If we are talking about the early 18th century, then it seems relevant to me to include access to education for men and women at that time.

Of course, there were well-tutored women, but if I remember correctly, they lacked access to the great British public schools and universities. Higher education for women is more a nineteenth-century phenomenon, and even so, the numbers and funding were far less, with some people highly criticizing the practice.

If you cannot learn Latin and Greek systematically, you read what is available in the vernacular. I'm moving into the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century (clerical and squirearchy) with Austen's PERSUASION, which shows Anne Elliott reading Italian, which was an accomplishment for young ladies. MANSFIELD PARK shows the declassee Fanny Price refusing some conventional accomplishments. NORTHANGER ABBEY shows its heroine reading novels like Anne Radcliffe's MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO. With the exception of aristocrats and "bluestockings," these reading women read what they were equipped to read by limitations on their education.

And where women wrote, they wrote what was available to them. You do not see women's names in the Early English Text Society editions; the earliest ones are the product, often times, of eccentric parsons who'd learned Greek and Latin up at Oxford.

I would assume that middle-class women who were educated learned accounts and other practical things that they would need to be useful.

This is not my field, however, and I am certain Lepore is aware of these aspects of educational differences.

I am now going to order John Burrow's HISTORY OF HISTORIES. If he is the man I am thinking of, he is or was a medieval scholar (and my tutor one summer up at Oxford) and his wife would be the fantasy writer Diana Wynne Jones -- a charming irony.

Whatever I may think of the risk that this man is putting himself and his child through, I think it's a remarkable gift of love and unselfishness. For a transgendered person to willingly choose to go back into the sexual persona into which he has always felt he did not fit in order to help create a family is awesome.

I hope the child is happy and healthy.

Let's take it further -- Lady Murasaki's TALE OF GENJI. She wrote in Japanese because, being female (despite her aristocratic status), what was available to her was vernacular. The men were off writing in Chinese.

That's considerably earlier than Oronokoo for prose.

If you want to consider verse narratives, we can push it back to Marie de France. Or, if plays, to Hrotsvit von Gandersheim.

The men here who have officiously favored us with their opinions are hereby forbidden to have abortions.

You're not at risk. STFU.

...about other people's livelihoods. I am not talking about the CEOs and hedge fund General Partners or the top traders and researchers and investment bankers. I am talking about the hundreds of thousands of accounts, clerical workers, marketing people, administrative assistants, drivers, cleaners, security people, etc. who also derive their livings from Wall Street.

I'm talking about them coming home with gray faces and insufficient severance, hoping it can last in one of the most expensive cities in the country (same thing for the people in San Francisco and Chicago and other financial centers). I'm talking about the dry cleaning they don't have done, the bills they string out, the things they cut back on, and the businesses those cutbacks effect.

Some of them are old. Some have health problems. Some are alone, while others have families. The lucky ones will have partners who work outside financial services -- until the cutbacks affect them too.

"A bas les aristos" was a bloody mess in the French revolution: putting everyone up against the wall to gratify your resentment isn't going to do a thing but make matters worse.

The people for whose downfall you indirectly call for are the same people whose courage and grief you honored after 9/11: the people who've made the Street their career. What pleasure can you have in hoping they fall into a gutter?

Thank you. See windmills. Tilt at windmills. Get knocked on my ass. Get up and go back to tilting at windmills.

Sometimes, I get the windmills but good.

I'm even better at using a lance on windBAGS that come blowing over here ("hey, trolls, there's an ABORTION debate!") to rant.

They should save it for their female dependents, if they have any. There are some men who should not be allowed to have female financial dependents. It gives them a sense of being worth listening to.

I say we've got some of them here, and I think they ought to go home.

DurianJoe, remember how Adlai Stevenson shocked hell out of radioland by saying at the UN that he was prepared to wait until hell froze over? I always admired him.

and I have enough going on in my life that I don't have to pull power games in the name of someone else's morality to get my jollies.

That is a beautiful myth you've woven about the origin of the poems attributed to Homer. Truly, it is.

So, I think that you'll understand the importance of myth in the battle of Troy, whether it was fought for merchandise, trade routes, or glory: we're still dazzled, like the old men on the walls of Troy, by the sight of Helen. And if that isn't enough, you have Marlow's mighty lines "Was this the face that launced a thousand ships/And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?"

When the archeologists and the economists and the military historians have done, what you -have- is the myth. It is pure gold, like the apple Paris awarded to Venus, and ultimately, it is what we remember.