'Women & Power' Links Today's Trolls With Ancient Ancestors
Classicist Mary Beard's new book — a compilation of two of her lectures — traces current strains of misogyny back to the ancient world (one 7th century B.C. poet compared women to yapping dogs).
Henry James, Mary Beard tells us in her new book Women & Power, liked to complain about women's voices — American ones in particular. Under their influence, he believed, language risked devolving into a "tongueless slobber or snarl or whine," like "the moo of the cow, the bray of the ass, and the bark of the dog."
James sounds remarkably like the seventh century B.C. poet Semonides of Amorgos, who lived some two and a half millennia before him and also compared women to yapping : "Hello. You've written in to voice your dislike of one of our female reporter's voices. You're not alone ..."
