History Repeatedly Traps Women; Let's Call It Out

[niyad]

History Repeatedly Traps Women; Let's Call It Out



The idea of women's inferiority is baked into our cultural history and still spews out at us from the Greek and Roman empires. We see it in the pressure for physical perfection, the abrogation of Title IX rights. Once we see these roots, we might be able to pull them out.




(WOMENSENEWS)--The 16th century French essayist Michel de Montaigne wrote about a man in Vitry-le-François who had grown up a girl. She jumped across a river one day and the trauma of a heavy landing on the riverbank brought down the testicles that had lain dormant in her since birth.

The idea that women were "imperfect men" goes back a couple of thousand years as far as Aristotle, Hippocrates and Galen. To Galen, a 2nd century Greek physician and philosopher who lived in the Roman empire, women were conceived with the same genitalia as men, but because of a lack of heat while a fetus, the testicles did not descend. Sex was determined, then, by whether the testicles had descended, creating boys, or undescended, thereby creating girls.

It is sadly surprising that, earlier this month, at the start of National Women's History Month 2015, another story landed in the public spotlight showing us how little we've moved past the notion of "imperfect men" and shape-changing myths.
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In his work "Politics," Aristotle wrote: "as regards the sexes, the male is by nature superior and the female inferior, the male ruler and the female subject." Galen built on Aristotle's ideas with his own hierarchical theories of anatomy, and his medical assertions were considered to be scientific fact until well into the 16th century, as Montaigne's anecdote tells us. As perceived inferior beings or "imperfect men," girls and women lacked the opportunities afforded boys and men, an ongoing historical trap. We see it at work in the way society consistently offers less to girls than to boys and abrogates women's human rights.

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History is our trap, unless we understand how it is working on us, from the depths of time.

http://womensenews.org/story/our-history/150323/history-repeatedly-traps-women-lets-call-it-out