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ulcers and their virility fears. It is not neces- sary to give menstruation holidays. It may be that women commit crimes during the premenstrual and menstrual period, but it is still true that women commit far fewer crimes than men. Women must be aware of this enlistment of menstruation in the anti-feminist ar- gument, and counteract it by their own statements of the situation. Menstruation does not turn us into raving maniacs or complete in- valids; it is just that we would rather do without it.

    Soul

    The Stereotype

    In that mysterious dimension where the body meets the soul the stereotype is born and has her being. She is more body than soul, more soul than mind. To her belongs all that is beautiful, even the very word beauty itself. All that exists to beautify her. The sun shines only

    Taught from infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.
    Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Women’, 1792, p. 90

    to burnish her skin and gild her hair; the wind blows only to whip up the colour in her cheeks; the sea strives to bathe her; flowers die gladly so that her skin may luxuriate in their essence. She is the crown of creation, the masterpiece. The depths of the sea are ran- sacked for pearl and coral to deck her; the bowels of the earth are laid open that she might wear gold, sapphires, diamonds and rubies. Baby seals are battered with staves, unborn lambs ripped from their mothers’ wombs, millions of moles, muskrats, squirrels, minks, er- mines, foxes, beavers, chinchillas, ocelots, lynxes, and other small and lovely creatures die untimely deaths that she might have furs. Egrets, ostriches and peacocks, butterflies and beetles yield her their plumage. Men risk their lives hunting leopards for her coats, and crocodiles for her handbags and shoes. Millions of silkworms offer her their yellow labours; even the seamstresses roll seams

    and whip lace by hand, so that she might be clad in the best that money can buy.
    The men of our civilization have stripped themselves of the fineries of earth so that they might work more freely to plunder the universe for treasures to deck my lady in. New raw materials, new processes, new machines are all brought into her service. My lady must therefore be the chief spender as well as the chief symbol of spending ability and monetary success. While her mate toils in his factory, she totters about the smartest streets and plushiest hotels with his fortune upon her back and bosom, fingers and wrists, con- tinuing that essential expenditure in his house which is her frame and her setting, enjoying that silken idleness which is the necessary condition of maintaining her mate’s prestige and her qualification
    to demonstrate it. 1 Once upon a time only the aristocratic lady could
    lay claim to the title of crown of creation: only her hands were white enough, her feet tiny enough, her waist narrow enough, her hair long and golden enough; but every well-to-do burgher’s wife set herself up to ape my lady and to follow fashion, until my lady was forced to set herself out like a gilded doll overlaid with monstrous rubies and pearls like pigeons’ eggs. Nowadays the Queen of En- gland still considers it part of her royal female role to sport as much of the family jewellery as she can manage at any one time on all public occasions, although the male monarchs have escaped such showcase duty, which devolves exclusively upon their wives.
    At the same time as woman was becoming the showcase for wealth and caste, while men were slipping into relative anonymity and ‘handsome is as handsome does’, she was emerging as the central emblem of western art. For the Greeks the male and female body had beauty of a human, not necessarily a sexual kind; indeed they may have marginally favoured the young male form as the most powerful and perfectly proportioned. Likewise the Romans showed no bias