A temple facade where women served as priestesses
Book I: Realities identifies the issues that women faced in the ancient world. Issues such as rape, contraception, and purdah faced all women in the three stages of their lives: maid, matron, and crone. It also discusses the sacred lore, the issues and customs, and the daily trials that women experienced from the day of their birth. This book evaluates the conditions that existed in the ancient world, conditions that shaped the lives of women. Marriage customs, motherhood, sexual mutilation, the harvesting of healing herbs, religion, and even war—all affected woman’s reality. More especially, the book traces the thin threads of history that have set the pattern of the present status of women. Throughout all the books, Points to Ponder written at the end of each section, raises questions that show modern women how the ancient status of these important, universal stages of life influence their own present condition.
A woman collecting honey, Paleolithic cave drawing
Book II: Expressions highlights the roles foisted on women and the achievements they made––despite tradition, suspicion, and taboo. The book also discusses the traditional roles of daughter, wife, and mother, as well as the venerated roles of Queen Mother and grandmother. Also, it illuminates the challenge of other traditional roles such as courtesan, captive, and priestess to the more natural role of avenger, builder, healer, and ruler.
Ruins of Troy
Book III: Cameos features powerful queen consorts from Egypt, Syria, Rome, Byzantium, Japan, and China. Some women rose from the position of concubine in a massive harem to queen consort, some of whom had power over life and death. There were no queen consorts in Greece. There were only favored partners like Pericles’s lover/wife Aspasia. In democratic Greece women were to be seen but not heard. That is, seen only by the side of a guardian and heard only in the privacy of pillow talk. Still, women from powerful families like Pericles’s mother Agariste had influence within the family. Those women were part of the informal power structure.
Minoan Women Singers
Book IV: Portraits specifically identifies the many women whose behavior was so unique and whose honor was so impressive that they simply could not be ignored. Their enemies wrote most of the accounts of their lives and activities.
The book illustrates the even more exciting specific examples of women who reigned as pharaohs, warriors, and divinities. Real women and goddesses—who were probably successful people of the vague, translucent mists of time—later deified in myth—now come alive with stories of their lives and achievements, description of their times and settings, and commentary connecting the ancient past to the present. Pharaohs like Hatshepsut and Cleopatra VII, Empresses like Lü, Wu, and Theodora, queen consorts like Berenice I and II and Arsinoë II, avenging queens like Amestris and Clytemnestra, builders like Semiramis and Artemesia, and warriors like Boadicea, Zenobia, and the Candaces spring to life. All lands including Egypt, Persia, Mycenae, Babylon, Halicarnassus, Rome, and China harbor intriguing women protagonists, even saviors and mothers of their countries, such as Teticheri of Egypt and Livia of Rome, in their archives. Their efforts—although downplayed or hidden—are worth remembering. These personalities are the forerunners of our freedom.