Beard opens with Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1915 utopian novel Herland — a peaceful, well-organized all-female society — as a springboard for exploring the relationship between women and power in Western culture.

Her central argument is that our mental template for a "powerful person" remains stubbornly male. Women who reach positions of authority must adapt to that male template (trouser suits, lowered voices) precisely because no established cultural image of a powerful woman exists in its own right.

Tracing things back to ancient Greece, Beard shows how powerful women in mythology — Clytemnestra, the Amazons — are always portrayed as illegitimate usurpers of power, bringers of chaos, who must ultimately be defeated or destroyed. Even Lysistrata, which looks feminist on the surface, ends with women reduced to objects. This pattern, she argues, is far from ancient history: the severed head of Medusa is still deployed as a symbol against women in politics today. The starkest example is the viral image of Trump as Perseus holding up Hillary Clinton's head as Medusa's.

The solution Beard proposes is not simply to get more women into existing structures, but to redefine power itself — to detach it from individual prestige and hierarchical models, and understand it instead as a collective capacity to make a difference and be taken seriously. She points to the founders of Black Lives Matter — highly influential yet largely nameless — as an example of this different kind of power.

She closes by returning to Gilman: the sequel to Herland ends with the birth of a son, and Beard notes that any reader attuned to Western tradition would know exactly who would be running things fifty years later. The point is bleak but clear — the old stories are remarkably hard to dislodge.