One of our readers sent this in reply:
Her obituary confirms her breakthrough.
Stephen
Friday, May 22, 2026
ANS -- Women & Power: A Manifesto.
This is about power and women being kept out of power positions for 3,000 years.
--Kim
She’s a 69-year-old classics professor who studies ancient Rome. When she became publicly visible, she received rape and death threats. Her response: write a book proving women have been silenced for 3,000 years.
Mary Beard is a Professor of Classics at Cambridge University. She studies ancient Rome—a civilization that collapsed 1,500 years ago. For most of her career, this meant academic papers read by other scholars, lectures for students, and quiet research in libraries.
Then she started appearing on television.
In the 2000s, Mary began presenting BBC documentaries about ancient Rome. She was brilliant, accessible, and funny—making 2,000-year-old history feel deeply relevant and alive.
She also didn't look like what television expected female presenters to look like.
Mary was in her fifties, with long gray hair, a distinctive gap in her teeth, and zero interest in conforming to TV beauty standards. She dressed casually. She didn't wear makeup designed for cameras. She looked like a professor, not a model.
And the internet lost its mind.
The comments were vicious: she was "too ugly" for television. She should "stay in the library." One viewer said she had "a face for radio." Others were far crueler.
When Mary spoke about politics or contemporary issues—things male public intellectuals do constantly without controversy—the backlash escalated. She received rape threats. Death threats. Graphic descriptions of violence strangers wanted to inflict on her simply for having opinions while being a visible woman.
In 2013, after Mary appeared on a BBC program discussing immigration, a man tweeted that he'd like to see her genitals mutilated. He faced prosecution, but the pattern continued: every time Mary spoke publicly, a torrent of misogynistic abuse followed.
Most people would have retreated, deleted their social media, or stopped appearing publicly. Mary did the opposite. She started studying why this happened.
Not psychologically—she's not a therapist analyzing individual trolls. She looked at it historically and structurally, using the exact same analytical tools she'd applied to ancient Rome for decades.
What she discovered is that this pattern of silencing women isn't modern. It's ancient.
In 2014, Mary delivered a lecture for the London Review of Books titled "The Public Voice of Women." In 2017, she expanded it into a short book: Women & Power: A Manifesto.
The book is only 115 pages long. But it traces 3,000 years of evidence showing how women have been systematically excluded from public authority since the very beginning of Western civilization.
Mary starts with Homer's Odyssey—written around 700 BCE, and one of the foundational texts of Western literature. Early in the story, Penelope comes downstairs to ask a bard to stop singing a particular song because it upsets her. Her son Telemachus—who is barely an adult—tells her: "Mother, go back upstairs and tend to your own tasks... Speech will be the business of men."
This is literally one of the first scenes in Western literature: a man telling a woman to shut up and go back to women's work, declaring that public speech belongs solely to men.
Mary traces this pattern forward through three millennia:
Roman women who spoke publicly were described as "barking" or "yapping"—animal sounds, not human speech.
When women in ancient Rome tried to speak in the Forum, they were physically removed, or their speech was described as unnatural, transgressive, and dangerous.
Medieval women who claimed religious authority were often labeled witches or heretics.
Elizabeth I had to rhetorically transform herself into an honorary man ("I have the body of a weak woman but the heart and stomach of a king") to claim authority.
Throughout history, powerful women have been masculinized, demonized, or reduced to their relationships with men rather than recognized for their own power.
The pattern is consistent across civilizations: women are welcome to have private influence, to whisper advice to powerful men, or to work behind the scenes. But public authority—the power to speak, to command, and to make decisions that others must follow—has been coded masculine since the Odyssey.
Mary's argument isn't just that women have been completely excluded from power. It's that power itself has been defined in ways that make female authority seem unnatural, transgressive, and wrong.
Even when women achieve positions of authority, they face constant pressure to adjust: lower their voices (but not too much, or they're "shrill"), assert themselves (but not too much, or they're "bitchy"), and demonstrate competence (but not too much, or they're "threatening").
Male leaders are just leaders. Female leaders are constantly navigating impossible double binds—criticized for being too feminine (weak) or too masculine (unnatural).
This isn't an individual failure. It's structural design. The institutions, the language of authority, the very concept of what a leader looks and sounds like—all of it was built around men for thousands of years.
Mary's own experience proves her thesis. She's one of the world's leading experts on ancient Rome, has published dozens of scholarly books, and is a Professor at Cambridge. Her qualifications are unquestionable.
Yet, when she became publicly visible, the response wasn't an engagement with her ideas. It was an attack on her appearance, her age, and her right to speak at all. Strangers told her she was too ugly for television—a criticism never leveled at male historians with far less impressive credentials.
The threats she received were designed specifically to silence her by invoking sexual violence, reminding her that her body could be violated just for speaking publicly.
Her response wasn't to retreat or to argue that individual trolls were just bad people. Instead, she showed that this silencing mechanism has always existed, that it predates the internet by millennia, and that it's deeply embedded in how Western civilization understands authority.
Women & Power doesn't just document exclusion. It asks: what would power look like if it weren't defined by masculinity? What if authority didn't require masculine voices, masculine styles of leadership, or masculine ways of asserting dominance? What if we rebuilt power structures around collaboration instead of hierarchy? Around inclusion instead of exclusion?
Mary doesn't claim to have all the answers, but she insists we need to ask different questions. Not "How can women fit into existing power structures?" but "Why were those structures built to exclude women in the first place, and how do we build something different?"
Since publishing the book, Mary has continued her work as a public intellectual. She still receives abuse—but she also receives messages from women and girls saying her work helped them understand that the barriers they face aren't personal failures. It's not that they aren't good enough, assertive enough, or leadership material.
It's that the definition of leadership was designed entirely without them.
Mary Beard is 69 years old. She's spent her career studying dead Romans and has become one of the most important voices on living power structures. She proved that if you want to understand modern misogyny, you need to understand ancient misogyny—because the patterns haven't fundamentally changed in 3,000 years.
Women have been told to shut up and go back to "women's work" since the Odyssey. The tools have changed—social media instead of the Forum—but the impulse is identical: keep women out of public authority.
Mary's response: document it all. Show the pattern. Prove it's not new, not individual, and not fixable by women simply "leaning in" or adjusting their behavior. The structure itself has to change. Because as long as power is defined by 3,000 years of masculine norms, women will keep being told they don't belong—no matter how qualified, capable, or brilliant they are.
Mary Beard received rape threats for being a visible female intellectual. She responded by proving that pattern goes back to Homer.
That's not just scholarship. That's using history as a weapon against the present.
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ANS -- PTSD and a Walk in the Park
This is an interesting story. I have no idea if it's true. It's interesting both in the therapy she invented and in the establishment's refusal to take it seriously.
--Kim
In 1987, the most important PTSD treatment discovery in modern psychiatry didn’t happen in a laboratory. It happened because a 39-year-old woman was walking through a park in Los Gatos, California, trying to get rid of a disturbing thought.
Francine Shapiro was an English literature student working on her Ph.D. in New York. In 1979, at the age of 31, she was diagnosed with cancer.
The medical treatments worked, but the psychological toll was devastating. She noticed that the severe stress of the diagnosis lingered in her body long after the physical disease was gone.
She dropped her literature studies. She moved to California. She enrolled in a psychology program, determined to understand how the human nervous system processes fear.
The field of trauma psychology in the 1980s was a rigid, heavily guarded fortress.
The standard protocol for combat veterans and assault survivors was prolonged psychoanalysis, exposure therapy, or heavy doses of medication. The psychiatric model demanded that the patient dig up the trauma.
They had to examine it verbally.
They had to endure the pain of reliving the worst moment of their lives.
They had to do this for months, sometimes years, in a clinician's office.
At the time, the Department of Veterans Affairs was overwhelmed. Thousands of men had returned from Southeast Asia with shattered nervous systems. The medical system had no idea what to do with them. They were assigned to group therapy circles where they recounted their darkest memories week after week, often leaving the sessions more destabilized than when they walked in.
If a patient didn't improve under this grueling regimen—and many did not—the failure was officially attributed to their own resistance. The patient simply wasn't trying hard enough to heal.
On that walk in May 1987, a highly stressful memory surfaced in Shapiro’s mind. She noticed her heart rate increasing and her anxiety spiking.
Then she noticed something strange. The memory suddenly lost its emotional charge. The thought was still there in her mind, but the physical panic attached to it was entirely gone.
She stopped walking. She paid attention to what her body was doing. She realized her eyes were spontaneously darting back and forth diagonally, tracking the sunlight passing through the trees.
She decided to test it right there on the path. She brought the disturbing thought back on purpose. She held it in her mind. She moved her eyes rapidly side to side again.
The anxiety vanished.
She tried it with another memory. The same thing happened. The emotional weight collapsed.
It was a purely mechanical action. The brain was digesting the psychological trauma the exact same way a stomach digests a meal.
At the time, the psychiatric establishment operated on the premise that deep trauma required deep analysis. Healing was supposed to take years. The idea that a physiological mechanism—moving the eyes side to side while holding a memory—could bypass decades of psychological scaffolding sounded entirely absurd. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders had only officially recognized post-traumatic stress disorder seven years earlier, in 1980, specifically to address the overwhelming crisis among Vietnam veterans returning home to a system that could not fix them.
Shapiro spent the next six months testing the mechanism on herself. Then she tested it on seventy volunteers, meticulously documenting their physiological responses.
She formalized a clinical protocol. She named it EMDR therapy, which stood for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing.
Her clinical tool was not a prescription pad or a complex machine. It was just her right hand, holding up two fingers, moving at a steady, rhythmic pace across the patient's field of vision.
She compiled her data into a research paper and took it to the academic institutions.
The response was swift and brutal.
Academic journals rejected her initial findings. The American Psychological Association viewed her claims with intense skepticism. Prominent psychologists openly mocked her by waving their fingers in colleagues’ faces at academic conferences, treating her life's work as a parlor trick.
One prominent Harvard psychologist famously dismissed it by stating that what was effective in EMDR was not new, and what was new in EMDR was not effective.
They demanded randomized controlled trials. They assumed the data would collapse under rigorous scientific scrutiny.
So she conducted them. She funded the early research herself. In 1989, she brought the protocol directly to a clinic treating Vietnam veterans and victims of sexual assault.
She selected twenty-two individuals for the study. These were people who had been entirely broken by their experiences.
Night terrors.
Hypervigilance.
Ten years of traditional therapy with zero relief.
The crushing, invisible weight of combat and violence.
In the clinical trials, Shapiro sat across from them. She asked the patients to hold the worst memory of their trauma in their mind—the ambush, the helicopter crash, the moment of the assault.
Then she held up two fingers. She asked them to track her hand with their eyes as she moved it rapidly back and forth for twenty seconds.
In one session, the emotional charge of the memory dropped significantly. The veterans reported that the memory suddenly felt distant, like watching a movie on a screen rather than reliving it in the room.
Within three sessions, the nightmares stopped entirely. One combat medic had suffered from violent night terrors for twenty years. After his EMDR sessions, the terrors ceased.
In 1989, the Journal of Traumatic Stress finally published her controlled study.
The establishment read it. Many still refused to believe it.
In 1990, she presented her findings at a major conference. The audience was hostile.
In 1991, she published another paper. The academic critics called it a placebo.
In 1992, she started the EMDR Institute to train clinicians directly, bypassing the academic gatekeepers who refused to fund her work.
For a century, psychiatry tried to talk the brain out of its trauma. The brain just needed a physical mechanism to digest it.
By 1995, the pressure from clinical results was too massive to ignore. The Department of Defense launched an independent study on combat veterans to verify her claims.
The military’s results were undeniable. Eighty-four percent of veterans with single-trauma PTSD no longer met the clinical criteria for the diagnosis after just three 90-minute sessions.
The establishment quietly began to change its guidelines.
The American Psychiatric Association eventually endorsed it in 2004. The Department of Veterans Affairs adopted it as a top-tier treatment. The World Health Organization formally recommended EMDR in 2013 for both children and adults.
Today, it is the gold standard for treating combat veterans, assault survivors, and disaster victims worldwide.
Shapiro died in 2019 at the age of 71.
The exact neurological reason why rapid eye movement strips the terror from a memory is still debated by neuroscientists. Current theories suggest it mimics the rapid eye movement of REM sleep, allowing the brain to finally file the memory away in the past where it belongs.
The mechanism works, even if the academics haven't entirely mapped the wiring yet.
In VA hospitals across the country this morning, a clinician will sit across from a veteran, hold up two fingers, and ask them to follow the movement with their eyes.
Francine Shapiro: the woman who rewired how we heal.
Source: Francine Shapiro. "Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing: Basic Principles, Protocols, and Procedures."
Verified via: The EMDR Institute, The Department of Veterans Affairs (National Center for PTSD).
(Some details summarized for brevity.)
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