Since the rise of agricultural societies, the idea of ​​women in power has traditionally made people uncomfortable. Even when women succeed in obtaining high positions and leading their nations into periods of growth and prosperity, men appear to fear women in power. As women advance through the different means necessary to navigate male-dominated systems and progress to the center of power, men push back to eliminate what they see as a threat to the patriarchy that has ruled the world for centuries. The discomfort that arises when women come to power is often accompanied by male reaction and defamation of women. By analyzing and comparing the rule of Hatshepsut and Catherine the Great, we can understand both the methodology used to gain power within a patriarchal system and the resulting denigration that often follows women's ascension to positions of power in order to support the patriarchy. We say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay To initially gain power, both Hatshepsut and Catherine the Great had to take advantage of different sources of social power. To ascend the throne, Hatshepsut knew how to take advantage of ideological power. One of the characteristics of ideological power that makes it so influential is that it cannot be proven or disproved making it the most powerful of social powers (Mann 23). Egypt, with all its divine kingships and ideological belief systems, chooses to use Hatshepsut to rule as regent and continue the divine succession in place of Thutmose III, who was too young to rule. Hatshepsut was both the descendant of the ancient family of King Ahmose and the new lineage of King Thutmose who was instrumental in his claim to power (Cooney 109). Not only was Hatshepsut the daughter of the king and the sister-wife of Thutmose II, which linked her to divine dynastic cycles, but she was appointed high priestess during her father's rule, which places her in a position of ideological authority. Hatshepsut saw how influential the Egyptian priesthood was and how maintaining an ideological base of power would help her claim power. Hatshepsut is able to use her position as priestess of Amun-Re to express her claim to the gods and assert that God wanted her to rule as both regent and king. Hatshepsut's reign was characterized by her multiple claims to ideological power which is very powerful in the Egyptian political and social structure. Similar to Hatshepsut's establishment of co-regency through her connection to men who held authoritarian power, Catherine was able to gain control through her connection to the male head of state, Karl Ulrich (later Peter III). At an early age, Catherine was chosen to marry Peter III, but when he came to power, he was seen as incompetent and incapable of governing. Catherine saw an opportunity to eliminate him and rule Russia herself. Unlike Hatshepsut, Catherine the Great was able to use military power and her charm to gain support and ultimately lead a rebellion against her husband and assert her control over the Russian Empire. Catherine had the support of the army and enlightened elements of aristocratic society and led regiments that rallied to her cause and proclaimed her empress, ultimately resulting in Peter III's abdication and subsequent assassination (Oldenbourg-Idalie). By first looking at the origins of their claim to power we can see the means through which women must move to push themselves towards the center of power. OnceGiven their respective roles, both Hatshepsut and Catherine the Great had to navigate their respective social systems and use the different tools at their disposal to maintain their claim to power. To gain respect, women in power often have to draw on their feminine characteristics and, at the same time, suppress their femininity and sexuality which leads to a constant struggle between competing self-representations. Women often have to take on more masculine characteristics to gain respect in a patriarchal power structure. Hatshepsut chooses to express her status as pharaoh through self-mandated masculinization. Once he ascended to full kingship, he commissioned representations of his kingship in the southern temple of Buhen where we can observe the change in expression because the consecutive phases are preserved. The first phase represents her as a female pharaoh. In the second stage, the queen is depicted in women's clothes with an elongated stride. In the third, the woman is portrayed wearing a royal kilt with androgynous anatomy and, finally, the fourth scene shows the queen in a fully masculinized robe with all previously sculpted figures altered to show more masculine characteristics. The way Hatshepsut gained and maintained power was to slowly de-emphasize the iconographic explicitness of her femininity and invent a more masculinized image of herself. Hatshepsut needed to shape her methodology of governing and representing herself to match the maturation of Thutmose III. By reinventing herself and taking on the attributes of a male pharaoh, Hatshepsut was able to gain power and assert her claim to authority even as Thutmose III grew up and would be able to claim the throne. Women often have to find a balance, ultimately adopting masculine characteristics and giving up some of their femininity to gain power and respect. However, when women draw on both feminine and masculine characteristics, the public tends to paint feminine characteristics in a negative light, while painting masculine ones in a positive light, making femininity a disadvantage. In contrast to Hatshepsut's desexualization, Catherine the Great was often selectively masculinized and simultaneously criticized for her sexuality. James Harris, 1st Earl of Malmesbury, clearly indicates this tendency when he states the following about Catherine in his memoirs: “Her Majesty has manly fortitude, obstinacy in adhering to a plan, and intrepidity in the execution of it; but she lacks the more manly virtues of deliberation, forbearance in prosperity, and accuracy of judgment, while she possesses in a high degree the weaknesses vulgarly attributed to her sexual love of flattery and her inseparable companion. Vanity; an inattention to unpleasant but healthy advice; and a propensity for voluptuousness that leads to excesses that debase a female character in any area of ​​life". In their writings, Western authors of the time such as De Ligne, Segur, Tannenburg, etc., depicted Catherine through two contradictory lenses: on the one hand, some of her characteristics were described as manipulative, deceitful and vain and these appear as feminine traits, while virtues such as strength and intelligence were masculine (Meehan-Waters). Foreign authors who criticized Catherine's rule often condemned her for her femininity and sexuality. Catherine was often denounced as extravagantly influenced by her desires and emotions which were seen as the result of her sex. The Knight of Corberon observed that Catherine submitted to her senses and therefore needed a mentor and that her mediocre loversthey demonstrated the bad taste and bad judgment of women. In her eyes and those of many Western male critics of Catherine's rule, Catherine was ruining Russia through lack of morals, extravagance, and would ultimately be judged "a weak, romantic woman" whose feminine vices limited her ability to rule. According to this reasoning, female domination is regularly condemned by women's supposed weakness and their tendency to fall under the domination of powerful men (Meehan-Waters). In a letter, a French diplomat in Moscow, Baron de Breteuil, praises her ambition but blames her for her love affairs and in one line of the letter he issues a chilling warning to "he who places too much trust in her", underlining how he men considered women who used their sexuality dangerous. People saw Catherine's use of sexual power as both manipulative and a sign of weakness. Any weaknesses in her kingdom would be seen as failures attributed to the characteristics of her sex. The idea that femininity and power are mutually exclusive is a widely held idea within male-dominated power structures. Hatshepsut's reign was characterized by her attempt to fit the masculine mold of government and justify her position as the primary head of state, but in doing so she was despised by those who saw her power as a subversion of theirs. It was not unusual for a queen to become regent to a young king, but it was unusual for her to become a king in her own right as Hatshepsut did. No other king of Egypt is known to have had Thutmose's specific experience, where a female regent actually became a king and dominated the government during the entire reign (O'Conner 6). Furthermore, from the beginning Hatshepsut and Thutmose would have had conflicting goals, because Hatshepsut was not her biological mother, so her goal was not to protect her kingship. This unique experience came to define much of Thutmose III's reign and likely led to a feeling of injustice and victimization. After Hatshepsut's death, Thutmose systematically ordered the destruction of Hatshepsut's monuments in an attempt to remove her name and memory from history. O'Connor argues that to strengthen the legitimacy of his family line he had to resort to reducing Hatshepsut's legitimacy by denying her any. He had to align himself with Thutmose I and II rather than have his image reflect Hatshepsut's rule. A further indication that Thutmose has changed his relationship with the long-dead Hatshepsut is seen in the change in her representation in reliefs and statues. Images of Thutmose III differ stylistically from his previous representations in which he begins to mirror the sculpted faces of Thutmose I and Thutmose II and, more significantly, begins to eliminate or downplay previous representations that mimic representations of Hatshepsut. With this new representation, Thutmose I,II and III and later his son Amenhotep formed a composite image of an ideal ruler and Hatshepsut no longer had any place in it because she did not fit the normalized mold (O'Connor). Thutmose saw Hatshepsut's unconventional reign as a threat because her insertion at the center of Egyptian governance would potentially destabilize the normalized dynastic cycle of male kingship. When women obtain high positions of power, if they step outside of socially accepted structures within a male-dominated system they are often vilified and persecuted. Society seems to inherently find something wrong with female ambition and clings to power by preferring women who fit roles