In Homer's Odyssey, when Penelope asks a bard to change his song, her young son Telemachus tells her that speech (muthos) is the business of men and sends her back to her quarters. This is presented as the first recorded instance in Western literature of a man explicitly telling a woman that public speech is not her domain.
In Greco-Roman antiquity, authoritative public speaking was treated as a defining attribute of masculinity, so a woman who spoke in public was by definition transgressing her gender. The deep voice and oratorical command marked the male citizen, while the female voice was framed as disruptive noise rather than legitimate discourse.
Women who attain public authority often succeed by partially de-sexing themselves and borrowing male markers: trouser suits, lowered vocal pitch, and masculine rhetorical postures. Power is structured as intrinsically male, so a woman enters it only by approximating maleness rather than by power expanding to include her as she is.
The problem is not merely that individual women fail to break in, but that the template of power itself (its vocabulary, imagery, and criteria of authority) was built to fit men. Admitting a woman to an unchanged structure still codes her as an interloper, so real change requires redefining power rather than coaching women to fit it.
Classical figures of powerful women (Medusa, Clytemnestra, the Amazons) are almost always depicted as monstrous, murderous, or destined for violent defeat, encoding female authority as a danger to be contained. Reading modern imagery through this lens reveals how recurring motifs (for example Medusa's severed head used against female politicians) carry an inherited instruction that such power must be destroyed.