The Oldest Instruction to Women: Sit Down and Shut Up

There is a particular kind of week — and Rebecca Solnit has had many of them — when the news seems to arrange itself into a single, unbearable sentence. The Tate brothers arrested on charges of rape and trafficking. A pop singer in a Los Angeles courtroom over the murder of a thirteen-year-old girl. Trump forced, at last, to pay out over $5.6 million for sexually assaulting and defaming E. Jean Carroll. Stories of gang rapes in India. Four more headlines about the abuse of women and girls, all appearing on a single day's front page, as if this were simply weather. Solnit has noticed, and wondered whether anyone else notices, how ordinary this violence has become as a category of news.

Into that week came something smaller but oddly clarifying: a stranger tagged her online to say, "Can someone please tell Rebecca Solnit to stop talking," and, more bluntly, to "sit down, shut up." It's the kind of message easy to write off as one unwell man's noise. But Solnit points out that mental illness, in an era saturated with misogyny, often works like a weakened immune system — it doesn't invent the hatred, it just makes a person more susceptible to catching whatever hatred is already circulating in the air. And this particular strain of hatred, it turns out, is not new. It's nearly three thousand years old.

The classicist Mary Beard traced it to what may be the first recorded instance in Western literature of a man telling a woman to shut up. It happens in the Odyssey. Penelope, grieving and besieged by suitors, comes downstairs to make a request of the bard performing in her own hall. Her son Telemachus cuts her off: "Mother, go back up into your quarters, and take up your own work, the loom and the distaff… speech will be the business of men, all men, and of me most of all." And Penelope goes back upstairs.

Beard's point wasn't that ancient Greek women simply didn't speak in public — it's that public speech was constitutive of manhood itself. To claim the right to speak was, in a sense, to become a man; a woman speaking publicly stopped counting, definitionally, as a woman. Beard also noted that the Greeks prized a deep voice as the mark of legitimate authority, which is why, two and a half thousand years later, we still find pundits fussing over whether a female politician's voice is too high, too shrill, too full of vocal fry — a critique that lets people avoid engaging with what she's actually saying by attacking the register she says it in.

The same reflex greeted Emily Wilson when she became widely described as the first woman to translate the Odyssey into English. Critics, many of them anonymous men online, reacted less to her prose than to the fact of her having touched the text at all — as though Homer rendered by a woman constituted some kind of civilizational injury. What they rarely acknowledged is that Wilson's translations are often less misogynistic than the ones they grew up on, not more. Where earlier translators rendered a servant's self-description as "slut" or "whore" or "wanton," Wilson chose the flatter, more literal "dog-face" — and pointed out that those same translators never used equivalent slurs when men insulted each other in the identical Greek. The accuracy read, to her critics, as betrayal. As Beard put it: "It doesn't much matter what line you take as a woman, if you venture into traditional male territory, the abuse comes anyway. It's not what you say that prompts it, it's the fact you're saying it."

Helen of Troy fared no better across the centuries — remembered, as historian Bettany Hughes writes, not primarily as a person but as a "fantasy whore," her long list of lovers recited by playwrights and poets like a courtesan's client roster, her beauty treated as a weapon she used against men rather than a fact that happened to her.

The through-line, from Telemachus to a stranger's comment section, is not that women are told they're wrong. It's that they're told, before the argument even starts, to stop making sound.

Distilled from Literary Hub