Women and Power
To book on any of these lectures please contact Sarah using the contact form on the bottom of this page of listings. Please include the Reference text for each course in the Comments field.
Course Description
For ~Autumn 2026 Sarah Antony is running a lecture series focussed on powerful women in History.
Sarah explains:
The lenses of history are often gendered. Powerful women have repeatedly been remembered through stories of sexuality, vanity, ambition, and failure. They were adulterers, murderers, mistresses, religious zealots, thieves, and traitors. They were known during their lifetimes or reinvented after their deaths as wicked women.
This lecture series looks at a selection of women who have assumed positions of power and who have, rightly or wrongly, been maligned by history, by propaganda and by art and literature.
Lectures are written to stand alone and can be booked individually.
Lucrezia Borgia
Date and Time: Thursday 12 November 2-4pm (
Reference: Lucrezia
Cost: £10
Lecture Description
Few figures from the Renaissance capture the imagination quite like Lucrezia Borgia. Hers was a life woven through with threads of scandal, ambition and survival. She was a pawn in her ambitious family’s machinations and quest for power. At thirteen years of age she was married in a union designed to cement alliances, but when that marriage no longer served Borgia interests it was annulled. Her second marriage ended with the brutal murder of her husband.
Notorious tales about her family have cast Lucrezia as a femme fatale who used seduction and poison to achieve her ends; a black widow who ensnared men, only to discard them when they were no longer useful. How much is truth and how much is myth? This lecture explores the story of a women whose life offers a vivid insight into the turbulent world of papal politics at the height of the Italian Renaissance and in the tumultuous years before the Protestant Reformation.
Catherine the Great
Date and Time: Thursday 19 November, 2-4pm
Reference: Catherine
Cost: £10
Lecture Description
Catherine II, called Catherine the Great, reigned over Russia for 34 years—longer than any other female in Russian history. As empress, Catherine westernized Russia. She led her country into full participation in the political and cultural life of Europe. She championed the arts and reorganized the Russian law code. She also significantly expanded Russian territory. Yet during and after her reign many urban legends arose about her sexual behaviour: allegations of her being a nymphomaniac or a libertine, rumours that she liked to collect erotic furniture, and, finally, that she died while having sex with a horse.
This lecture looks beyond the legends into the life and achievements of a woman who championed Enlightenment ideals, exchanged correspondence with Voltaire and Diderot, spearheaded judicial and administrative reforms, founded the country’s first state-funded school for women, and promoted a national system of education; an empress who wielded power for three decades – despite the fact that she had no claim to the crown whatsoever.
Marie-Antoinette
Date and Time: Thursday 26 November, 2-4pm
Reference: Marie
Cost: £10)
Lecture Description
Cake, death and the French Revolution. Once the most despised woman in Europe, Marie-Antoinette was vilified as an empty-headed libertine, a conspirator and a reckless spendthrift – and then publicly executed. Her name is associated with the decline in the moral authority of the French monarchy in the closing years of the ancien régime, though her courtly extravagance was only a minor cause of the financial disorders of the French state in that period.
This lecture aims to interrogate and break through the mythologies surrounding Marie-Antoinette, looking at her background, the context of her position at the French court and the ways in which public opinion was manipulated to make her a symbol of decadence, loose morals and heartless extravagance.
Evita
Date and Time: Thursday 3 December, 2-4pm
Reference :Eva
Cost :£10
Lecture Description
María Eva Duarte is a near-mythic figure: a woman who rose from obscurity to become the emotional heart of a nation. Born into poverty to a single mother, Eva navigated class barriers, gender expectations, and political opportunism to reach the very centre of Argentine public life.
As First Lady alongside Juan Perón, Eva became both a symbol and an actor in Argentina’s populist experiment. A powerful, though unofficial, political leader, revered by the lower economic classes, she became a champion for labour rights, women’s suffrage, and social welfare through the Eva Perón Foundation and the Female Peronist Party. Beloved by the descamisados, she was named “Spiritual Leader of the Nation” before dying of cancer at age 33.
This lecture looks at the story of a remarkable woman whose glamour, charisma, political influence and controversial nature continue to generate huge amounts interest decades after her death.
Contact Sarah Antony To Book.
To book on any of these lectures please contact Sarah using the contact form below . Please include the Reference text for each course you wish to join in the Comments field.