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.
Stacy SchiffRead
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.
Stacy SchiffRead
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.
Stacy SchiffRead
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.
Stacy SchiffRead
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.
Stacy SchiffRead
Similar quotes
For nearly a century and a half, this country deluded itself into thinking that its greatest calamity, the Civil War, had nothing to do with one of its greatest sins, enslavement. It deluded itself in this manner despite available evidence to the contrary.
Ta-Nehisi CoatesRead
Why is it that, next to the birthday of the Savior of the world, your most joyous and most venerated festival returns on this day (the 4th of July)? Is it not that, in the chain of human events, the birthday of the nation is indissolubly linked with the birthday of the Savior?.
John Quincy AdamsRead
This was the first Memorial Day [Monday, May 1st, 1865]. African Americans invented Memorial Day in Charleston, South Carolina. What you have there is Black Americans recently freed from slavery announcing to the world with their flowers, their feet, and their songs what the war had been about. What they basically were creating was the Independence Day of a Second American Revolution.
David W. BlightRead
Momma said that ghosts couldn't move over water. That's why Africans got trapped in the Americas.. They kept moving us over the water, stealing us away from our ghosts and ancestors, who cried salty rivers into the sand. That's where Momma was now, wailing at the water's edge, while her girls were pulled out of sight under white sails that cracked in the wind.
Laurie Halse AndersonRead
It was Rome, on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.
Edward GibbonRead
History must give the Poles the principal credit for bringing the Soviet bloc to its knees.
Norman DaviesRead