Where we turn the soapbox over to the feminists, themselves.
Women are marked for marriage and prostitution by a wound between the legs,
acknowledged as such when men show their strange terror of women. Intelligence
neither creates nor destroys this would; nor does it change the uses of the wound,
the woman, the sex.
If we can control our reproduction, we can control our lives.
Like race, and to a more hidden extent, class, gender has become a code through which some groups and individuals are deemed deserving of protection and respect, while others are vilified as demons responsible for society's ills. Authors of women's history books have understood this code for decades, and today their craft has reached new levels of sophistication, complexity, and diversity.