How does a woman in authority convey that authority? Is it possible for a woman to rule without sounding shrill? Is it possible for a woman to manage without manipulating? All of these things seem to me to be very much at the fore today, and were no less the case 2,000 years ago.

Stacy Schiff

Categorized in : Me Things Woman Today

parenting is an exercise in unintended consequences.

Stacy Schiff

unintended-consequences consequence exercise

An interesting thing about book groups, it seems to me, is that there is no correlation between a brilliant book and a brilliant discussion. The first seems sometimes even to undermine the second.

Stacy Schiff

groups book interesting

And in the absence of facts, myth rushes in, the kudzu of history.

Stacy Schiff

myth absence facts

When a woman teams up with a snake a moral storm threatens somewhere.

Stacy Schiff

storm snakes team

As always, an educated woman was a dangerous woman.

Stacy Schiff

educated-women dangerous educated

Here you have an incredibly ambitious, accomplished woman who comes up against some of the same problems that women in power come up against today. Cleopatra plays an oddly pivotal role in world history as well; in her lifetime, Alexandria is the center of the universe, Rome is still a backwater.

Stacy Schiff

ambitious rome play

No one in the modern world controls the wealth or territory that Cleopatra did.

Stacy Schiff

wealth territory world

Women enjoyed rights in Egypt they would not again enjoy for more than 2,000 years. They owned ships, ran vineyards, filed lawsuits, practiced medicine. Their husbands supported them after divorce. Their power was unprecedented.

Stacy Schiff

divorce husband rights

Motherhood is always an act of courage.

Stacy Schiff

acts-of-courage motherhood

We don't know how Cleopatra spent her days, but we do know how other Hellenistic monarchs spent their days. There has been a great amount of scholarship in the last 30 years about education in the Hellenistic world and women in the Hellenistic world. We now know how an upper-class woman was educated in her day.

Stacy Schiff

class world years

I checked to see if there’d been a really good book published in the last few decades. Then I started with what Cleopatra would have read, asking myself, “What can we know about her education?” It turns out to be a very great deal, and bizarrely, no one had written about that before.

Stacy Schiff

lasts asking book

A rich, multi-dimensional tour of Naples, most brilliant, battered, and bewildering of cities, here fixed to the page with wit and élan. Splendid.

Stacy Schiff

naples pages cities

Ancient history is oddly short on incorrect omens.

Stacy Schiff

ancient-history omen ancient

No one sits on the stoop when she's a kid and thinks, 'I want to be a biographer when I grow up,'

Stacy Schiff

growing-up kids thinking

It has always been preferable to attribute a woman's success to her beauty rather than to her brains, to reduce her to the sum of her sex life.

Stacy Schiff

her-beauty brain sex

I'm a sucker for lost worlds. I was nostalgic even as a child. I was happiest in my hometown library in Adams, Mass., where nothing seemed to change.

Stacy Schiff

library children world

My next book is on the Salem witch trials. As a small-town Massachusetts girl, this makes me very happy. So does the reunion with documents!

Stacy Schiff

witch-trials girl book

For a few thousand years, women had no history. Marriage was our calling, and meekness our virtue. Over the last century, in stuttering succession, we have gained a voice, a vote, a room, a playing field of our own. Decorously or defiantly, we now approach what surely qualifies as the final frontier.

Stacy Schiff

finals voice years

Cleopatra stood at one of the most dangerous intersections in history; that of women and power. Clever women, Euripides had warned hundreds of years earlier, were dangerous.

Stacy Schiff

dangerous clever years

The vanity extended most of all to his library, arguably the real love of Cicero's life. It is difficult to name anything in which he took more pleasure, aside possibly evasion of the sumptuary laws. Cicero liked to believe himself wealthy. He prided himself on his books. He needed no further reason to dislike Cleopatra: intelligent women who had better libraries than he did offended him on three counts.

Stacy Schiff

real believe book