Aristotle affirmed the essential difference between the sexes: men's brains were bigger, women were more inconstant, emotional and compassionate, at least in part because they do not produce semen - whence men's and women's different behaviour and place in the social order. Symbolically, at least, biology's long, continuing and often lamentable history of using its authority to define woman's nature, in order to justify attributing her with inferior status, begins here.

LRB 28 April 2011 | PDF Download