Women and men
The sexes, their roles and the arguments about them.
85 works · Refine in the browser → · Marked passages →
The oldest books already have the question. Antigone defies a king, Medea a husband, Lysistrata a war, and the Greeks who wrote them gave women the strongest speeches in their theatre while keeping them out of the assembly. Plato’s Republic, alone among ancient books, proposes that women be educated and rule alongside men, and then treats the idea as one of three waves that will drown him in laughter.
The Bible begins with Eve and Paul’s letters set the terms for two thousand years of argument about her. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath gives the reply from the other side, in her own voice, with five husbands behind her. Milton’s Paradise Lost puts the fall in a marriage and has been argued over ever since for which of the two he blames.
The novel is where women wrote. Austen’s heroines have one decision to make and everything depends on it. Middlemarch is about what a woman of Dorothea’s gifts could do in 1830, and the answer is not much. Wollstonecraft and Mill made the political case. Ibsen’s Nora shut the door on it. Woolf asked for a room of her own and Beauvoir wrote the book that made the question a field. Morrison’s Beloved is what the shelf was missing until it arrived.
