II. The Nature of Women

Extract

Conditions of life for women in the ancient world followed from one major fact and one major assumption. The fact is that women bear children. Menstruation, pregnancy, labour, and lactation are wearing and restrict activity; contraception varied (as it did until the 1960s) from moderately reliable pessaries and spermicides to mere superstition. But women do not spend all (or, for some women, any) of their lives bearing children. The assumption was that even when they are not doing so, they must lead a domestic life under male protection, for they are not suited to independence. Women were seen as more emotional than men (a question still in dispute), more gullible, more likely to yield to impulse or desire, less rational - generally less in control of their reactions than men are. Much of this, to modern observers, is self-fulfilling prophecy. If you restrict women (or unemployed men) to domestic life, they will lack experience of the world, develop compliance not self-confidence, and have too much time to brood.