The Fall of Woman
THIS book concerns women in the early Mediterranean civilisa- tions and describes their lives and appearance from Neolithic to Roman times. It is both erudite and delightful, two adjectives rarely conjoined, and displays remarkable sympathy, not to say gallantry, for our much-vilified sex. Not that our female forbears needed sympathy, for up to the Christian era when St. Paul initiated his anti-feminist campaign, women were considered equal, and in some civilisations superior, to men. Mr. Seltman presents a mouth-watering panorama of women untrammelled by social restrictions, some property-owners, judges, elders, some wrestlers, runners, hunters—all married, with extra-marital associa- tions taken as a matter of course. In Sparta, for instance, a man would lend his wife to another man if he was in the 'right set' and the woman liked him, so that neither adultery, bastardy, divorce nor prostitution were -words to worry Over. They simply did not exist. Intelligent, athletic, beautiful, and profoundly innocent—what magnificent human beings were our ancestors!
In his tracing of woman's perfect freedom to her fall from grace and renewed struggles' for emancipation, the author digresses a moment to give a Socratic dialogue on modern times as viewed from Athens. Our amazing cruelty in compelling the idiot and the incurable to stay alive as long as possible, our Church, whose conceptions of sin are founded on the myth of Adam and Eve, 'the repression of females and the intemperate practice of perpetual virginity' as advocated by the man of Tarsus, are dis
cussed with stupefaction. Touching on the Renaissance flowerings' the Reformation blights, the enlightened eighteenth century and the Victorian setbacks, Mr. Seltman leads us to the present da)", and it transpires that the only blessings we can count above those enjoyed by the women of Sparta are a wardrobe and a vote.
-Entertaining as it is informative, this book is also lavishly illustrated.
VIRGINIA GRAHO
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