The Women’s History of the World. Rosalind Miles
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу The Women’s History of the World - Rosalind Miles страница 1
Название: The Women’s History of the World
Автор: Rosalind Miles
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Социология
isbn: 9780007571970
isbn:
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by Michael Joseph Ltd 1988
Published by Paladin Books in 1989
Copyright © Rosalind Miles 1988
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780586088869
Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2016 ISBN: 9780007571970 Version: 2016-09-13
For all the women of the world who have had no history
Contents
I IN THE BEGINNING
II THE FALL OF WOMAN
III DOMINION AND DOMINATION
8 Revolution, the Great Engine
IV TURNING THE TIDE
Woman is and makes history. MARY RITTER BEARD
‘What is history?’ brooded Gibbon, the great historian of the Roman Empire. ‘Little more than a register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of men.’ At last the hand that rocks the cradle has taken up the pen to set the record straight. In history, there were women too.
It would be hard to find much support for this proposition from the historical record. When a memorial stone was carved into the quay at Plymouth to commemorate the Founding Fathers who made the historic Mayflower voyage of 1620, there was no mention of the seventeen women who sailed with them to build the new world. In general, the historians of every era have shown little interest in the female sex. In 1238, only one maidservant, ‘awake by night and singing psalms’ saw the assassin who gained entry to the bedchamber of the king of England, knife in hand. She changed the course of history – and the chronicler, Matthew de Paris, did not even get her name.
Yet the women of the world have had a history, and the full story has been far more rich and strange than we are ever led to think. The chief aim of this book is to assert the range, power and significance of women’s contribution to the evolution of the human race, its huge-variety in both the public and the private spheres, and the massive female achievement on every level – cultural, commercial, domestic, emotional, social and sexual. Our world past is packed with countless stories of Amazons and Assyrian war queens, mother goddesses and Great She-Elephants, imperial concubines who rose to rule the world, scientists, psychopaths, saints and sinners, Brunhild, Marie de Brinvilliers, Mother Teresa, Chiang Ch’ing.
The lives of unsung heroines also have the fascination of the greatest story never told. Every СКАЧАТЬ