Review: "When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt"

Egyptians allowed women to take power more regularly and systematically than anywhere else on earth, ancient or modern

Kara Cooney, Associate Professor of Ancient Egyptian Art and Architecture at UCLA, explores the lives of ancient Egypt’s six female pharaohs. She utilizes their lives and reigns as a framework for discussing how Egyptians enabled women to take and wield power more frequently and systematically than any other civilization on earth.

It’s under-discussed history, according to Coney, wrapped in 3,000 years of "a culture so beautiful—with its golden masks and colossal statues" and also so "ruthlessly authoritarian."

Moreover, Cooney, in her introduction, points out the relevance of the female pharaohs to today:

We may be a 50/50 society in terms of gender, yet women do not hold 50 percent of the power. We say it’s because of the patriarchy, because it was never an even playing field to start with. But when the cynical voices rise, ancient Egypt calls out from the past, reminding us that there was once a society on this planet that valued a woman’s calmer, more nuanced political skills.

Taking power and utilizing it wasn’t easy for ancient female pharaohs, but it has, if anything, gotten more difficult for women to play a leading role in politics, says Cooney:

Because we are not just talking about Cleopatra, Nefertiti, and Tawosret, but also Hillary Clinton, Angela Merkel, Margaret Thatcher, Theresa May, and Elizabeth Warren—all of whom have been discredited as erratic, drama-prone, inconstant, deceitful, opaque, flighty, illogical, even evil, ruled only by hot flashes and full moons.

Cooney teaches a class at UCLA called “Women and Power in the Ancient World,” and it has only been since the Me-Too movement that she hasn’t had to work to prove to her undergraduates that women must combat hostility to succeed in politics and business. She says, “Our hostility toward strong and empowered females is everywhere. What is it that we are afraid of?”

An interesting question and one that has long plagued women. Cooney has some answers, and they are much the same for modern women as they were for ancient female pharaohs.

Kara Cooney, When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt, (National Geographic, 2020)