Sherry Knowlton

Author of Alexa Williams suspense series and Beyond the Sunset travel memoirs. Part-time health care consultant. Wife, mom, grandmother. World traveler.

[Sherry Knowlton @KnowltonSBooks]

Adventurers, frequent travelers, and armchair travelers alike. The 2-volume Beyond the Sunset books make a great gift or a holiday vacation read for yourself. https://t.co/iPa5gZbABn via @YouTube

[Sherry Knowlton @KnowltonSBooks]

@TimHannan Have you ever seen that old movie The Bad Seed?

[CRG @Cantrushit]

Hey conservative and Republican boomers. They just said outright they are cutting your Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Straight up.

Wake. The. Fuck. Up.

[SubRosa )✿( Magick @subrosamagick.bsky.social @SubRosaMagick]

She was 57 years old.
White hair. No carefully managed image. No media training designed to make her more palatable. Just thirty years of accumulated knowledge and the calm, unhurried authority of a woman who had spent her life mastering her subject.
She sat on a BBC panel, answered questions about immigration and politics, cited evidence, made arguments — and then went home.
The next morning, her inbox looked like a crime scene.
Her name is Mary Beard — Cambridge professor, classicist, one of the most respected scholars of ancient Rome and Western civilisation alive. And the internet had decided that a woman speaking with quiet authority on television needed to be punished for it.
The messages were not criticism. They were not debate. They were rape threats. Death threats. Coordinated campaigns of personal destruction targeting her appearance, her age, her voice — anything that could be used to remind her that spaces like the one she had just occupied were not meant for her.
Most people would have gone quiet.
Mary Beard went further in.
She did what scholars do when they find a pattern that disturbs them: she followed it backward. Through decades. Through centuries. Through millennia. All the way back to some of the oldest texts in Western civilisation.
And she found it had always been there.
In Homer's Odyssey — one of the foundational works of Western literature, nearly three thousand years old — there is a scene that most readers pass over without registering its quiet violence. Penelope comes downstairs and asks the poet to sing a different song. Her own son, Telemachus, cuts her off. He orders her back to her room and tells her plainly: speech is the business of men.
She goes.
Mary Beard read that scene and recognized it immediately.
Not as ancient history. As a pattern.
In ancient Rome, women who dared to speak in public were not described as orators or thinkers. They were described as noise — disorderly sound, something that did not deserve to be called language or argument. Their voices were not speech. Their thoughts were not thoughts.
In the medieval world, women who claimed public authority were labeled as witches.
Elizabeth I — Queen of England, ruler of a nation — had to rhetorically reshape herself into something masculine just to be taken seriously as the leader of her own country.
The silencing of women who speak with authority was not invented by social media. It was not a modern pathology or a cultural accident. It was built deliberately, over centuries, into the very foundations of how Western civilisation defined who gets to speak, what authority sounds like, and who is allowed to take up space in public life.
Mary Beard had found something important.
In 2017, she published Women & Power: A Manifesto — short enough to read in an afternoon, substantial enough to reframe everything you thought you understood about why this keeps happening.
Her argument was precise and devastating.
The problem is not that women lack the ability to lead. The problem is that the model of leadership itself — the template for what public authority looks, sounds, and feels like — was built by men over centuries and has never been redesigned. When a woman enters public life and doesn't fit that template, she is not failing. The template was never built for her. It was built specifically to exclude her, and it has been doing exactly that, efficiently and continuously, for three thousand years.
The solution, Beard argued, is not to teach women to perform power the way men have always performed it. The solution is to dismantle and rebuild the very concept of what power is allowed to look like.
She kept teaching. She kept writing. She kept appearing on television — white-haired, unhurried, carrying her decades of authority without performing it, without packaging it for comfort, without apologizing for it.
The threats continued.
But other messages began arriving too. Letters from women and girls who had spent their entire lives feeling that every door was slightly too narrow, every table slightly too high, every room slightly reluctant to make space for them. Women who had spent years wondering what was wrong with them — why they couldn't quite fit, couldn't quite belong, couldn't quite be taken seriously no matter how much they knew or how hard they worked.
They read the book and understood, perhaps for the first time, that nothing had ever been wrong with them.
The room had been designed without them in mind.
That is not a personal failing.
That is a three-thousand-year-old architectural decision.
And one Cambridge professor with white hair and a calm voice — who refused to go quiet when the internet told her to — spent her career documenting it, naming it, and handing that knowledge to everyone who needed to hear it.
Telemachus told Penelope that speech was the business of men.
He was wrong then.
He is still wrong now.
And Mary Beard has three thousand years of evidence to prove it.
via The Inspireist

#FeministFriday #HERstory

[Sherry Knowlton @KnowltonSBooks]

@Mollyploofkins Why did this post immediately make me think of the Wicked Witch disappearing into a tornado in the Wizard of Oz? Of course, she was green, not orange

[Prez @PrezLives2022]

Trump is so pathetic 😂😂😂

“The [Iranian sources] said 'we recognize that we are dealing with a mentally incapacitated individual and we've had senior psychologists work up a psychological profile of what they think is going on with Trump's brain, and so we started to cater our messages by running them past senior psychologists before delivering them to Trump,'” Scahill continued.

Translation is they had to dumb down their negotiations in a way that Trump would understand without offending his fragile ego.

[Sherry Knowlton @KnowltonSBooks]

@Gianl1974 This isn't real, is it?

[Mohamad Safa @mhdksafa]

The richest man on Earth dismantled the organization that feeds the poorest children on earth.

The definition of evil is being a trillionaire in a world where millions of children are starving.

[Jamie Bonkiewicz @JamieBonkiewicz]

They put a tarp around the removal of Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center. They covered it up, just like they did with the Epstein files

[Sherry Knowlton @KnowltonSBooks]

@mainesm6 @Trumpgirl2614 Oh, please. When did Biden destroy an entire wing of our historical mansion, gild the Oval with trashy tchtockes, wipe out Jackie's iconic Rose Garden and turn it into a chain restaurant patio, or cut down stately trees for a business opp with a side perk of blood lust voyeurism?

[Sherry Knowlton @KnowltonSBooks]

Trump has now succeeded in turning the White House, the People's House - a symbol of America, into a replica of one of his seedy Atlantic City casinos. And he's driving the country into the ground with his incompetence and hinky business practices just like he did those casinos.

[Sherry Knowlton @KnowltonSBooks]

@PrimatePulse @Shnookie04 Yeah. I won't be watching.

[Sherry Knowlton @KnowltonSBooks]

@DebBrow16344984 @RSBauch @gnwayland I had forgotten that. It was Eva Braun that had dogs, right?

[Emoluments Clause @Emolclause]

#BREAKING: Struggling MAGA senior voter: I actually have panic attacks. I’ve heard a couple this past week, and I get very emotional over it. I don’t want to work anymore, but I can’t afford to retire…It’s not an overnight thing, but it’s been two years now. You said you’d bring down the grocery prices. Literally I must be the most angry person when I grocery shop because I buy the same things every week, and I see it jump EVERY WEEK, it’s not every couple month, it’s literally every week.” 😢

[Sherry Knowlton @KnowltonSBooks]

@covie_93 Exactly. Bizarre and pathetic at the same time.

[Christopher Webb @cwebbonline]

I knew the scaffolding made no sense. They could have used two cherry pickers and called it a day.

We waited all day and night because the scaffolding wasn’t there to do the work. It was there to hide the letters from view while they were being removed.

Trump is embarrassed.

[Sherry Knowlton @KnowltonSBooks]

@gayguycandleco @Joyismymidlname Even more bizarre- 1. Trump has 0 connection to JFK or the arts. 2. It was named for JFK as a memorial. Why would he be added to a memorial if he’s not yet dead, especially another guy’s memorial?! Trump just doesn’t get that he can’t buy/bully admiration, respect, class, or cool

[Jennifer Get In Good Trouble @TheJenniWren]

Trump’s FBI showed up, without warrants, at the homes of Black and Brown voter registration canvassers in Ohio. They raided the Ohio Organizing Coalition’s offices.

Over 100 agents. No charges. No crime. This is federal voter intimidation, happening right now, ahead of a major election cycle in a purple state.

Wake up and fight back people because it’s coming to your state too.

[Sherry Knowlton @KnowltonSBooks]

@7Veritas4 Next we need a court to overturn Hegseth’s blatant racist and sexist discrimination against promotions for blacks and women as well as his actions to erase their achievements from military history. I’d suggest ordering him to pay out of his own pocket for any costs incurred too

[#PositiveForLabour @nowayjomo]

@afneil Makes a big difference to some lives

[Sherry Knowlton @KnowltonSBooks]

@jrovner Yesterday and today