Mary Beard on Leadership and Power

Mary Beard's tiny book, Women and Power, should be required reading for anyone who reacts negatively to the word "feminism," or who wonders what all the fuss is about. As one would expect from a noted classicist and public intellectual, it is particularly helpful in tracing how classical ideas about gender continue to influence contemporary discourse, not least on Twitter. It is also a cracking good read (though a little crass).

What I want to reflect on here, however, is not so much gender as leadership. In her Afterword, Beard says that she would eventually "like to try to pull apart the very idea of 'leadership' (usually male) that is now assumed to be the key to successful institutions, from schools and universities to businesses and government" (p. 94).

Beard's initial attempt in the book itself is embedded in a passage that is difficult to excerpt:

"... But this is still treating power as something elite, coupled to public prestige, to the individual charisma of so-called 'leadership', and often, though not always, to a degree of celebrity. It is also treating power very narrowly, as an object of possession that only the few - mostly men - can own or wield .... On those terms, women as a gender - not as some individuals - are by definition 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. What I have in mind is the ability to be effective, to make a difference in the world, and the right to be taken seriously, together as much as individually. It is power in that sense that many women feel they don't have - and that they want." (pp. 86-87)

This is one example of how questions about gender can get at issues of wider relevance for people in general. Perhaps I'm mistaken, but when I hear "leadership" I think of the elite power "coupled to public prestige" and "individual charisma" "that is now assumed to be the key to successful institutions"--and I want to run the other way. To be sure, some people do need to be in senior leadership and management positions, people in those positions can exercise a great deal of influence, and it is important for such people to be trained. Bless them. Good leadership development will presumably stress service more than public prestige and personal charisma. But viewing everything in terms of leadership in the conventional sense can still exclude other people, and other ways of encouraging "the ability to be effective" and "to make a difference in the world."

Beard, Mary. Women & Power: A Manifesto. London: Profile Books, 2017.