How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.

any signs of intelligence unless she is possessed of the Devil ? Perhaps a majority of adults still believe in the fiction of the inferiority of women, and the great majority of children are impregnated with this falsehood in the early years of their lives. Few men know that large sections of the earth’s crust are inhabited by peoples who regard women as the dominant sex, and fewer people are aware that, only a few thousand years ago in the highly developed agricultural civilizations of early Greece and Egypt, matriarchy was in force, and women ruled the world much as men rule the world to-day. Few people realize that, in ancient Egypt, the child derived its name from its mother rather than from its father, that older women married younger men, that men had to be chaste before marriage, whereas women were allowed a double standard ; that a man had to bring a dowry to a marriage, and a woman had to swear to support her aged parents and those of her husband ; that men used cosmetics, changed their fashions every season, and remained at home to watch the pots and pans, while their women-folk were out running the business of the day, wearing the same tunic year in and year out, abjuring cosmetics as inferior, and even laughing at their husbands tor their gossip and pettiness. This proves that there is no such thing as a masculine trait or a feminine trait, as such, because the rdles have been completely reversed in historical times, and are reversed in every purely agricultural culture even to-day. What we call “ masculine ” really signifies, “ belonging to the dominant sex,” and what we term “ feminine ” means “ belonging to the submerged sex ”. That the present prejudice is not natural is to be deduced not only from history and archaeology, but also from the fact that if the inferiority of women were a natural truth, no laws would be needed to keep women in their place, and no age-old conspiracy would be required to prevent women from ever regaining their former high position. We do not need laws to prevent idiots and imbeciles from becoming