing to make a girl at a girls' school learn,

that speech, but I did.

That comes from a letter from a pretty unreliable commentator

with a terrible axe to grind,

about 40 years after the speech was said to be delivered.

But, for my purpose,

the likely fictionality of the words makes them even better

cos the nice twist there is that the male letter-writer

puts the confession or the boast of androgyny

into Elizabeth's own mouth.

But looking at modern traditions of oratory more generally,

we also find that main area of licence for women to talk publicly,

that is to support their own and women's interests,

again, being very prominent.

And I hope you don't spend as long as I've been spending

flipping through those rather quaint compendia

called A Hundred Great Speeches From History,

cos they're very odd.

But, if you do, what you will find,

when they come to get the women's speeches from history,

which is always a bit of a challenge,

most of the female highlights, from Emmeline Pankhurst

to Hillary Clinton talking at

the UN Conference On Women in Beijing, very famously,

are just of that type.

They're talking, always, or almost always,

about the lot of women, not about the community as a whole.

And so, too, is probably what's the most popularly

and frequently anthologised example of female oratory of all,

which is the 1851 Ain't I A Woman? speech

of Sojourner Truth,

an ex-slave, abolitionist and American campaigner

for women's rights.

"And ain't I a woman?" she's supposed to have said.

"I have borne 13 chilern

"and seen 'em most all sold off to slavery

"and when I cried out with my mother's grief,

"none but Jesus heard me!

"And ain't I a woman?"

That's been very influential.

I should say, just in case you're wondering,

those words are only slightly less mythical

than Elizabeth's at Tilbury.

That authorised version was written up about ten years

after Sojourner Truth's speech, saying whatever she said

and it's in that second version, not by her at all,

that what is now the famous refrain - "Ain't I a woman?"

which Sojourner Truth certainly never said - was inserted

and, in fact, the whole speech was kind of re-translated at that point

into the Southern drawl that I notably failed to replicate...

AUDIENCE CHUCKLES

..to match the abolitionist message,

even though Sojourner Truth came from the North

and had been brought up speaking Dutch.

So we have to be careful with these things.

Now, I'm not, of course, saying that women's voices

raised in support of women's causes aren't important, you know.

Someone, for heaven's sake, has to speak up for women

and if men won't, well, women should.

But it remains the case that women's public speech has, for centuries,

been niched into that area

and here, of course, I've got to flag up, before somebody else does,

my own topic this evening.

No-one forced me to talk about this,

but I think it can hardly be a coincidence

that I chose to talk about the public voice of women

rather than about, say, migration or the war in Syria.

Now, I don't want to put myself in the same league as Sojourner Truth,

but I probably have to confess to being in that niche, too.

But even that area of licence has not always, or even at all,

consistently been available to women.

There are countless examples of attempts to write women out

of public discourse entirely, Telemachus-style.

But just to take one, anyone who's read Henry James's Bostonians,

published in the 1880s,

will remember that a central theme in that book

is the silencing of Verena Tarrant,

a young feminist campaigner and speaker.

As she draws closer and closer to her suitor, Basil Ransom,

a man endowed, as James stresses, "with a rich, deep voice"...

..she finds herself increasingly unable to speak,

as she once did, in public.

Ransom effectively re-privatises her voice,

insisting that she speak only to him.

"Keep your soothing words for me," he says.

Now, in the novel, it's quite hard to pin James's own standpoint down,

and certainly most readers don't warm to Basil,

but in the essays, James makes it pretty clear where he stood,

for he wrote about the polluting, contagious

and socially destructive effects of women's voices

in words that could well have been written

by some second-century-AD Roman,

and were probably in part derived from second-century-AD sources.

Under American women's influence, he insisted,

language risks becoming "a generalised mumble or jumble,

"a tongueless slobber or snarl or whine.

"It will sound like the moo of the cow, the bray of the ass,

"and the bark of the dog."

I hope you spotted in that kind of mad, extreme stuff,

a faint glimpse of the tongueless Philomela, the moo of Io,

and the barking of the Roman female orator in the Forum.

Henry James was just one among many in what amounted, at the time,

to something of a crusade for proper standards in American speech.

Other contemporaries praised

the sweet, domestic, private singing of the female,

while opposing any use of a female voice

in the wider world.

And there's plenty of thundering

about "thin nasal tones" of women's public speech,

about their twangs, their whiffles,

their snuffles, their whines and their whinnies.

"In the name of our homes, our children, our national honour,"

said James again, in 1906, "Don't let us have women like that!"

Now, we don't talk quite in those bold terms now.

Not quite, but it does seem to me

that many aspects of that traditional package of views

about the unsuitability of women for public speaking in general,

a package which goes back more than two millennia,

still underlies some of our own assumptions about,

and our awkwardness with,

the female voice in public.

Take, for example, the language we still use

to describe the sounds of women's speech,

which is not all that far from Henry James

or some pontificating Roman.

In making a public case, in speaking out, what are women said to be?

They're said to be "strident",

they "whinge" and they "whine".

When, after one particularly vile bout

of internet comments on my own genitalia,

I tweeted, rather pluckily, I thought,

that it was all a bit "gobsmacking".

This got reported by one commentator

in a mainstream British magazine in these terms -

"The misogyny is truly 'gobsmacking', she whined."

LAUGHTER

Since when has it been whining

to say that something was gobsmacking?

This did induce in me a quick Google trawl to see, you know,

who is said to whine in the world these days?

And I can tell you - it's women, closely followed

by Premiership football managers on a losing streak.

LAUGHTER

Not only women.

I felt so angry about that,

I felt more angry about being said to be a whiner

than I did about the misogyny in the first place, I think.

You might say, "Well, do those words really matter?"

And the answer to that is of course they matter

because they underpin a contemporary idiom

that acts to remove the authority, the force,

even the wit or the humour or the irony from what women have to say.

It's an idiom that effectively repositions women

back into the domestic sphere.

Think when people normally use the words "whinge" and "whine",

it's over things like the washing-up and who hasn't put their socks

in the laundry basket, and things like that.

It trivialises the words of women

by making it into, turning it into, a whine

or in the terms I was using about Henry James,

it "re-privatises" women that way.

Contrast, very easy, contrast "the deep-voiced man"

with all the connotations of profundity

that that simple word "deep" actually brings.

Deep, he's deep and deep.

And it is still the case, I'd argue, that when, as listeners,

we, and I think I'm including women in this,

we hear a female voice,

we much more rarely hear a voice that connotes authority

or rather, and this is to put it, I think, more correctly,

we haven't yet learned how to hear authority in a woman's voice.

We don't hear, in Homeric terms, muthos when we listen to a woman.

Now, I'm talking just voice here,

but it's very obvious that you could do appearance too.

You could say, in a man,

craggy and wrinkled faces signal mature wisdom.

In a woman, they signal a kind of

past-my-use-by-date label, I think.

We don't hear a voice of authority,

we don't hear a voice of expertise either,

at least, not outside women's traditional spheres.

To put it in another obvious way,

for a female MP to be a Minister of Women, or of Education or of Health,

is a very different thing from being Chancellor of the Exchequer -

a post that no woman has yet filled.

And, across the board, we still tend to see a tremendous resistance

to female encroachment

onto traditional male discursive territory,

whether that's the abuse that gets hurled at Jacqui Oatley

for having the nerve to leave the netball court

to become the first woman commentator on Match Of The Day,

or what can get meted out, and regularly is meted out,

to women who appear on Question Time,

where the range of topics discussed

is usually fairly mainstream "male political".

It may not be a surprise that the same commentator

who accused me of whining claims to run, I quote,

a "small light-hearted competition," for guess what -

"the most stupid woman to appear on Question Time in a year."

Now, I am extremely reluctant to stoop to the obvious point

about the stupid men that appear on the panel.

Much more interesting is another cultural connection

that that reveals -

that unpopular, controversial or just plain different views,

when voiced by a woman,

tend to get taken as indications of her stupidity.

It's not that you disagree, it's that she's stupid.

"Sorry, love, you just don't understand."

And I can't tell you the number of times that I have been called,

you know, online or by e-mail,

"an ignorant moron".

Now, hang on, I think, and sometimes say, you know,

I might be wrong, you know, I might not have got it right.

We might disagree, but I'm self-confident enough to know

that I'm not an ignorant moron. Right?

CHUCKLING

Being wrong is different from being stupid.

Now, these assumptions and these prejudices are,

I think, very hard-wired into us.

I don't mean that they're hard-wired into our brains,

there is no neurological reason whatsoever

for us to perceive low-pitched voices

as more authoritative than high-pitched voices.

But they hard-wired into our culture, our language,

our way of talking about men and women

and into the millennia of our history.

And when we are thinking about the under-representation of women

in national politics, say,

their relative muteness in the public sphere,

I'm sure we have to think beyond what the Prime Minister

and his chums got up to in the Bullingdon Club,

beyond the bad behaviour and the blokeish culture of Westminster,

beyond even issues of family-friendly hours,

childcare and women-only short lists,

important as those are.

I think we need to be focusing on those even more fundamental issues

of how we have learned to hear the contributions of women,

or, just to go back

to the cartoon for a moment,

I think we have to focus on what

I'm going, from now on, to call

the Miss Triggs question.

Not just, how does poor old Miss Triggs get a word in edgeways?

Though that's important enough.

But how can we make ourselves more aware about the processes

and prejudices that mean we don't hear her.

Now, at this point,

I am going to turn briefly to trolls,

the internet death-threat and abuse,

because some of these same issues of voice and gender

are at play there, too.

Now, I think we have to be very, very careful about generalising

too confidently about the nastier sides of the internet.

These appear in many, many different forms,

it's not quite the same on Twitter

as it is under the line in comments in newspapers,

and criminal death-threats are a quite different kettle of fish

from merely "unpleasant" abuse.

And many different people are targets,

from grieving parents of dead teenagers

through, you know, professors of classics,

to celebrities of all sorts.

What is clear about internet abuse

is that many more men than women are the perpetrators of it,

and they attack women far more than they attack men.

Now, men are not immune from attack,

but one academic study a few years ago put the ratio

at something like 30 to 1, female to male targets.

For what it's worth, and I have to say I've not suffered

anything like as bad as some other women,

I receive what I would euphemistically call

something inappropriately hostile,

that's to say, you know, beyond fair comment,

beyond even fair anger, just being cross,

every time I speak on the radio or television

and I almost certainly will after this lecture is broadcast.

It's driven, I'm sure, by many different things.

Some of it's from kids acting up, some of it's from people who've had

too much to drink, some of it's from people who've just for a moment

lost that inner inhibitor and can often be very apologetic later.

I think most of them are more sad than they are wicked.

And when I'm feeling charitable,

sometimes, when I'm feeling charitable,

I think quite a lot of it comes from people who feel rather let down

by the false promises of democratisation

blazoned by media such as Twitter.

It was supposed to put us directly in touch with those in power,

it was supposed to open up

a new kind of democratic kind of conversation.

Of course, it does absolutely nothing of the sort.

You know, if we choose to tweet the Prime Minister or the Pope,

they will no more read our tweet than they would read a letter

if we sent it to them.

And for the most part, the Prime Minister doesn't even write

the tweets that appear under his name anyway.

How could he?

I have to say, I'm rather more optimistic

that maybe the Pope does write some of his.

I think he might not be so busy.

LAUGHTER

Some of the abuse, I suspect, is actually a squeal of frustration

at those false promises, taking aim at one of the traditional targets

of our culture - "the gobby woman".

And we have to remember,

and I think it's important to stress at this point,

women are not the only group in our culture

who either are or feel themselves to be voiceless.

But the more I've looked at the details

of the threats and the insults

that women are on the receiving end of,

the more, some of them at least, seem to fit into the old patterns

of prejudice and assumption that I've been talking about.

For a start, it doesn't much matter

what line you take in an argument as a woman.

If you venture into traditional male territory, the abuse comes anyway.

It's not WHAT you say that prompts it,

it's the fact that you are saying it.

And that matches the details of the threats themselves.

And OK, you know, they include the predictable menu

of rape, bombing, murder and so forth.

And if I sound now relatively insouciant about that,

I can tell you, late at night,

when you get one of those, you feel scared.

They have all that, but there's a significant subsection

which homes in on the silencing of women.

If you look at what these tweets are saying, "Shut up, you bitch,"

is a fairly common refrain.

Or they will promise to remove your capacity to speak.

"I'm going to cut off your head and rape it," was one tweet I got.

"eadlessfemalepig"was the Twitter name chosen

by someone threatening an American journalist.

Or perhaps most diagnostic of all,

"You should have your tongue ripped out,"

as was tweeted to another journalist, which, of course,

takes us back straightaway, 2,000 years,to poor Philomela.

In its crude, aggressive way,

a lot of these tweets and other forms of online abuse

are about keeping women, or getting women, out of man's talk.

In a way, I think, the 140 characters of a tweet

act as a sort of magnifying glass on attitudes that you find elsewhere.

And, in some ways, I'm tempted to see

that there is a kind of faint connection

between these mad Twitter outbursts, and mad mostly is what they are,

and the blokes in the House of Commons heckling women MPs so loud

that you simply can't hear what they say.

I'm told that in the Afghan parliament,

they have a rather cleverer strategy.

They just unplug the women's mics when they don't want to hear them.

Ironically, too, the well-meaning solution that's often recommended

when women are on the receiving end of this turns out to bring about

the very result that the abusers want -

namely, women's silence.

What do you get told? "Don't call the abusers out.

"Don't give them any attention, that's what they're looking...

"Just say nothing and it will all go away."

That's the advice you get.

I can tell you, if you think

that women have put up and shut up far too long,

it's very hard to follow that advice.

It amounts, I think, to leaving the Twitter bullies

in unchallenged occupation of the Twitter playground.

We have to speak out.

Now, in a way, that's sort of the bare bones of my...

It's not a diagnosis, it's my kind of historical long view.

But to finish with, we ought to think a bit about

what the remedy might be.

It's all very well doing a bit of analysis,

but what are we going to do about it?

What is the remedy?

Well, put in those terms, like most women,

I can say, I only wish I knew what to do about this.

There can't be, I think, a group of female friends or colleagues

anywhere in this country,

and probably not many places in the world,

who haven't regularly discussed

at least the day-to-day practical aspects

of the Miss Triggs question,

whether in the office or the committee room,

the council chamber, the seminar or the House of Commons.

How do I get my point heard?

How do I get it noticed?

How do I feel, as a woman, I belong to that discussion that is going on?

Now, I'm sure it's something that some men feel too.

As I've already said, women aren't the only voiceless people on the planet.

All the same, if there's one thing we know bonds women

across all backgrounds, all political colours,

in all kinds of businesses and professions in this country,

it's the classic experience that almost all of us have shared

of the failed intervention. I'm sure that many women in the audience

are instantly going to recognise what I'm talking about.

You're at a meeting, you decide you're going to make a point,

you find a place to put it in,

then there's a silence - isn't it? - a short silence follows,

a few awkward seconds...

and then some man picks up just where he'd last left off and says,

"But what I was saying was..."

LAUGHTER

And if feels as if you might never have opened your mouth,

and you end up both blaming yourself

and the blokes whose exclusive club this discussion appears to be.

Those who do manage successfully to get their voice across

very often adopt some version of the androgyne route,

like Maesia in the Forum or the mythical Elizabeth at Tilbury -

consciously aping aspects of male rhetoric.

CHUCKLING

That was basically Margaret Thatcher's line

when she took training specifically to lower her voice,

to add the tone of authority

that her advisers thought her high pitch lacked.

And that's fine, in a way, if it works,

but it seems to me that all tactics of that type

tend to leave women still feeling that they're on the outside,

that they're impersonators of rhetorical roles

that they don't quite own.

They're actors rather than orators.

And putting it bluntly,

it seems to me that having women just pretend to be men

may be a quick fix for some,

but it doesn't honestly get to the heart of the problem.

Now, what I've been suggesting at various points in this lecture,

is that what we really need to do

is to think much more fundamentally

about the rules of our own rhetorical operations.

Now, I don't mean by that that sort of old stand-by of,

"Oh, men and women talk different languages, don't they?"

To which I would always reply, "Well, if they do, it's because

"somebody taught them different languages."

And I certainly don't mean to urge us down some kind of

pop psychology route, you know,

"Men are from Mars, women are from Venus,

"so never mind about public speaking, my dear."

CHUCKLING

My hunch is that if we're going to make any progress

with the Miss Triggs question,

we need to go back to some first principles

about the nature of spoken authority,

about what constitutes it,

how we have learned to hear authoritative utterance

where we have,

and how we recognise that.

And rather than push generations of women into voice-training classes,

I think perhaps we should be thinking more about

the fault lines and fractures that underlie dominant male discourse.

It isn't necessarily women's fault here.

And again, I think, we can usefully look back

to the Greeks and the Romans.

For, while it is true, as I've been insisting, that classical culture,

I think, has to bear, some, some part of the responsibility

for our starkly gendered assumptions about public speech,

about male muthos and female silence,

it's also the case that some ancient writers were much more reflective

than we ourselves are about those gendered assumptions.

They were subversively aware of what was at stake in them,

they were troubled about their simplicity,

and they hinted at resistance.

Ovid, for example, may have silenced his women

in their transformation and mutilation,

but he also suggested that communication could transcend the human voice,

and that women were not that easily shut up.

Philomela lost her tongue,

but she still managed to denounce her rapist

by weaving the story of what had happened to her into a tapestry,

which is why Shakespeare, in Titus Andronicus,

has to remove not only the tongue of Lavinia, but also her hands,

just in case she got anywhere near a loom.

CHUCKLING

And the smartest male, ancient... They're all male.

The smartest ancient rhetorical theorists acknowledged

that the best masculine techniques of oratorical persuasion

were uncomfortably close, as they saw it,

to the techniques of female seduction.

"So, was oratory really so safely masculine?" they wondered.

Maybe it was a female genre all along.

And one particularly bloody anecdote vividly exposes the gender wars

just below the surface of ancient public life and speaking.

It's a story that comes from the conflicts at Rome that followed

the assassination of Julius Caesar, in 44 BC.

The cause of these, Marcus Tullius Cicero,

Roman's most powerful public speaker and debater ever, was lynched.

And the hit-squad that took him out

triumphantly brought his head and his hands to Rome,

and they pinned them up, for all to see,

on the speaker's platform in the Forum.

So just where Cicero had claimed his greatest oratorical triumphs,

there his head and his hands got stuck up, dead.

It was then, the story goes, that Fulvia,

the wife of Mark Antony, who had been the victim of some of Cicero's

most devastating polemics, went along to have a look.

And when she saw the bits of him,

she removed the pins from her hair and repeatedly stabbed them

into the dead man's tongue.

It's a disconcerting image

of a defining article of female adornment, the hairpin,

used as a violent weapon against the very site of the production

of male speech in the male mouth.

It's a kind of reverse Philomela.

This 19th-century painting, even more disconcertingly,

eroticises the whole scene.

In fact, gloating Fulvia actually

seems to have taken Cicero's head home

to do her way with, rather than...

It's supposed to be in the Forum, you know,

not in your bedroom, darling.

LAUGHTER

But you get the point.

What I'm pointing to here is a critically aware,

self-aware ancient tradition,

and it's not one that directly challenges the basic template

I've been outlining, but it is one

that seems to determine to reveal the conflicts and the paradoxes

in the gendering of public speech,

to raise bigger issues about the nature

and purpose of communication, male and female.

And I think, really, to close,

we should perhaps take our cue from this,

and really make an effort to bring to the surface

all those big questions that we tend to shelve

in our pursuit of quick fixes and practical answers

about how we speak in public,

why we speak in public, what actually is debating for,

and whose voice, have we learned, fits.

What we need, in other words, I think,

is not just, you know, practical measures, you know,

not just saying, "Let's have a woman chair every committee and everything will get better."

What we need is some good, old-fashioned feminist consciousness-raising

about what we mean by the voice of authority

and how we have come to construct it.

And I think we need to work on that

before we can even start to figure out how we modern Penelopes

might answer back to our own Telemachuses,

or, for that matter, I think we should start to work on that

before we decide just to, well, lend Miss Triggs some hairpins

and see what happens. Thank you.

APPLAUSE