Women Take Over the Richler Room

How does power get situated? How do women hold it? In a correspondence recently someone used “unempowered” to describe someone with lack of access to power. They aren’t the same thing at all. Power and mentorship, mentorship and power. Women want access without having to be sexualized. Women want to professionalize without having to dodge unwanted advances. Women want to sit in the seat of power.

In her recent book, Women and Power, A Manifesto, Mary Beard suggests that we “have no template for what a powerful woman looks like, except that she looks rather like a man…” (54). Well, time to shift that notion. Here are some powerful women taking over the seat of power under the ever watchful gaze of Leonard Cohen, who towers over Crescent street, peering into the Richler Room where our graduate poetry seminars are held.