 STOP Professor Mary Beard—MDSP I don't think that any MSP has ever been greeted that way in the chamber. My name's King McIntosh. I'm the Presiding Officer here at Hollywood I'm delighted to welcome you this afternoon, and thank you very much for coming along to the Festival of Politics 2018. This is our 14th year, and this is our final day, but it's been a great success thanks to you because it's a participative event. It's all about your engagement with politics and with public policy, your chance to give us your thoughts and your questions, and today is no exception with our guest Mary Beard. Before we go on to introduce Mary, I want to thank, first of all, the Open University, who are the sponsors of today's event, and they've been a big supporter of us throughout this week and sponsored several events, and they made this event possible this afternoon. We're also broadcasting live on Facebook, Facebook Live, so for those of you who are social media savvy, I know that Professor Beard is very social media savvy, we're on hashtag FOP 2018, hashtag Festival of Politics 2018. So, I'd like to welcome Professor Mary Beard, and I'd like to give a little bit of introduction, I think actually from the reaction people do know you, but for those who don't, Dame Mary Beard is a Professor of Classics at Newnham College, Cambridge, and Classics Editor at the Times Literary Supplement. Born in Shropshire, the family relocated to Shrewsbury when Professor Beard was young and she attended Shrewsbury High School on a scholarship, where she swiftly became a star pupil. She was particularly gifted at Latin and Greek, often completing all-terms homework in the first week, and in her summer holidays, participated in local archaeological digs. In 1972, she took the entrance exam and applied for a place at Newnham College, Cambridge, and since then became a Classics lecturer at King's College London, then moved back to Newnham College in 1984 as a fellow at the time the only female lecturer in the faculty. Her first book was published in 1985, Rome in the Late Republic, praised as an accessible and innovative account of Rome's transformation into an empire. In 1989, whilst raising her children, Zoe and Raphael, and working, she published her only non-history book, The Good Working Mother's Guide, a series of hints and tips for working mothers. In 1992, she was appointed Classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement, a post that she continues to hold, and in 2004, Mary became Professor of Classics at Newnham College. Her breakthrough to public consciousness was probably the book Pompeii, and it was read by the controller of BBC2, who offered Professor Beard the opportunity to present it as a TV documentary. Since that launch pad, the learned but very approachable Professor Beard can be seen on TV translating Latin transcriptions, carving up pizza to explain the divisions of the Roman Empire or arguing about public services on question time. Her book, Women in Power, was a runaway bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, and one of her most recent television appearances has been as one of the presenters of Civilisations, the big budget BBC version of Kenneth Clark's 1969 series. She is regularly flagged down by fans, and one admirer published a poem titled When I Grow Up I Want to Be Mary Beard, which now adorns t-shirts worn by her legions of fans, and she has many friends in high places, including Hillary Clinton and the shoe designer Manolo Blannock. Professor Beard writes a blog called A Dawn's Life for the Times Literary Supplement. She is known for being very active on Twitter, responding to critics and trolls with reason and optimism. She sees that as a big part of her public role as an academic. Professor Beard was made an OBE in 2013, and a Dame commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2018 both were for services to classical scholarship. She lives in Cambridge with her husband Robinson Clare Cormac, a fellow classicist and art historian, has two children who are also academics. I'm delighted to welcome Dame Mary Beard. Thank you very much now for joining us, Mary. Thank you. Can I just say the reason I did all my homework in the first week of term was because I wanted to get up to no good in the other weeks? So if you had a real blitz at it, a binge homework session, you then could go out and do things you shouldn't for the rest of the time. I like that, that mischief of street two, which I think comes out in all your work. It's probably worth starting just there to explain how you got into the classics. It's not even for very bright children, as you clearly were. It's not an obvious interest. What inspired you? Those kinds of questions are always difficult. They're always difficult to give a true answer, but the answer that makes most sense to me and what I remember goes back to when I was five, actually. My mum, who was a school teacher in Shropshire, thought I ought to go to London to see the capital. We went to London and she was a teacher. So we did some fun things and also did some educational things. We went to the British Museum and there were two things I remember about that, which I think were absolutely informative for me. First of all, we went to see the Parthenon Marbles. Whatever you think about where the Parthenon Marbles really belong, I was just, when I saw them, gobsmacked. I just thought, I'd kind of got the impression when I was a kid that somehow humanity had been a series of progresses. If you went back a very long time, people weren't so good at doing things as we were and to discover that two and a half thousand years ago, they're actually better than us. I remember that kind of jolting me in some ways, but the thing that really, really got me in this visit to the British Museum was, I wanted to see the Egyptians. Partly that was the mummies, but I also wanted to see Egyptian everyday life or my mum had convinced me that I did. There was one case where she could see, and it was the old days in the British Museum, and so it was certainly not child-friendly. She convinced me that, and she was right, that the very back of this case, there was a piece of, I think, 4,000-year-old carbonised Egyptian cake. There's not many five-year-olds that wouldn't find the idea of a 5,000, 4,000-year-old piece of cake kind of intriguing, but it was right at the back. I was quite big and she was trying to lift me up to this high case to see, not very successfully. When a guy walked past, I've got no idea who he was, he must have been a keeper at the British Museum. He saw what was going on, he came over, he unlocked the case, and he said, what did I want to see, and I said I wanted to see the cake, and he got the cake out of the case and put it right in front of me, and what I think was amazing about that was not just that the cake was fascinating, and it's still there, I can tell you, because I've been to see it, it's that this guy, I just, the message that that guy conveyed, which was people will open cases for you, people will help you understand the past, and this might be right at the back of the case, but people will be nice, and they will introduce you to it, you know, eyeball to eyeball. I think that's somehow struck as a kind of political message in part, even though I didn't quite realise it at the time. But it has, I mean, that has been your approach to history, or certainly the programmes that you make for the public. It's about the accessibility, and it's often about the detail about what people eat, you know, or where they've been to the toilet, actually, quite often. You could always get a load of kids interested by showing them a Roman lavatory, you know, and then you say, and do you know they didn't use paper, they used a sponge on a stick, and at that point you've got them. But, you know, looking back, one of the things that I'm trying to do in these tele-programs, I think, is do what that bloke did for me, and to say, look, it's interesting, metaphorically at least, even if you can't do it, literally, want to open museum cases and make sure that people get to enjoy what's inside them, and think about it, and often it isn't rocket science. When people think that, you know, archaeologists, historians, you know, they have all these technical skills in looking at these objects that, you know, ordinary people don't have, you know, there is some technical skill, I wouldn't deny that, but very often, you know, history is a game that we can all play. Our questions are good questions, and, you know, we don't need to have got a degree in Roman archaeology to start to kind of engage with that, and that seems to be very important, often because television programmes take a very long time to make, and there's a lot of hanging around. I sit and I watch visitors go round Pompeii, for example, you know, ordinary visitors, whether with guides or not. What always strikes me is that when they're looking, when they're really concentrating, almost all the questions that they raise are really good ones, you know, I can't see where the water goes here, you know, is that where a window was, and you think, but often they'd be made to feel that their questions are just, you know, they're just kind of amateur questions, and I want to make help people to think that their questions are largely, you know, the right ones, and they can have a go answering them. So I'm struck, and we'll return to some of these issues about accessibility, but I'm struck by the fact that how much you do, so you're, how busy you are, generally, so you're making these TV programmes, you're active on Twitter and so on, but you've got a daytime job as a scholar and a lecturer, and have you always enjoyed that part of it? I mean, that's hard work, and I know you're, I think you're famous for the hard work, but do you enjoy it? Yeah, I mean, that's my day job, and I think, well, you know about telly, you have to be realistic about television, you know, that you get picked up, you're the flavour of the month, three year or so, maybe five years, maybe ten years, but in the end, they'll get fed up with you, you know, that's just the law of telly, I think. David Attenborough is probably the only living exception of this, and you know, I think always, you know, first and foremost, I'm an academic who works on the history of mostly ancient Rome, but also in part ancient Greece, I've got great students, I really like the job, I really like writing about that in a highly academic way, I've written some really, really boring stuff, you know, and the other bit is kind of, it's a lovely optional extra, and I'm hugely relieved that I didn't get into television until I was in my mid-fifties, you know, because I think it would have been, it would have just been awful to be a young person, you know, and your eyes, you know, you would have, it would have gone to your head, you know, and I think of it as a kind of quirky extra thing that I do, and it's fun, and you know, there is a sense in which it's nice to get what you think, and your idea is out to, you know, a wider audience than a few hundred undergraduates, but it's not me, I mean, when all this is gone, I shall be in the university library in Cambridge writing extremely boring things, I'm being very happy here. That's interesting, you don't feel the need to prove yourself in any way, you have proved yourself as an academic and TV is the icing on the cake? Yeah, you know, I guess so. I mean, I mean, I think telly in part was proving I could do it, you know, and I have learnt, I have learnt a hell of a lot, I mean, I used to think that it would be perfectly fine to do a programme on Pompeii in which he just went round, you know, a few houses, never got outside the city of Pompeii, or possibly went to see a museum, and you know, the first director I worked with said that if you never get out of this town, your viewers will have switched off, right? You know, and so I've learnt a bit about how you put things over visually, and you mentioned the pizza, you know, in one of our programmes, we did try to encapsulate the nature of the disaggregation of the Roman Empire by cutting up a pizza, it took so long the pizza, it was inordinately difficult to pull apart by the time we finished it. Interestingly about that, people remember that, it was the idea of my producer, and I'd said, look, sorry, that's so naff, you know, I am not going to, you know, I'm just not, and so she's very patient and she let me have a go explaining to camera the nature of the disaggregation of the Roman Empire, and you know, after a few attempts at this, I had to agree, it was so dreadful. I said all right, let's do the pizza, and we did, you know, so there are things like that that you are always learning. And we'll come back to history, particularly your most recent book in a second, but sticking with TV, one of the most, I'm not sure if it was, life-changing moments was when you went on TV and A.E. Gill, the critic of the, well, I think people might know the story, but he's the TV critic of The Dealy Meal. Sunday Times. Sunday Times. All right. So, but he had a right go at you. He had an amazing go at me. But you had a right go back. Yeah, it was after, he had a little go at me after my first television programme on Pompeii a mine ago, and then he really went to town when we did a series Meet the Romans, about everyday life in the Roman Empire afterwards. And it was kind of, you know, she looks, you know, 16 from behind, but 65 from the front. How dare she think that she can come into our living rooms without having made herself look presentable. I mean, those teeth, that hair. I mean, it just went on and on and on. Now, I love about it now. And, you know, when you actually pick up the paper, or in fact, I read it first online, and you read that about yourself, you think, blame me. You know, she said, she should be on the undatables. But it took me a kind of, you know, 30 minutes or so to think I can only be it. This is just stupid. You know, this is, this is sexist, it's ages, and it's just not very intelligent. It's not very clever. So actually, paradoxically, the Daily Mail was part of my defence, because loads of people in the media picked this up. And interestingly, it turned out that Gil was not with the trend, really. There must have been some people. I'm sure there still are some people who think, can't she do something better with her hair? But I did two things. I went on Women's Hour, I think, and I did an article in the Daily Mail, and I thought, just saying, look, come on, you know, we're not judging historians on telly by, you know, what their teeth look like, you know. And I was really, really fearful that the Daily Mail audience would, and readership would be rather with Gil than with me. And there were some, but by and large, all those comments under the line, the Daily Mail, which are usually so absolutely ghastly, they were mostly on my side. And what I suddenly realised was that the Daily Mail's readership was actually women of my age. You didn't like this idiot saying that about somebody who they felt they were kind of the co-evil of. And when I said, I bet they really liked it, I said something like, look, just get real. Just look at me. I was in about 56. This is what a 56-year-old woman actually looks like, you know, if she hasn't had work done. Let's just accept that. And in some ways, this was nothing to do with me, really. It was a bit of a turning point. It was people, although one reporter, one television critic in the Sunday Times about civilisations tried to kind of ape AA Gil to not much success. And people don't really say that now. We know there's all kinds of trouble about women on television, women getting paid the same, older women on television, or whatever, but they don't do that. And I'm pleased to say that AA Gil had his Wikipedia page hacked and had nasty things put into it. It wasn't me. I wouldn't know how to hack a Wikipedia page. So it was a learning experience for us all. Well, indeed. I mean, a rather nasty experience for you to endure. But I think people warmed to that, the idea of you standing up so robustly in the face of that attack. Because I think people would recognise that kind of attack and how unfair it is, but it's the fact that you stood up. And you did very similarly, you went on Newsnight, I think, in 2013, and you were just defending immigrants. You were saying, you know, come on, these people make a contribution. I was slightly naive then, because I think I would know now that if you were to go on Newsnight and defend immigration, you might feel that that was a very important thing to do, but you'd know there would be, you'd get attacked. I didn't expect it. That's right. And so, but you were really aware, but again, it was because this and politicians and female politicians in particular will recognise this. You don't just get attacked, you get, you know, it's misogynistic, it is vicious, it's sexual, you know, and it's very aggressive. But you didn't, again, you didn't, it's not just that you didn't buckle, which is, but you didn't ignore it either, you then took them on and you responded politely to the point that I believe that one of the young men who I've been attacking you, I mean, I was reading this and this is absolutely remarkable. You sort of challenged his thoughts, he responded and you ended up getting to know him and you ended up becoming a referee for him in applying for a job. I mean, it's astounding. It's very funny. I mean, I suppose, you know, I've realised to several things actually about how you quote to deal with this. One is when you get attacked online, the standard advice is don't reply, block them, move on. And I wouldn't want to say that my solution works for everybody. And I think if you're, if you're working online, you have to find your own way of dealing with this. But I thought, look, this is just telling me to shut up. You know, somebody says all that rubbish about me. And the advice I'm given is to say nothing. You'd be kind of like saying, well, you know, let the bullies stay in charge of the playground and let the bullied, you know, take them away from the swings and give them to the bullies. That's not what I'm going to do. So I kind of felt very strongly that I felt better if I replied. And I learnt that it was extremely advisable to be polite. You know, if ever you're on Twitter and you think you are about to be rude, stop it. You know, because it only goes to the bad. It's the slippery slip. And I also kind of thought that some of these people who were writing that kind of stuff, you know, bits of it, you know, were awful. You know, they took, you know, really graphic images of female genitalia and put it over my face. Some of those guys, I think, are nasty. But many of them are lonely, drunk, disinhibited. The one that I wrote reference for certainly fell into that category because he put this stuff off. It's about, I think, again, what my genitalia might smell like, I think, was the burden of it. And I said something like, would you please take that down? No, ply. And it had two stages this story because the first stage was somebody tweeting, I know his mum. She'll going to take it down. Which indeed, I think she did. And then there was a kind of bit of good news story, you know, if you want to stop the Twitter trolls, just get on to their mums and that's fine, you know. Then, you know, because the Daily Mail so far, and what I had to say, it had quite a good press, then the bad side of the Daily Mail came out because they got onto this story and they tracked this kid down. And they had a picture of his house. He'd been on holiday with his mates and too much lager had been consumed. And, you know, it was a nasty thing to do, but, you know, when you're 18 or 19, you sometimes do very stupid things and nasty things. And so it had a second wave where they went for him. Then he applied for a job and he was first offered it and then they googled him and they found all this stuff and everything that the Daily Mail had raked up. And I said, and he, they withdrew the offer and he told me about this because by that stage he'd come to Cambridge and apologised and we were in contact. And I said, look, I will write, you know, the only person who can tell these people that you apologised as far as I'm concerned, it is over, move on. It's the only person who can say that is me. So on that occasion I did write, but they said, no, we're still not going to give them a job. I then said to him, look, I better just write you a reference because you're not going to be able to conceal this. And I am the one person who can explain what you did, explain how it was resolved that you had been brave enough to come and apologise and say that this was now, you know, as far as everybody was concerned in the past and he has now got a job, but all is all right. Thank you. I think we might return to that because it's a particularly live political issue, particularly for women in politics and how to deal with Twitter trolls. Can I just turn to your book? This is a fantastic book, I have to say. And it's very short. Yes, indeed, you've got this, I know. In fact, maybe it'll be signing copies afterwards, so just for information. That's a plug. The key here, though, is that, and we'll come on to the position of women in society, you've talked already about older women on TV, the absence of older women on TV and the reaction they get, but the point here is that you trace misogynistic attitudes to women back centuries, and you talk about the culture, the structures of society that keep this way. Can you just introduce for our audience, you start off with a great example of how women have been told to shut up? The book originated in lectures, two lectures I did in the British Museum for the London Review of Books, they have a winter lecture series, they always find it actually, find it quite difficult to get women to agree to do it. I said, yeah, okay. And it was a topic that I didn't pick myself. It's very easy to agree to give lectures, and then six months later they say, what's your title going to be? And you say, haven't the clue? And then they press you more and more, and they say, look, we've got to get a title because we've got to get our publicity out. So I said to the editor of the magazine, what do you want me to talk about? You choose the title. And good literary editors are really wonderful, because the mark of the really good literary editor is that they know what you'd be good at talking about, and they know what you want to talk about, even if you've not quite realised it. And so she said, and it's the start of the book, I think you want to talk about the public voice of women. Right, okay, that's the title. And of course she was very smart, and I did see that somehow all kinds of issues about the woman's voice had been something that I've been thinking about for ages, but not sound crystallising as a subject. And it was what I was really pleased about was that it was a subject that could enable me to link what I did in the day job, really, study of the ancient world, and often the study of gender relations in the ancient world, with now. And I put two things at the very beginning of the book really came together for me. One was a little scene at the very beginning of Homer's Odyssey, 8th century BC, the second oldest work of Western literature. And as many of you, I'm sure, know the Odyssey is a story which has the end of the Trojan War, the Greeks have beat Troy, but the Greek heroes are having very hard time getting home, and we follow partly the story of Odysseus, who wants to get home to his wife Penelope, takes him 10 years and an awful lot of women intervene between Odysseus and his wife, it has to be said. But also it's the story of Penelope waiting for him back at home, and slightly at the beginning wet behind the ear's teenage son, Telemachus. And there's one bit at the very first book of the Odyssey, which I must have read 20 times, but I've never really noticed. And it's a little moment, just a few lines long when Penelope is up in her room, she's doing her weaving, she comes downstairs in the palace at Ithaca, and she finds the bard singing a terribly gloomy song about what terrible time the Greek heroes are having in trying to get back home, and she says, quite reasonably, could you please play something a little bit more cheerful? At which point, this wet behind the ear's teenager, says, shut up, mother, speeches, man's business, go back to your room. And she does. And I thought, gosh, you know, I looked at it in the context of this woman's voice issue. I looked at it and I thought, that's the first time we have any recorded evidence of something that has happened ever after throughout the world of a bloke, and in this case a rather kind of weedy bloke, telling this savvy woman to shut up, right? And I thought, that is how I'm going to open this lecture, because somehow all those occasions in which women have been silenced, in a sense, go back to that. And I joined it to a wonderful cartoon that was in punch, I think in the 60s or 70s, which is a scene that every single woman I know recognises, where this meeting is going on, and there's a man in the chair, and there's about six or seven blokes around the table, and one woman, and the woman's name is Miss Triggs, and she's obviously just made a good suggestion. And the chair of the meeting is saying to her, that's a very good suggestion, Miss Triggs, would one of the men like to make it now? And I don't know any woman that that doesn't actually play to it. It's the same story. It's Odysseus, Telemachus and Penelope. And you make a couple of political observations too, talking about modern day politics in particular about Mrs Thatcher, about having to lower her voice, her register, and then about the treatment that Diane Abbott received, compared to the treatment that Boris Johnson received at apparent gaffes. Yes, when you start to look at that and you think about how women's voices are heard and what the reaction to them often, you know, I think very clearly on radio, you do start to see that kind of issue that the voice of authority is still thought to be the voice of a man continues. And that was very, very clear in the case of Thatcher, who famously, when she went to kind of training courses in self-presentation, was told to lower her voice. And if you go on to Google and you look at the early videos of Thatcher and the later videos of Thatcher, you see that instantly. That is what has happened. And women who go on leadership courses now are told to do exactly the same. Because we don't hear the voice of a woman as a voice of knowledge or authority. And that came over very clearly to me in just before and just after the last general election. And I added to the point that we have higher standards for women in politics than we do for men. And we judge them differently. And we never let them fail. And there was two interviews that were, one was I think on LBC, but the other was on the Today programme. And they were both politicians making a real mess of it. One was Diane Abbott, who hadn't got her maths remotely straight about what police pay would amount to. And the other was Boris Johnson, who didn't have the foggiest clue what his party's policy was on something. And when you looked at how there were total car crash radio interviews in both cases, Diane Abbott, the reaction to it was, you know, you are not fit for public office. That is actually, the interview was just before the election and she did re-elect it with an increased majority. But the commentariat just rounded on her to say that that shows that, you know, get out of our government. Boris, and it's interesting that we call him Boris, you know, one that's very... It's affectionate, isn't it? It's affectionate, you know. He had the kind of, oh, tucked up Boris, next time be a bit more on, be a bit more on top of your brief. You know, it's a kind of naughty schoolboy being told to do his prep better, you know, but not being told, you know, you are not fit for public office. And I think throughout this you can see, I mean, if you look for example at what happened to Hillary Clinton and the email server, you know, I'm sure Hillary Clinton was not sensible to have used whatever email server that she used. She wasn't the only politician to have done that. And it becomes a kind of, a hanging offence. And sticking with Diane Abbott, I'm just conscious that of all the women in politics she attracts more aggressive attacks on Twitter and social media generally than anybody else. I mean, is it, I mean, you famously respond to these people but is that actually even possible for someone like Diane Abbott? She gets thousands of these horrible offensive attacks. Yeah, I think it's, you know, she's both female and she's black, you know, and I think that the double whammy there means that she gets, you know, she gets worse than I get because she's kind of, she's compounded her crimes, not just being a woman but being a black woman. And I noticed it actually when she, we were direct contemporaries in the same year where we were undergraduates at Cambridge. We didn't know each other very well. She'd found a, you know, our undergraduate matriculation photograph and she'd kind of, she just, she did a good humor tweet where she kind of circled her and circled me and said, you know, you know, just have basically, haven't we done well? You know, go about all those years, would we ever imagined that life would have, you know, and the shit she got for that, you know, you privileged, and you think, look, you know, she wasn't, she wasn't, you know, she isn't. We were both the first people in our families to get a degree, you know, we're not, we're not, you know, we're people who education has made, not who took advantage of education because we were already privileged. And, you know, I just thought, heavens. It's the idea, though, that women like that are not allowed to speak in public, and the theme of your book is that it's not just that they're not allowed to speak in public, but they're subject to quite well in historical terms, vicious ways of silencing them. Yeah, I mean, you have your, your head's chopped off, basically. Tons cut out. Tons cut out. I became very interested, actually, in how the Twitter trolls, not just in that they were abusing me, but how, what were they picking on? And quite often it was, I'm going to come and cut your tongue out. Now, it eventually struck me that really what was the issue here was not that I had said something unpopular about immigration. It's that that I had spoken at all. What Twitter trolls are trying to do is not say, I disagree with you on this particular issue, which they may or may not do. They're saying, I don't want you to speak at all. I'm going to cut your head off and rape it. I'm going to cut your tongue out. And those tropes, of course, go back to, again, back to the ancient world itself. You go back into Greco-Roman mythology, you know, and you find the story of Philomela, who is raped by this nasty king, Therios. And what does he do to her? He cuts her tongue out so she can't denounce him. Now, there is a, hard to say there's a happy ending to this story because there isn't, but Philomela is resourceful and she weaves the story of the rape into her tapestry. So she, in a sense, she finds another way to speak. Shakespeare then takes that up in Titus Andronicus and he has Lavinia being raped. And her rapist there, who knows the story of Philomela in the tapestry, cuts her tongue out and chops her hands off. You know, she still manages to speak. She puts a twig in her mouth and she writes the story in the ground, in the dust. But it's always about stopping the women speaking at all in stories. And there are stories that are part and parcel of our culture. And we want to go on. I don't want to say we shouldn't watch Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus because it shows a woman being punished for being raped. I'm just saying we should have our eyes open to what's going on. But it does alert us to things that need to change. Catch my eye at this point if anybody wants to come in and ask questions or make little points. Just put your hand up so I can see you and we'll pass a microphone round at your desk. Here we are 2018, so it's 100 years since women's suffrage was introduced for some women in this country. But this is also the year that's seen the Me Too movement. Does that depress you, frustrate you or encourage you? That lack of progress? Partly I think, I feel and my mother felt that we, she had, I am now still living through a revolution. I feel my mum was born before any women had the vote in general elections and she died having seen a female prime minister. And even though it was a female prime minister she had no time for whatsoever, she did at least think it was a change to celebrate and I feel that. I mean when I was growing up, something like 4% of women of Westminster MPs were female, now it's just over 30%. That's still not necessarily good enough but I feel I live in a different world. I feel that when I look at Westminster Parliament, the Scottish Parliament, I feel that it's, for all the disadvantages, it's not just men in suits. When I was a kid it was basically men in suits in Barbara Castle and Margaret Thatcher. So I can do the optimistic story. But then you come to something like me too and part to me again is whatever the terrible allegations are that lie behind that, I partly feel celebratory. The women have really used social media as a way of speaking out that it's been impossible not to hear some of the voices of women over the last 12 months. My question is what's the trajectory of me too and how do you turn a hashtag into a kind of social change and I think it's far too early to say and I have two entirely different predictions here. One is we'll look back to the end of 2017-2018 and we'll say that was the start of a revolution, another revolution about what women should be able to do and what they should not have to put up with. Not just women in the rather glamorous bits of the film industry but women in the office, women on the factory floor, women beside the photocop here in schools and universities, you know that however kind of torturous the path might be that was the moment we look at. And that's what I hope. I also kind of think that there is a possibility that even if things don't ever go back quite to what they were before that there'll be a ffizzle here and if you were to say why won't there be a ffizzle it's because if you think that that sort of abuse of women is about the differential power structure then actually what's going to change that is not a hashtag it's going to be changing the power structure and you know if you look at the statistics for who is powerful in the film industry just to name one and you think that something like 10% of the directors of big Hollywood movies are female now if you're going to actually make women's not just about women's careers but if you're going to provide a proper place for women in the film industry you've got to change that you've got to do more than say me too you've got to change that structure we'll see but so you're encouraged by it but a lot more needs to happen there i've got a question right here yes yes your microphone will come on in a second Chris Muirhead I'm a psychiatric abuse survivor and unwage carer campaigner blogger writer and agitator I want to say that there are a lot of strong women probably that were behind the men that were strong and I'm thinking of John Knox and probably his mother was there I'm thinking of all these statues of men and I'm thinking of Scotland here because I had a lot of strong women in my family we weren't academics my mother was a psychiatric survivor and she survived much ECT and various other forced drugging and was a great example to me of surviving despite all of that and being very productive because she externalised her mental distress I think in Scotland historically we have very strong women it goes right back to Pictish times where women did actually there was a matriarchal line as far as I'm aware so I think historically in Scotland we are strong I feel that I'm a strong woman I chose who I wanted to marry and he said yes and before that his mother asked me if I would marry him and that's Scottish folk and I think you know he married me again when I asked him in 2002 because I divorced him before that the reason being I was again having to voluntarily go into a psychiatric ward and I think he's really good because he's anti psychiatry I needed him but we're separated again because we can't really go on you know it's just he was useful and he's quite happy as a father of my three sons and they're all psychiatric survivors also there are different ways of being strong and being powerful a good point can I put that just to make it just because I think the excellent story and about your life there but it's also start off with the point about the visibility of these strong women in tonight because the statues we've everyone's commented upon this recently all the statues the public statues in Scotland are men I mean I think in terms of strong women you know that it may be one of one of the several things that Scotland does better than England I think a sense of strong women but it I think for me the the issue is not whether there have been or are strong women because you know women are immensely resilient tough strong in all kinds of ways um it's the issue of whether you see them and it's the issue of whether you hear them and it's also the issue whether they get a chance to change the world uh and you know historically you know you know historically I think they've often told them and fought what to do but uh but I think a lot of us think that you know being the power behind the throne is not what we want to be I want to be the power on the throne not behind it and that's the difficulty what I as as an historian what do you think about the the move that very I kind of classic to to smash all these statues bring them down I mean do you approve or do you disapprove or what what how do you see that I think it's a really tricky one because you know again I'm such a bloody academy I'm sorry I've always got I've always got two answers which are diametrically opposed right one is I that's like a politician I you know to take your statues of oh let's say university benefactors who've profited from the slave trade something like that um I worry that removing those statues partly lets us off the hook I mean what I what I want to do is I want to say you did give this university a lot of money and we are now looking you in the eye because we've got to accept where that money came from we've got we've got to see it by removing you like you know we we can somehow turn a blind eye to where the cash came from I was in Oxford quite recently and they have a very notorious example of this a guy called Codrington who made a huge amount of money on slave plantations in the Caribbean and endowed vast sums of money they've left his statue but they've put a really really big and elegant pluck saying this is in memory of all the people who actually suffered so that we've got this money and so I like the idea of looking these statues in the eye putting two fingers up to them I like walking through London and seeing all these blokes and thinking you never thought I should have the vote did you you know I'm moving on you know I like that you know I do have to say and this is the other side of the argument if you were to say well okay so should we still think you know that we'd be happy with a statue of Goebbels or Hitler then of course I think no so somewhere in between this there's a boundary which I'm not entirely certain where it lies but just always remember to say to these guys you didn't think I should have the vote and they quail in their bronze you know so can I ask though some of the things that the battles that you have fought or are fighting how do you win them because for example the first one to appear to for older women to appear on TV so it's about the visibility of women in places I mean you are still the exception there are very few older women on TV I think I think there are more but I did a television programme with another great haired excellent actually Denison of Glasgow and Denise Miner a novelist and she did tweet before we went on this programme I thought it used to be illegal to have two great haired women on the same TV programme and you know but no I think partly one does it by resilience you know when I said I was pleased I hadn't done any of this before I was 50 odd you know in the end it doesn't it doesn't matter all that much to me I've got a pretty thick skin but I just won't be battered partly it's being an academic you know because so when look my job is arguing with students and when students say something that I think is probably wrong or possibly stupid or with which I disagree I say I don't agree with you and that's I mean I've done that for 40 years I've been teaching in university and I'm not going to stop now you know even if it's some silly young lad you know making stupid comments about um what I smell like um so um the academy gives you a kind of it it programs you to do that I also think a bit of sense of humour helps you know I think that and again I think that comes with age I think when I was you know my 20s I think I was cross about things the whole time I was angry and I was outraged and you know now I think it's a good idea that sometimes people should be cross angry and outrage because that's in a way um is but is partly what changes things but also you know it's sometimes it's a good idea to have a laugh at it and I think there are some bits you know in terms of the world of sexism and misogyny I think that there are some bits that are so terrible that you have to call it out as just disgraceful but you know some things that some men do and I'm not tiring all men with the same but they're just silly you know it's not the you know I want you know they're ridiculous so we should laugh at it as much as we try to um stop it in fact laughing at it is quite a good way of stopping at it because they tend to feel a bit silly I was in particular reading um your attitude to sexist behaviour has changed as well in the sense that in the 70s you're just reading this in an article you've been interviewed um you were actually not more tolerant but um it was perhaps it was more socially acceptable perhaps that's what it was um so for example in universities um you know there'd be gropers and you know oglers and all the rest of it and you tolerated them to an extent that perhaps you wouldn't today is that fair? I mean I think I think my levels of tolerance and what I expect has changed and it's certainly true that the kind of the kind of world that students lived in in universities in the 70s is very very different and what I would now call the abuse of power which in some ways it was is something that we would now call out and say this should not happen you know the fact that you know let's say this is an advantage example you know the you know the elderly don who thinks it's fine to put his hand on your knee or whatever and I think that's true and that kind of the convent the conventions of morality for all kinds of good reasons change what I think is important to realise and this is what my students I think find very hard to kind of get their heads around because if you tell them what life was like as a student in the 70s and including how many have few have few women students there were at Cambridge they think god you must have had a terrible time you know must have been just awful you know they imagined that you were well that you were sad the whole time really and you say no actually what's really interesting is that I had the most wonderful time when I was an undergraduate it was you know I think the best time of your life is usually the bit you're now in or it is for me but but anybody comes along and says to me look at the sexist behaviour that you have to put up with how did you manage it must have been awful I can say I can analyse it in those terms intellectually but actually I had a great time thank you and I had agency and I wasn't a victim not a victim not a victim or I did not I mean what I what I dislike is people telling people like me you know 20 years on that we've got to go back look at our experience and realise that we were a victim I'm not going to be made into a victim I think that what went on was it was bad so it's a hand just going up there yes if you speak up there I think the microphone will come on there as well and any other hands is oh look at this I'm looking the wrong way that's why okay the lady there and then we'll get some over here yes just one working it is I'm wondering how much you still believe in progress as you did when you were five because women have got their power back and then lost it historically time and time again I'm thinking of women regaining power in the mon in their monasteries nunaries whatever and then it being pushed back and I'm thinking of great movements of of women getting power back in the 19th eight sorry 18th century 17th century and then getting pushed straight back French Revolution and so on and so on and so on and I wonder which do you still believe in progress it depends what lens I I take I mean if I look at my own life and the way the opportunities for me you know have changed you know over my 63 years then it's very hard to put that in any kind under any definition it has to be progress and now we may worry that there's not enough grey head old ladies on telly but 30 years ago there wouldn't have been one right so I feel I feel that I am living in a world that's come on if you then say right okay think wider than that you know you know try to foresee what happens you know off maybe you know you know when you're long you know underneath the earth do I think that this you know things are going to go on going up I'm I'm really not sure that I do I mean I hope I hope so and I think that you know we can all point to the ways for example that periods of austerity often fall harder on women than they do on men and the progress is is perilous and that you know it's it's very easy to get it's very easy to get you know as a keyboard warrior enthusiastic about change but it's harder to embed that so that it can't so that it can't ever go back and so you know I think that I'm I'm less certain though for me I'm you know I celebrate the fact that I've lived over the late 20th and early 21st century because I don't think there's you know there's never been a better time to be me I think there was a lady right there yes with the glasses yes hopefully they're out hi there Mary I was really interested in your book and also what you said today about the register of women's voices their tone and having a voice of authority you were saying that women in leadership are told as was Margaret Thatcher that you need to lower your voice I'm trying to do that right this minute but it's Saturday morning so that's probably not or Saturday afternoon not so difficult is that what women have to do to women have to learn to lower their voice or do the listeners have to re attune what they expect to hear I basically I think the listeners have to re attune because I think the problem about the kind of leadership courses that we may or may not go on is that basically they tend to suggest to women that women should pretend to be men right so that when you so here you are you're in the political sphere you're or you're lecturing a university or whatever and the way to claim authority is to be as close to being a man as you possibly could be and you can see that in voice you can see that in the outfits the dress that the that is very often adopted by female politicians I mean you know Hillary Clinton and Angela Merkel regularly wear very sensible and practical trousers suits and I'm sure partly it's sense it's good sense and practicality that's behind it it also makes them you know they're dressing as close to looking like men as they possibly can and I think somehow we have to learn to hear women's voices as speaking with expertise and authority and even me and an example that I've quite often told about myself but I think it shows how we're all implicated in this it's about 15 20 years ago I was on a plane and there was that bit where um the pilot speaks to you and says we're going to be travelling at 35 000 feet and whatever you know and does the kind of pilot bit and I was on this plane and that notice was being made and it was a woman's voice for a split second I said to myself why is one of the cabin crew doing this notice and I thought oh my god you know I have been fighting all my life for women to be pilots or not bishops of Canterbury or whatever and even I know my first instant reaction was that that's not the pilot and you know I've then changed this into a celebration that we are now getting few female pilots on airplanes but it was it was a wake-up call for me because I thought you just caught yourself out in falling into the traps that you criticised if you can pass the microphone down to yes there and but there's a man just here if you want to the microphone should come on for you oh so I'm sorry I beg your pardon I thought you were looking for someone else for the last couple of years we've been talking a lot about fake news but I think the professor beard has spent her life questioning fake news in in history how do you establish a fact in in in history would you like to say something about that please thank you it's extremely difficult I mean I think that in a in a way I don't trade much in facts I mean you know I'm not going to be happy if somebody says that Julius Caesar was murdered in 43 BC rather than 44 BC when he was murdered that's true um but I what I'm trying to do with my students is to see that the facts there are far fewer facts in the distant past that we would like to think um and often I think the area of history I work in people have rather crucified the idea of a fact and so I will find my students come up and say um well look I would you know Nero was a bad emperor fact and you say well okay was Tony Blair a good prime minister and then they say oh well that's difficult isn't it because you know some things he did I said right let's try and think about all the ways that we debate our own political historical world and that we see that there are hundreds of different perspectives and let's try and think as hard as we can about how we can reflect those debates back into antiquity now so I think in some ways it's recognising that news and fake news are always two sides of the same coin and say and then saying so what difference does that make when you think about that historically it's almost fake news has done you know has done the world of good for historical sophistication actually oh those are challenge things yes I'm Annie I work in the charity sector at the moment there was a long long time ago I attempted to pass as an academic um and I really would be interested in your thoughts um connecting with what you said about the silencing of women um about it seems to me an increasingly kind of fraught an angry debate uh in in the academy about no platforming yeah I mean I think this is quite again it's quite difficult I think that you know speaking of somebody's day job is in a university um it frankly isn't what I see around me uh in Cambridge all the time I mean I don't you know that I know I also read stories of of of key and I think in some ways um you know unacceptable examples of this but you know people I think it's very easy to get the impression that university sector in the United Kingdom is absolutely river with problems of no platforming you know and actually I haven't I haven't spotted that with my own eyes um and I think it it does provide it provides a very good um a very good case study for any journalist for any political persuasion to you know really get in and say you know well they are these the snowflake generation or whatever now um I don't think it's entirely invented and in my own view is very straightforward that um that I I will and I want my students to listen to every kind of opposing view they legally can listen to and and learn how to argue with it now with course we know there's a problem because certainly on some of the far right of this debate you you get people saying free speech counts as everything well actually most of us do not think that um free speech includes the right to go and stir up hatred against Muslims um or any other minority or majority group and so again you know it's a bit like those statues you know quite where you draw the line is I think is bound to be contested but I I want my students to listen to and engage with and show how wrong some of the people with whom they rightly disagree are cogently and learn to be plausible in arguing and learn to be powerful in argument and a key theory is open and um not to get an echo chamber you know Twitter is a bit of an echo chamber you know I think that you know your followers tend to agree with you because that's why they're your followers um and they um and there is a kind of degree of um self-righteousness which can come on both sides and the word I notice um and I think it kind of shows a bit of that sort of echo chamber mentality is that people sometimes say about me when I've said something with which they don't just disagree with which they don't agree in my kind of group I'm very disappointed in Mary Beatt and I think Loddiel we disagree right you don't have to make that a moral failing on my part we can actually disagree and privately on one thing we might agree on a lot of others so I bridle every time I see I'm very disappointed yes woman in the front row there yes yes um as a follower of you on Twitter I've always very much enjoyed listening to what you've got to say about women and power I wonder Professor Beatt if I can tempt you to talk a little bit about men and power because in the world I come from which is diplomacy and international affairs there's a lot of concern about the rise of the strongman that Putin's tramps Erdogans or bands what's happening in Saudi Arabia North Korea and so on and actually it strikes me that the end of the republic in Rome the Roman Empire and so on tells one a great deal about strongmen and power and what happens to politics with it I'd be very interested in your thoughts on that yeah I absolutely agree and I don't mean to you know against my own commercial interests to recommend somebody else's book but Tim Amanda negotiates Adiche's book um on why we should all be feminists or something I think she's extremely good on um on the male aspect of this you know we can give it the the kind of shorthand toxic masculinity but she says you know you only have to go to a school playground to see you know little boy falls down and still people will say don't cry you know you know they still say big boys don't cry and and actually if you're kind of thinking about you know how the world would be well better it would be well much better if little boys were allowed to cry and and guys like you know Trump and Putin whatever and I'm sure we could name some politicians in the United Kingdom too uh you know didn't think of kind of powers well you know something which was kind of weaponised for them and which they stood to lose everything by if they didn't get what they wanted and there's I think that feminism always although it hasn't always stressed it but for me at the root of it has always been you know it's it's as much empowering women as it's you know it's letting some it's letting men off the hook a bit you know it's allowing them not to be like that and it's sort of calling out these guys who um who I think you're probably you know trapped in that kind of masculinity really I mean I'd like to think that if Donald Trump could think very hard he wouldn't like to be Donald Trump we should let him not be Donald Trump there's hands going up ever here yes young woman just there indeed thank you um my name is marcy win stanley I'm a second year classical literature and civilisation student at the university of Birmingham um one of my main interests in the ancient world is kind of women's voices the power of underrepresented groups whether it's slaves minorities in any sense but I'm also interested in that in our own world um and after university I want to go into politics um so women and power was something that really um affected me and I think it's my favourite book of all time um so um I just wanted to ask though um I think already um in my own research even though I'm less than halfway through my degree um there's been kind of at some points dismissal by some men of kind of the whole field of studying women and power um that somehow looking at women in the ancient world through um a kind of contemporary feminist lens is wrong anachronistic and not valid I was just wondering kind of whether you could give me your thoughts on that what would be a constructive response to some men who say that um well at the widest level I'd say look history is all about looking at the path through our eyes you know I don't I don't think that uh the ultimate aim of history is to um find out exactly how it really was I'm not saying we should not be interested in that at all but I think the best historians always have been those who have had a dialogue between that and what we and our own our own world you know you can look in the classical world that the study of the um of the rise of autocracy in Rome uh was really reinvigorated in the late 30s for quite obvious reasons just by looking around at what was happening in Europe and you know I've lived again this is another kind of revolution I've lived through in which you know when I was an undergraduate actually we used to occasionally in the summer term do an essay on women because it wasn't you know it was what you did in the summer term when it didn't really matter right and now it's not it's that it's not that women in the ancient world seem to me to be important that of course they are it's the whole way that gender operates and I mean I think I would say to them look a gendered approach to ancient history has revolutionised our understanding of how the men we see in ancient literature are presented and again it's about feminism always being bifocal and you know if anybody wants to come to me and say you know feminist theory has not made our picture of the ancient world richer more sophisticated um brought brought all kinds of issues into strong relief look I didn't notice Penelope being shut up by Telemachus when I was an undergraduate I just thought oh probably it's the kind of weird things that happened along very long time ago and so it makes you see different things uh it's not necessarily right you know there isn't it's not that we're going to kind of get history finished once we've given it a feminist tinge but we are going to it's going to enrich what we say um and I would just tell him to shut up really a couple of comments on facebook by the way just an interesting one about a woman who's saying that she's a teacher and she when she talks to boys about statistics they don't think she's being truthful or they don't give her authority I think that's what she's saying it's just it's an observation she also questions about the me too we've been for a couple of hands here was it a question yes young woman right now my friend should come on yes that's it okay first off sorry for my voice I'm just a bit all over the place and so recently obviously we've been hearing a lot about the bret cavena case and you were talking earlier about silencing women and how they're sort of portrayed in the media and a lot of press both here and in the US we're talking about these women being hysterical when they were confronting confronting these these men in suits and and how they were so unsophisticated and they weren't put together and thinking about the silencing women and when women do speak out it's about how men then well men and women portray what they're saying and I'm sort of trying to get your opinion on not just that case but sort of when women do speak out how they're then spoken about further a good example of that is everybody I think ought to examine carefully the the verb to wine because it's something that no man is accused of and women regularly are I did actually do that's not quite true Premier League football play football managers are often accused of whining I don't know why that is but otherwise you do get in you get a position in which women's attempts to speak out successful attempts to speak out are then dismissed by using a particular kind of verb to describe their interventions and that is true right back to antiquity as well you know women's voices in the Roman in the Roman period were often described as animal voices they they yelp or they bark and you still find that Henry James late 19th century is still saying the voices of women pollute political discourse so you don't what that means is you don't have to listen to them and when I thought in the cavernor case I started off thinking well maybe I do feel a bit awkward about what happened 37 years ago when the guy was 17 somehow being now seen as as the breaking point here what was very interesting is that I somewhat had to eat my words because in his response to those allegations whatever you think of the allegations the response to his allegations in my his response to the allegations in my view meant that he displayed his unsuitability for the post and I think a lot of women felt that though the upshot was not quite as we wanted to and it will be interesting to see how that story gets replayed and narrativeised you know who's who is going to seem the narrative winner in the long run I think we don't know that yet yes indeed can I ask you a couple of political questions I'm just conscious we're coming to the end and yeah well it's a festival of politics so I pick you up uh um well we're on political subject but a couple of points you made about um you said that your your own popularity is because people like an expert um but of course we're in a period where Michael Gold famously said that you know it's the the British public don't want to hear any more experts thank you very much in the context of the Brexit referendum in particular yeah so do you think there is I mean let's go back to this issue about truth and you know fake news what is the role of the expert and do politics politics need more expertise yeah I mean I think that that we just have to we we have to speak out in support of expertise now I think the difficulty is again we we're trying to do two things and um one is you know and I'm now going back to a basically an ancient democratic argument here that in some ways everybody is an expert in politics what you know being a citizen um is being a political being and people sometimes attack me and other people who when they appear on question time saying well you're a classic they say stick to your own subject right and you have to say politics is everybody's subject we're all experts in politics um and what we want is the citizen to speak out and I think that's absolutely true at the same time and again another ancient democratic argument is the problem is democracy isn't worth a hill of beans if the democratic citizen does not get access to correct information so the democracy is not defined by putting a vote in a ballot box solely that is a kind of part of it certainly a part of it it's not the be all and end all you democracy is about the well-informed voter putting his or her vote in the ballot box now when you say that people often say oh so you're saying that um people who voted for brexit were stupid i'm not saying that whatsoever i'm saying that we have reached a position in which the referendum on both sides was an example of that uh the brexit referendum um where we have forgotten the importance of proper accurate and expert information and if there was a if there was a real democratic tragedy in the brexit referendum it was that 99 percent of us and i'm including me whatever we thought did not vote with full information most of us can still not actually explain the difference between um uh the customs union and the single market and it's absolutely crucial and uh first my final question to end this this parliament is the leader of the two biggest parties are women nickel surgeon who stands sits there and Ruth Davidson normally sits here and of course we have a women prime minister Theresa May now do you see her from your political perspective do you see her as a conservative or do you see her as a women prime minister so when she when she danced onto the stage oh well but she danced on the stage she was half commended for that yeah for the courage of that and half mocked yes so what did you see you i am afraid i thought she has been advised by her pr people that to take a little self irony at her previous dancing out outing would be a very good idea um i would have felt happier with it if i felt she'd felt happy with it that's you know i mean nice idea i don't you know dance or she likes i love her shoes you know and i think why the hell not you know i mean why the hell not my unease was that you know i just i pictured this back room thinking okay now last year mrs maespeech was a bit of a disaster so what are we going to do this year and then somebody had an idea i know hey look what about dancing because it was you know and and so the whole thing seemed to me in in two sentences of the word extremely choreographed and i think what you know what i want to hear and this is i want to hear my elected representatives even if i've not voted for them talking to me in what they want to say i mean i still you know i'm still the person who feels kind of slightly anxious when i kind of realise all their speeches are written for them you know and and and their articles in newspapers you know you can see an article signed whatever kind of front bench spokesperson you know in whatever sunday newspaper and you know in what sense do we think that's by that person and so you know i would kind of i would like to you know decoreograph dpr and desloganize politics but it's probably a bit late maybe you're going to say thank you very much in fact i want to say thank you to everybody here for coming along and for supporting the festival of politics for your questions and your interests in politics future politicians in the audience it's good to see thank you very much also to the open university for supporting this event afterwards if you there's other events on the building but if you want to go down mary will be signing copies of her book in the garden lobby which i'm sure she'd welcome to see more of you in any further questions you can put to her at the end but could i ask you to join me in thanking our guest today dame professor mary bierd