In her lecture ‘The public voice of women’, Mary Beard begins with Homer’s Odyssey and the ‘first recorded example of a man telling a woman to “shut up”’. Penelope, patient wife of adventuring Odysseus, requests that a bard sing happier tunes; her son, Telemachus, is not impressed. ‘“Mother”, he says, “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; for mine is the power in this household”’.1 With this moment, Beard highlights continuity between antiquity and the present, revealing the importance of female silencing to male identity. Telemachus, she observes, becomes a man by confining Penelope, setting her out of sight and hearing. Her silence amplifies his voice.