​Mary Beard, a professor of classics at the University of Cambridge is a well-known expert and author of a history of ancient Rome. She is also present on social media, including a blog and a Twitter feed.

Just this past December she published two talks as Women & Power: a Manifesto. https://www.amazon.com/Women-Power-Manifesto-Mary-Beard/dp/1631494759/

She traces the origins of misogyny to ancient Greek and Roman roots. Women have been prohibited from leadership roles in civic life since then, and public speech has historically been defined as inherently male.

She draws on classic and contemporary examples, including the battering of Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren.

p. 36. “It doesn’t much matter what line you take as a woman, if you venture into traditional male territory, the abuse comes anyway. It is not what you say that prompts it, it’s simply the fact that you’re saying it. And that matches the detail of the threats themselves. They include a fairly predictable menu of rape, bombing, murder and so forth. … A significant subsection is directed at silencing the woman. ‘Shut up you bitch.’ … In its crude, aggressive way, this is about keeping, or getting, women out of man’s talk.”

If you look at her Twitter feed, you’ll see that she is very familiar with the most vicious of Internet trolls, and even jokes with them in her Tweets.

In fact, if you are a student of “how bad does the trolling get,” this is one place to look. Also, take a look at responses to #MeToo messages. And “gamergate” messaging, when females in the gaming industry complained about their treatment by male peers and got death threats.

Other quotes:

p. 53 “My basic premise is that our mental, cultural template for a powerful person remains resolutely male. … To put this the other way around, we have no template for what a powerful woman looks like, except that she looks rather like a man.”  [photo of Angela Merkel and Hillary Clinton in the “female politician’s uniform” of trousers—a dark pant suit.]

p. 62 [regarding the myths about Amazon women] “The basic message was that the only good Amazon was a dead one, or one that had been mastered, in the bedroom. The underlying point was that it was the duty of men to save civilization from the rule of women.”

Her point about “our mental, cultural template” echoes another favorite expert: Virginia Valian, who wrote Why So Slow? about the low numbers of women in professions. She called it our “schema,” not a “template,” and noted that our schema for a professional person (especially a scientist) was incompatible with our schema for women.

Basically, we think the idea of a powerful woman, or a professional woman, is WRONG, and NOT NATURAL.

Watch this expressed nearly every day, as women are interrupted, insulted, and banned from speaking. (For example, a Congresswoman, IN CONGRESS).

If you have time to dip into feminist classics, this is one, I think.
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Mary Beard is taking unbelievable fire for speaking out. The backlash is proving her point.

Many of us immigrated to the U.S. as young children in the wave following World War II. Our parents had to find work, learn English, seek food and housing. Many were too tired or traumatized to sit back and tell tales about the homeland. In fact, they might have been abnormally silent. I’ve met many contemporaries who wish they knew what happened and sought to learn from others what happened.
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Now sixty-plus years later, more books are appearing to explain those times. The authors include scholars who’ve taken a long time to pull the research together and retirees who are using their leisure to fill in the history. Here are a few books that brought my mind some rest.
 
DPs: Europe’s Displaced Persons, 1945-1951 by Mark Wyman. 1989 and 1998 editions.

Displaced persons, also known as refugees, are a constant in human history. As long as there is conflict and war, there are people who flee for safety and find it far away in a foreign country. In September 1945 there were 1.8 million displaced in Europe still waiting for a place to go. The politics of their resettlement continued for years after. Among them, 200,000 Baltic people knew that Russians had killed and deported about 130,000 of their kind in 1941 and would resume the persecution, so they refused to return. “Some 75 percent of the university, high school and grade school teachers had fled Lithuania,… as well as 80 percent of the doctors and … writers, painters, musicians, artists, etc.” (p. 119)

Wyman describes the “continent in ruins” right after the war, with up to twenty million bewildered people on the move. There were soldiers returning home; POWs, concentration and labor camp internees; civilians escaping intolerable places or expelled due to political antipathy. Most returned to their former homes. The Allied Forces were busy sorting them out and herding them into organized camps.
His riveting narrative describes the history around the DP camps in detail. Stories of individuals bring the experience to life. A chapter on repatriation explains the politics and logistics addressing stateless people who would not go home. He describes the special problems of orphaned children and surviving Jews. The camps became multi-lingual and -cultural communities, struggling to hang onto national identity, to school children, and to apply for asylum, in a limbo that lasted years after the war.
The hair-raising story must not be forgotten. In 2015, over a million refugees from the Middle East entered Europe, and there were 1.3 million active claims for asylum.
Those of us within a generation of the WWII DP experience know that security and prosperity was found by many DPs from this era. What we might not know is exactly how our parents coped at the time, and what lingered in their lives, good and bad.
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​Unravel the Secrets of Your Family

Nearly all families have some dysfunction. And SECRETS. Secrets are bonding. A family will unconsciously assign “roles” to different members to compensate for some of the imperfections in the group, or deep-seated wishes.  (E.g., “peace keeper,” “servant,” “provider,” “the sick/incompetent one”) If you want to break free and assign yourself roles that feel more AUTHENTIC, you need to look at the pacts that were created, first by your imperfect parents, and then joined by everyone, and then automatically reinforced in a thousand tiny interactions and words. How would someone outside the family, looking at the HEALTH of every person, see the games that you collectively allowed? Then practice HEALTH. On The Family, John Bradshaw.

You Are Allowed to Outgrow Your Parents’ Wishes For You

The “gifted child” is every child who is born and who uses his/her wiles to survive. It will accept nearly all treatments because it instinctively knows that the alternative is to be abandoned, punished, or die. That’s why abused children stay. Children’s brains grasp how they need to behave in order to survive. The trick is, when you CAN survive on your own, pull away from rotten “deals” with a parent. Say “no” to being put in the service of a parent’s dysfunctions--pleasing parents who really want to continue to own you, and maybe use you. You can love them, but when you grow up, try to rescue the SELF-WITHIN that compromised extremely, that “went along” with THEIR PERSONALITY more than it wanted to, deep-down. The Drama of the Gifted Child, Alice Miller.

Your Life Matters, Own It, Don’t Waste It

Pelzer is a coach for people who need to grow up. He himself transcended a horrific, cruel childhood. He models what it means to BECOME HEALTHY. Stop blaming other people, hating based on stupid reasons, own your actions. The book is aimed at teens, but trust me, it’s a bath of wisdom. Help Yourself for Teens, Real-Life Advice for Real-Life Challenges, Dave Pelzer.

Stay on Top of Boundaries, Confusing Foibles

We all get into stupid pickles on a daily basis. “My mother-in-law smokes around my kids.” “My boyfriend won’t let me see my friends.” “My friend won’t speak to me since the wedding.” If you want excellent, routine coaching, covering the big and little foibles of life, subscribe to her feed or read her books. Carolyn Hax, https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/carolyn-hax/ or Tell Me About It.

​We all have voices in our head. Pithy messages from people who tell us good ways to think. Parents, therapists, friends. Self-help books.

Here are a few that reached into my confused, tormented, scrambled mind and heart at various points, and stuck, forever:

Recover Happiness

I was in deep despair about a romance, alone in a new city. I had experienced an obsessive, unrequited love for several continuous years in my early youth (e.g., “Maybe he’ll appear around the next corner? Please, please.”) This book told me how to BREAK THE HABIT OF SADNESS. Actions you can take every day, as if easing from an addiction. The Book of Hope, Helen A. DeRosis and Victoria Y. Pellegrino.

Choose a Good Love Partner

Almost forever, I mulled and mulled: What is a good love? How do you know you have a good love going? I knew that great chemistry is NOT the best clue.

Peck told me: With a good partner, you will GROW, spiritually, intellectually. They will provide a foundation and partnership for CHANGE, for GROWING UP. A bad partner will fear your change, your new ideas, your ventures even into new, petty daily habits. With a good partner, you can “be yourself” without a lot of censorship. You tolerate and adapt to each other. Want to learn guitar? Okay, go ahead. Want a new career? Okay, I’ll support you. Want to go vegan? Let’s plan a path that works for both of us. Neither person is PUT INTO SERVICE of the other so much that their soul feels crushed. The Road Less Travelled, M. Scott Peck.

Be Creative, Explore

It is okay to be HIGHLY IMAGINATIVE and UNCONVENTIONAL. Society won’t break. (Anyway, you ARE society.) You don’t need to be destructive or angry about conventions you don’t like (e.g., girdles for women, neckties for men). Drop it, and see what happens. Create YOU and YOUR STYLE. Don’t live in fear of “what others think.” (They might be over-compromised, conforming in ways they don’t like.) Compromise when you need a trade-off, if you can tolerate it (dress for a job, clean up for a romance, show up for a community you want to join).  The Fan Man, William Kotzwinkle (a novel).

Treat Kids Like People

I grew up with authoritarian parents. Control and order were more important than fun, and warmth, and teaching to think. My automatic behavior with kids was to talk down to them, and guide them by being BOSSY PANTS. Here is a HANDBOOK for retraining yourself to be a kind and effective adult. There are exercises. Simulated conversations using cartoons. Examples of dialogs, responses. You will recognize your childhood in the examples of WHAT PEOPLE USUALLY SAY, and it’ll tell you to TRY THIS INSTEAD. How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk, Adele Faber and Elain Mazlish.

Among memoirs and novels is a genre I call “rotten childhood” stories. The ones I’ve read seem to fall in these groups:

1. My parents were crazy
2. My parents were mean
3. My parents were wildly interesting and maybe not too interested in me

I don’t know anybody with a childhood that was all puppies and ice cream. Maybe you do, and you won’t identify here. Reading these “Oh my GOSH” tales is therapeutic. They might make your own childhood and its disappointments feel downright boring and trivial. (“Nobody taught me how to cook an egg!”) Or, you can think, “That’s nothing, wait until you hear what happened to me.”

A childhood happens to us before we have any wits about us. We don’t get a “do-over” on our childhood. (We do get “do-overs” in romance, jobs, etc.)  By the time you figure out just how it was faulty, you are old, your parents are old, and you need to get over it, get strong and healthy, and redirect your life from a path of hardship and trauma to one of blissful happiness or satisfaction.
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Here’s some do-it-yourself therapy. We might has well enjoy unraveling the mysteries of our misery, as these authors do.

THE CRAZY
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Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls.  Charismatic, artistic hippy parents keep moving the kids from one hovel to another, totally uninterested in the conveniences of daily life like food and heat. The kids have to scrounge for food, clothing, dignity. The only way out is to grow up and go away.
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Running With Scissors by Augusten Burroughs. The author’s mother gives him to a psychiatrist to raise. There are no rules. The house is neglected. A guy living in a backyard shed is a pedophile. The bizarre family prides itself on being anarchists.
 
What I Had Before I Had You by Sarah Cornwell. A portrayal of what life is like as a bipolar mother, and then bipolar son. Lies told to cover up rejection by family. Lack of supervision, crazy adventures.

​THE MEAN
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Falling Leaves: The True Story of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter by Adeline Yen Mah. Her mother dies when she is young and the stepmother is a witch, with no protection from her father. The kids are kept in a back room, starved, tormented, abused. The author struggles to be loved, far into adulthood, demonstrating the powerful grip of even abusive parents. Hair-raising story of surviving cruelty and misfortune as a Chinese girl in 1940s Hong Kong.
 
Stitches by David Small. A boy is the son of a radiologist who subjects him to x-rays and gives him cancer. He loses his voice. A graphic novel that captures the silent scream of this child, who finally gets away.

​Help Yourself For Teens by Dave Pelzer. This is not a memoir or a novel; it’s an advice book. Inside, however, the author tells us about his early life with an unbelievably abusive mother. Basically, she tortured him. She put him in a bathroom with ammonia and bleach, which could have killed him. She didn’t feed him for fourteen days. She stabbed him and wouldn’t take him to the emergency room. He was taken away and put into foster care. The wisdom he shares is phenomenal: a testament to the potential for recovery of a healthy sense of self. This is like reading the wisdom gained by a survivor of the holocaust, only it was personal.

THE REMOTE

A House in the St. John’s Wood by Matthew Spender. The author compulsively reconstructs his parents’ lives, separate and together. They are English elites with a fabulous bohemian social life. Stephen Spender is a famous poet, his wife Natasha well known. The father has frequent openly gay relationships, Natasha is loyal to her gay husband. There are crazy family feuds. A glamorous literary life fueled by sex, and the kids are on the side, trying to figure it out.

This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff. A boy’s mother takes him away from his father and brother on a crazy life on the move that is all about her and her flight from reality. There’s a hostile stepfather. He runs away to Alaska, steals cars, and finally makes a life for himself out of the chaos.
 
(Pending, April 2016) The Rainbow Comes and Goes: a Mother and Son On Life, Love, and Loss by Anderson Cooper and Gloria Vanderbilt. The famous mother who is a designer and tycoon, who had relationships with Howard Hughes and Frank Sinatra, lives a very full whirlwind life. One son commits suicide in his twenties. At ninety-one, she connects with her son Anderson Cooper, a busy and famous journalist, in a new closer relationship. The book is an email correspondence.