For thousands of years, men have written history, so it seems to me that most of what we've read is from the male point of view.
Stacy SchiffRead
Women enjoyed rights in Egypt they would not again enjoy for more than 2,000 years. They owned ships, ran vineyards, filed lawsuits, practiced medicine. Their husbands supported them after divorce. Their power was unprecedented.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Women in ancient Egypt held significant rights that were not seen again for millennia.
This quote by Stacy Schiff highlights the remarkable legal and social status that women enjoyed in ancient Egypt, which encompassed rights such as owning property, conducting trade, and retaining support after divorce. It emphasizes the unprecedented nature of these rights, contrasting them with the much more restrictive circumstances that women faced in later societies and the long historical period that followed the decline of such freedoms.
Themes
WomenRightsHistoryAncient EgyptPowerEquality
In practice
Example use cases
In a women's rights seminar, to illustrate the historical context of women's freedoms.
More from Stacy Schiff
All quotes →And in the absence of facts, myth rushes in, the kudzu of history.
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It has always been preferable to attribute a woman's success to her beauty rather than to her brains, to reduce her to the sum of her sex life.
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Cleopatra had one great advantage. She lived at a time when female sovereigns were not anomalies. And when women enjoyed rights they would not again enjoy for another 2,000 years. You could call them early feminists, if I may use a dirty word.
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Power has for so long been a male construct that it distorted the shape of the first women who tried it on, only to find themselves in a sort of straitjacket.
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A woman can never be too rich or too thin, but until very, very recently, she could be too powerful, for which - if she wasn't smart enough to camouflage herself - she generally paid the price.
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